We can see by the fossil record that earth's history is punctuated by many extinctions. The evidence is very strong that life has existed on the earth for a very long time.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions

If you happen to doubt the age of the earth and the geochronology found in the stratifications of the soil, then take a look at zircon crystals. Earth scientists use the radioactive isotopes of uranium found in the zircon crystal to date many types of rock. The half-life is 4.5 billion years, meaning that's the time it takes for those parent isotopes to break down into daughter isotopes. It is a ratio of these isotopes that gives us absolute geologic time, within 1%. Search radioactive decay or radiometric dating.

https://www.amnh.org/explore/resource-collections/earth-inside-and-out/zircon-chronology-dating-the-oldest-material-on-earth/

Yet, latter-day revelation says it isn't so. The LDS church's stance is that "Latter-day revelation teaches that there was no death on this earth before the Fall of Adam. Indeed, death entered the world as a direct result of the Fall (2 Ne. 2:22; Moses 6:48)."

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bd/death?lang=eng&letter=d

So, which is right?

During my seminary years, I was given a little plastic card for the chronology of the Old Testament. The church teaches the chronology of things and it is pretty clear that as members, we are supposed to believe all of the latter-day revelation. So as the church teaches, was there no death on the earth around 4000 BC? Do you believe this? Take a look at this seminary card. Do you remember?

https://www.lds.org/bc/content/shared/content/images/gospel-library/manual/00001/old-testament-bookmark_1344149_prt.jpg

I have written a thesis on Upper Ordovician Limestone, approximately 444 million years old. I have collected the rock samples, cut them with a lapidary saw, mounted the rocks on slides with epoxy, and shaved them down to within 2 microns thick. Under the microscope, an amazing world appears! The science doesn't lie folks. Life existed on this planet much earlier than you would expect.

In graduate school I studied 91 million year old mud from the Cenomanian/Turonian period. I studied the entire petroleum system paradigm that brings forth very low specific gravity (low API) oil and natural gas from a tight shale formation. I can tell you that the geologic processes necessary for hydrocarbon generation is very complex and takes a very, very long time. The earth is old folks.

I have hiked around Burgess mountain in Yoho National Park. There is just as much life preserved here in Alberta as what is found in Kentuckian Limestone. Albeit soft tissue creatures, which makes the Burgess Shale a World Heritage Site. This shows that death was on the earth long before Adam ever existed. If you believe in this kind of thing.

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/ovation-worm-bizarre-new-burgess-shale-species-discovered-on-b-c-guided-hike

Here is Bruce McConkie's opinion:

"My reasoning causes me to conclude that if death has always prevailed in the world, then there was no fall of Adam that brought death to all forms of life; that if Adam did not fall, there is no need for an atonement; that if there was no atonement, there is no salvation, no resurrection, and no eternal life; and that if there was no atonement, there is nothing in all of the glorious promises that the Lord has given us. I believe that the Fall affects man, all forms of life, and the earth itself, and that the Atonement affects man, all forms of life, and the earth itself."

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie_seven-deadly-heresies/

Members of the church will mock me to scorn with what they know to be "true". As I studied paleontology I held the Tuang baby's replica skull in my hands and admired the dentition to not be much different than that of my own children. It was remarkable to see the similarities. Look at the study of dentition analysis and how we compare.

https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/press7

Remember, we are not evolved from apes but share a common ancestor. There is a big difference. We come from a branch of bipedals, branching off at Australopithecus Afarensis. The science is still evolving and open to debate and discussion. Isn't this the healthy way to do things?

Science is constantly peer-reviewed, replicated, and proven many times over. The take away is to believe evidence as presented, with a desire to understand truth. Collect your own evidence and do not be afraid of what you will find!

"The truth will set you free."

Someone must have told me that the reason the earth appears to be so old when dating with radioactive isotopes is that "the Fall" and/or "the Atonement" somehow messed with their half-lives ... or something. Anyway, I later discovered that using lake strata ("varves") you can actually count individual years going backwards from the present--tens of thousands of them. Remains of plants (including pollen) and insects buried in these layers prove beyond a reasonable doubt that things were reproducing and dying tens of thousands of years ago, without having to rely on dating through radioactive decay at all! (Oh, and carbon-14 dating has been nicely calibrated using these varve data.)

When I made that simple discovery, Mormonism's chronology of "no death before the Fall," as firm a tenet of Mormonism as any that exists, was crushed--along with my testimony.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2018 03:12PM by lurking in.

William Lee Stokes, a prominent LDS geologist, wrote a letter to David O McKay in 1957 on the subject of organic evolution. Although McKay believed in organic evolution, he was bound by his position as church president to state that the church took no position on the matter.

There is direct communication between the Stokes and McKay that you can read about here:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V12N04_92.pdf

Most of the twelve apostles at the time were young-earth creationists. Can you imagine the arguments behind closed doors as McKay publicly denounced Joseph Fielding Smith's and McConkie's books regarding the matter? McConkie was just parroting the theory of his high-school educated father-in-law anyways.

