According to the Bible timeline Adam and Eve lived about 6200 years ago. The first homosapien bones were discovered to be 100,000 years old. Okay now, help me.
Yeah, it's troublesome. I struggled with this issue for a long time in the Church. I finally came to the conclusion that I could not reconcile the Bible with science.
1) I considered everything in the Old Testament to be mythology, not factual. I was never comfortable with this, but I figured the main reasons the OT were important were: a) the prophesies & foreshadowing of Christ, b) a contrast with what was taught by Crhist in the New Testament.
2) I could get past more recent prophets, etc. believing it literally because being a prophet does not mean knowing everything. It means God gave the prophet a revelation or a couple revelations of specific topics and that does not mean they know everything. They will believe their worldview that they understood at the time and that's good enough for God.
With that said I had long considered that the Old Testament could not possible be factual from the time of Noah back. That was definitely something "on the shelf" that bothered me. Eventually I concluded that the more recent scriptures were just as mythological. For example the Book of Mormon is directly dependent on the Tower of Babel actually happening.
That could play into the whole idea of being cast out into the lone and dreary world. It's actually a different world. Maybe the Garden of Eden became the City of Enoch and lifted off into outer space, leaving no trace.
It was based on the teaching that when earth was celestialized it would physically move closer to god (just as Kolob did)
P.S. a lot of people say god lives on kolob, but that's far less weird than what they actually teach: god lives on an unknown planet, kolob was like earth, got celestialized into a "star" (later recanted so it is still a planet), physically flew through space to go be nearest to god's planet, and earth will one day do the same.
bc Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I considered everything in the Old Testament to be mythology, not factual.
I take the Adam and Eve story to be a mythological story that provides an explanation for how we came to be self-aware. I also sometimes wonder if there are elements of ancestral memory involved, i.e. the verdant rainforests of Africa vs. the dry savannahs. I can't believe that anyone takes the story literally.
The temple ceremony used to say in reference to Adam and Eve "these things are figurative so far as the man and woman are concerned." (Or something close to that.) It's always been a mess, but Mormonism and the thinking of its membership has regressed.
"to believe that they are 100,000 years old is to put your faith in man."
To which I always reply: IMO, believing that JS saw god is putting your faith in man. A human man told you the story. To believe in the BoM is to put your faith in man. To believe in the BoA is to put your faith in a shifty, liar of a man.
a day for the Lord is 1,000 years for man... or, whatever He needs it to be to work things out. Matter of fact, His ways are mysterious, and we can't really know these things. Satisfied? Cause that's about the best I ever was told.
I don't know how true it is but I remember learning in seminary that in the original Hebrew bible the word that is translated into English as "day" can also mean "a period of time" so I never really figured that the earth had to be only 6000 years old. I also always looked at the OT as being full of allegories and hearsay and not always the literal truth.
I now figure Moses was just a shyster like the rest of these religious types. He just lived a really long time ago. Christianity seems to be built on the ruins of other faiths, so as much as I think Jo Smith was a d-bag, he wasn't the first and he won't be the last.