Forget science, forget reason, forget facts, Mormons believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. Do you TBM's really believe this nonsense or instead just protecting the church from another one of their stupid beliefs?

If you do believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, please explain how you do it.

(dead silence)

If the dinosaurs really lived on earth 65 million years ago, how could they all have drowned in the Flood?



(Posted just in case "Tonto Schwartz" doesn't get a chance to reply:

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,915900,915900#msg-915900 )



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2013 12:46AM by Fetal Deity.

Using Tonto Schwartz's style of logic to answer this one:

If the earth weren't really 6,000 years old, then would God need to create dinosaur bones to test our faith?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2013 02:13AM by transylvania.

Every time I ever heard that , I simply replied with the rhetorical question of ' then how old is that stuff in your cars' gas tank ' ?

no no no no no no.. guys!.. Geeshh..

The dating techniques are all wrong! That's all! And god doesn't 'fix' that.. because he wants to test our faith!

And the dinosaurs?!..

Well Eve was seduced by a dinosaur everybody knows that! And after Eve ate from the fruit, God punished the dinosaur by turning him into a snake!.. That's where all the dinosaurs went!..

(O/T) Ooooohhh. That makes much more sense! Thanks.

So to recap, 6000 God created the Earth, then quickly after threw in some dinosaurs cuz he thought they were cool looking, then made Adam/Eve. Realized Dinosaurs+Man are a bad combination because a Dino seduced Eve, Adam got very jealous and complained to God, who apprently head the words of his mouth because he punished the Dinosaurs by turning them into snakes.

Yes, that makes as much sense as mormonism. And as dining room talking point I now the devil should not be symbmolized as a snake but rather a dinosaur. TIL why the earth is 6000 years old. ;)

Exactly!

:D

It varies from Mormon to Mormon. I don't know of anyone in my family that actually believes the Earth is only 6000 years old. Most of them accept evolution and all that. They just ignore the whole "no death before the fall" thing.

Actually Mormons should believe the earth is more than 6k years old because that is what they are taught. Even Joseph Smith taught it was 2.5 billion years old. They get over the usual biblical fundamentalist notion of 6k year old earth by defining the 'days' of creation as creative periods of unknown time scale.

Joseph got his 2.5 billion years by multiplying days by different factors according to God's time.

So, billions of years old earth and evolution can be explained as God's creation. Although evolution by natural selection does fly in the face of a creator God making man in his image and creating all the species, commanded to multiply each in their own kind, as taught in the temple.

Where they are 100% demonstrably wrong is stating that the earth came into this temporal existence and literally 'fell' (according to Brigham Young) 6k years ago. Plus death did not enter until 6k years ago (2 Ne. Alma, and D&C 77).

This for me is the 'smoking gun'. Undeniable church doctrine (it is in their scriptures and taught by their prophets, including priesthood and seminary and institute manuals), that there was no death on this planet before the 'fall' of Adam approximately 6k years ago.

We all know (and they know) their has been death for billions of years. That is why we have gas, fossils etc. So, the undeniable absolute fact that there has been death = scriptures wrong, not word of God = prophets wrong, not mouthpieces of God = church is not true.

Apologists try to spin this by saying the no death before 6k years ago is not official church doctrine. By stating that argument, the apologists actually come under the church's definition of 'apostate'. Someone who teaches against a core doctrine of the church. Ho hum, when will we hear of their courts of love?

They do seem to have dropped the original notion taught by their early apostles that this earth was made from other planets and planters were sent here from other realms with seeds etc. Adam and his wife (wives) were transported here through space. As GBH would say 'I don't know that we teach that'. Except they do, in the temple!!!

So according to biblical christianity, god set the radioactive isotope decay rate forward for the entire earth to test our faith. For mormons, however, he only manipulated the fossils and decided to ignore everything else.

I'm starting to get the hang of this stuff!

I would use, in place of "biblical", "fundamentalist". Many Christians do believe in evolution and take the stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah, etc. as mere allegorical stories. I have lately been amazed that anyone takes the stories as literally true. It is interesting to note that in my first temple experience, I noted that the stories were presented as "a smililitude". Now that word has been taken out and moism is even more literalist as to Eden, Noah, ets.

They don't teach it at BYU outside of the religion department. In fact, I spent weeks when I took Biology 100 in the early 1990s going over organic evolution as a FACT. They also taught that the Earth is billions of years old, not thousands.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2013 03:48AM by Makurosu.

I never believed the earth was only 6,000 years old line, and whenever it came up, I always assumed the teacher was teaching their their own uninformed opinion. My own father, had told me exactly this, stating he believed the young earth claim was false doctrine.

In fact, I don't really remember any serious debate on the age of the Earth until we started using the teachings of Brigham Young Manuel back in (was that 1997 or 98?) and his prehistoric thinking then seemed to have gotten resurrected. I mean, there was always debate before then, but it seemed like there was always room to believe one way or the other. Then again, this was also about the time I started going to the adult Sunday School, so I may have been insulated until then.

It was probably always official doctrine that the Earth was young, but until they started using those words of the prophets books, most members simply dismissed the idea. When I was told the whole, there was no death before the fall thing in an institute class, that was the first time I had ever had serious doubts.

So glad to hear BYU has changed since the 1980s. One of my more entertaining memories from that my time there was a conversation with my roommate, a nonreligious exchange student from Japan. She came in with an odd look, shut the door and said, "Do you believe in evolution? I said the evidence was pretty strong, and she let out a huge sigh of relief. Turns out someone had told her it wasn't true, and in the ensuing discussion the entire floor had said it wasn't true. Not one person would even consider it - except me, apparently.