Needless to say, McKay is the only LDS prophet to have my continued respect.

What always bothered me about that OT "chronology" bookmark was that, according to their imaginary "chronology," Methuselah--supposedly a righteous man--would have been killed by the flood.

Yes YeS YES. Love this. Evolution is amazing and beautiful-- studying it at BYU of all places. The church "has no stance" and yet history and modern sources obviously show they have a mighty stance.

You’re studying evolution at a University that doesn’t evolve?

Ironic, right? One of the professors I work with is a very faithful TBM who completely opposes church views about death before the fall, the whereabouts of the garden of eden, noah's ark and flood, creation, etc.

No clue how this professor deals with the cognitive dissonance he so obviously experiences from the matter.

When talking about Creationism, I sometimes point out that thousands of generations of dinosaurs walked around on top of the fossilized remains of thousands of generations of their own ancestors.

And that's millions of years after the microscopic critters that show up in a lot of strata...

We humans are a blip.......

That makes the mormon church 0.06% of the current human blip.

Chickens are theorized to have evolved from dinosaurs such as the T-Rex. Whenever I eat chicken, I feel like I’m getting a little payback.

I recall, decades ago, as a young-adult TBM working at a
hospital in Utah on the housekeeping crew. The other guys on
the crew were all TBM RMs. One day in the locker room after
work they were discussing one of their professors at BYU who was
(*gasp*) teaching evolution. One of the guys talked about how
he button-holed the professor after class and asked him about
Adam and Eve. According to this guy his professor believed that
there were humans who predated Adam and Eve and that Adam and
Eve's chldren intermarried with "the hairy apes" (his exact
words). Everyone agreed how ridiculous his professor was.

He ended the discussion by pointing out that the matter is
settled and quoted Joseph Fielding Smith that evolution was a
false, devilish doctrine. That was all you had to know.

I remember liking the idea that I could just rely on a quote by
JFS and then I'd never have to worry about evolution again. I
resolved that day that if the subject of evolution ever came up,
I'd just remind myself that it was a false and devilish
doctrine, and that would be the end of it.

However, I was unable to keep my resolution to remain closed
minded.

Thank-you for sharing Steve. Your input is invaluable to shedding light on the history of the LDS church in the latter half of the 20th century. Your interactions have great merit, and even more so that you have documented them and disseminated them through this thing we call the internet.

I have made one simple observation about McConkie. Sometime between 1957 and 1980 someone seems to have slipped him a copy of Orson Pratt's "The Seer", circa 1853. It is a collection of writings that Pratt put together to teach the principle of polygamy through various essays on celestial marriage and our place in the pre-existence.

The evidence for McConkie reading Pratt's work is as follows. McConkie, a young earth creationist in 1957, changed his opinion on the age of the earth by the time he started the lecture circuit giving his "The Seven Deadly Heresies" speeches in 1980. How does a man go from preaching the earth is only 7000 years old to talking of a God presiding over the universe for 2.55 billion years in 1980? That's easy.

Follow this simpleton math (I am laughing right now BTW). Okay, the first one is easy. As perpetuated by Joseph, one day on Kolob is equal to 1000 years on earth. The earth was created in six days and God rested on the seventh giving us seven days total or 7000 years earth time. As Orson Pratt taught things, it got a little more complex. He claimed that a spirit mother could give birth to one spirit child per day on Kolob. Doing the math, this equals to 1 spirit child x 365 days per year x 7000 earth years x 1000 Kolob years = 2.55 billion children born on Kolob to each spirit mother. Which, of course in Pratt's book, translates to the earth having a geologic age of 2.55 billion years old! McConkie made quite the leap in thinking over the course of 23 years. Somebody slipped him a copy of "The Seer". It's funny how Pratt used this calcualation to determine the age of the earth and how McConkie just uses the number to decribe the age of the universe.

It gives some perspective to the kind of quack McConkie is when in his speech he states "Eternal progression consists of living the kind of life God lives and of increasing in kingdoms and dominions everlastingly. Why anyone should suppose that an infinite and eternal being who has presided in our universe for almost 2,555,000,000 years, who made the sidereal heavens, whose creations are more numerous than the particles of the earth, and who is aware of the fall of every sparrow—why anyone would suppose that such a being has more to learn and new truths to discover in the laboratories of eternity is totally beyond my comprehension."

Yet the Mormon church looks up to this guy, as a gentleman and a scholar, mature in the gospel, and having met Christ personally. He's not a man of science and he perpetuated quite a myth that he had some special connection with God. None of the readers should ever be fooled into thinking that he had any insight into any of the temporal of spiritual creation of the earth or how long God has governed the universe. He was always on a fool's errand, a life wasted on fictitious books and cross-correlation.

Really, the age of the earth is based on how quickly spirit mother could pump out spirit babies? And this also translates to how long God has been governing the universe? Use your own reasoning here folks.