But I will say my science teachers at BYU were good, thoughtful people. My geology teacher admitted under questioning on a field trip that there was no evidence of Noah's worldwide flood, and it must have been much smaller. My biology teacher had us research ethical issues and the LDS stance on them. My presentation on birth control is why my then TBM room-mate had adventures instead of babies after marrying at 20. I don't remember studying evolution at all at the time, but there were so many crazy, frustrating comments in religion classes that maybe it was just drowned out.

The evolution thing isn't just Mormons though. I saw the textbook for a Christian HS science class and it had pure creationism with one sentence about evolution, arguing against it.

Or at least the 'man evolved from monkeys' theory.

That was a critical time for much of the religious world when evolution (Darwin) was discussed as 'evil'. The Bible was the all knowing informational book on mankind. Adam and Eve and all.

Now the 'man evolved from monkeys' theory is out there with additional ideas for so many other evolutionary theories that the focus has changed.

It is apparent with supporting evidence that evolution is a natural process and has been the active result of changes in the planet.

I think when asked, Mormons/Christians say they don't believe in the evolution theory that we came from monkeys, but they can't dismiss the evidence in other species. At least the educated observing people can't dismiss it.

The 'no death before the fall' idea is not logical with the current and undeniable evidence.

But then, whoever believes and angel took gold plates back to heaven might believe anything. Even giving their wife to a prophet like she was chattel. Very strange church history which still makes me shake my head that I ever believed it and that others still swallow it hook, line, and sinker.

Well, SOME Mormons believe the earth is 6,000 years old. One of the better things about Mormons is that they believe the earth was created in six creative periods, not knowing or specifying how long the periods would be. This gives them a way to back out of the Biblical 6,000 years thing. I think the real concern is that the belief in a literal Adam and Eve. Most Christians believe it is allegorical, but due to the whole temple schtick, Adam-Ondi-Ahman, and the belief in a literal Garden of Eden having been in--of all places--Missouri, Mormons can't back out of the allegory and have painted themselves into a corner of silliness.

Explanations I've heard from TBMS:

-- God incorporated leftovers from older planets and space junk when he made Earth. The dinos are from those remnants.

-- God created and then let the creatures evolve.

-- We don't know what those Biblical time measurements really represented (God's time is not our time).

-- God used "hyper-time" (kind of like hyper-space) or a time warp during the creation, so of course the time periods don't make sense to us.

-- Time works differently on Kolob.

-- Time doesn't exist on Kolob and those Bible references are just an attempt to put it in terms we can understand.

-- It's not essential to our salvation.

-- God will explain it in the afterlife.

-- What? We never taught that!

-- Living prophets trump dead ones.

-- Are you perfect yet? Then don't worry about it!

It's SCRIPTURE!

D&C 77:6: The "seven seals" of the book, in Revelation, represents the seven thousand years of the earth's "temporal existence."

(The 7th thousand is the millennium, of course, which hasn't started yet).

As a mormon I believed 6,000 years had passed since Adam was cast out of the garden, but not that the earth was 6,000 years old.

I played fast & loose with the 6 creative periods and just pretended the time scale allowed for a 4.5 billion year earth.

So I think few mormons believe this. This is more a fundamentalist christian belief, in my experience..

I saw some survey results and the percentage of Mormons who don't believe in evolution is higher than that of Christians as a whole. The fundamentalists get most of the news but the rest of the Christians disagree with them.

I hear this a lot, but if christians acknowledge evolution then they also acknowledge the non-existence of adam & eve. If they acknowledge the non-existence of adam & eve then they acknowledge there was no such thing as a "fall." If they acknowledge there was no such thing as a "fall" then there is no need for a savior.

Without adam & eve there is no christianity. So it's nice when christians say they acknowledge evolution but I think it's just mouth-noises. Deep down they're no different than Paul...

They read books like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Earth-John-D-Morris/dp/0890511748

I haven't read it, but I know some Christians who believe in a young Earth.

I actually brought this topic up with a TBM. He told me Joseph Smith taught that the earth was made by bringing together parts of different planets. That why there are fossils dating back millions of years when the earth is really only 6000 years old.

I just nodded my head and walked away.

-Grand Canyon
-(California) Tar Pits, oil deposits world-wide.


the Young-Earth theory/possibility is one of those marginal items of Mormonism, possibly originated with JS, but now seldom mentioned. It's not as important to 'modern life' as the fable it once was; it's one of those items that current leaders wish had Never Happened.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2013 11:31AM by guynoirprivateeye.

I am always amazed at the Ussherites (Bishop Ussher was the one who came up with the young Earth theory, based on the day it was when he decided to tally up Biblical folks' ages ... and, of course, on what time classes started at Oxford).

I think that anyone who believes that bullcrap should be taken forcibly to visit the LaBrea Tar Pits and the accompanying lab and museum.

but that it has been 6000 years since Adam left the garden as someone has already suggested. Are there any quotes from GAs that said the earth is only 6000 years old?

Even so far as the time since Adam, it is unreal. Man has been on earth much longer than 6000 years. Fortunately, I was not told the story of Adam was literal until I was LDS, and then I not only did not agree, I even told a class that there was death before Adam, etc.

Maybe it's because I've lived outside the Morridor, but I've never actually met a Mormon that believed the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Even those who moved from Utah tend to accept that the Earth is actually billions of years old since they don't consider the creative periods to be literally 6 24 hour days.

The church, the GA's all teach and preach the earth is only 6,000 years old. To do otherwise would show what a crock the religion is.

Go to LDS.org and do a search on it.

You can also go to www.lds.crockofcrap.org.