Just curious.

I have seen reports of many fundamentalist Christians who believe the earth to be on,y 6000 years old. Has the Morg ever come out with anything official or semi-official about the earths age? Most in church that I Knew growing up I assume believer it older...... anything said by the prophets of old on this.

There is no official church doctrine on the age of the earth, but if one is to believe the temple ceremony, it clearly infers a recent creation and literal old testament.

http://www.mormonthink.com/QUOTES/evolution.htm

The church has been very clear over its existence that, as far as it is concerned, humanity is six thousand years old. The seventh thousand will be the so-called millennium.

D&C 77:6
"Q. What are we to understand by the book which John saw, which was sealed on the back with seven seals?
A. We are to understand that it contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence."

The wicked apostates may think that D&C stands for Delusions & Crap. But in reality it stands for Doctrine & Covenants which means that the book is full of just sacred doctrines and sacred covenants & the word of the Almighty God. Only someone who doesn't believe in the Church could claim that the earth's temporal existence could possibly be more than what's in the sacred doctrine outlined in D&C 77:6.

This thread reminds me that as part of our glorious missionary work we can do much more to encourage people to only buy gasoline at gas stations where they scientifically verify and then certify that the crude oil only comes from fossils less than 6000 years old. We could have the Age Certification label put more prominently than those 87, 89, etc. Octane labels I often see as its certainly much more vital for everyone when they operate vehicles to have them be spiritually right than temporarly right. Otherwise we'd be hypocrites out doing our various responsibilities if we use any sort of vehicle that relies on fossil fuels directly or indirectly.

"The church has been very clear over its existence that, as far as it is concerned, humanity is six thousand years old."
======================================================

Evidently the Masons believe this too. There was a Masonic Temple in the neighborhood where I grew up in Washington DC. The cornerstone has two dates:

AD 1908
AL 5908

The AL stands for "ad lucem", Latin for "to the light."

I encountered the same thing outside one of their buildings in South Carolina.

Just wondering: is there any sect or group that actually pretends that the current year is 6017? That would be very strange.

What I’ve seen play out in my lifetime is that the “doctrine” has changed.

What’s more interesting, is the changed stance on what is or isn’t doctrine. You see, if we now say it was never really doctrine then we can’t be blamed for changing the doctrine that never was. And don’t give me any of the history and scripture stuff to confuse the issue.

In the old days several apostles such as Widstoe and Orson Pratt speculated the earth was up to 2 billion years old.

The old statements were that there were six time periods called days of unknown length. Such as in the days of Adam or in the the days of Noah etc.

There was also an unknown length of time between each "day".

Correlation came along and I think things changed dramatically but I had left by then.

I think there is now a "recycled" earth teaching where god "reuses" parts of planets to form new ones thus explaining fossils.

The other I hear is 13,000 years. 7000 to make the earth and 6,000 of "recorded time"

6000 years is what I was told by my Mormon father, who is a college graduate. So confusing.

Yes, the LDS doctrine is "young earth". As ridiculous as that is, they also officially endorse the historicity of the flood and the tower of Babel, although I will bet there isn't a professor of linguistics at BYU who believes that all mankind was speaking the same language 4,000 years ago.

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1998/01/the-flood-and-the-tower-of-babel?lang=eng

I love how that piece goes on and on about what "Moses" said about Noah -- not realizing that "Moses" was almost certainly a made-up character as well.

Hilarious :)

The whole creation thing Mormons peddle is whacko. Obviously making a whole earth in a day is a stretch even for a Mormon and as a kid I was told that God's days were like thousands of years. Wow, I thought.

Now this is what I think. With no sun at all everything is pitch black. But, God gets all this stuff made without the sun. He just said, "Let there be light" and there was light. But it wasn't the sun--that was coming much later. Still God called it the day and the night and the evening and the morning. No sun.

Then, after God gets his firmament a firmamenting he plants plants all over his planet except for the non-GMO type. No sun yet, though, so . . . No photosynthesis? I'm not much of a gardener but one thing I know is plants are all about the light. Also the plants depend on carbon dioxide from animals, so how are they surviving? No sun. No animals. How?

Magic! He's God. It doesn't have to make sense if you are Mormon. Pay lay ale that in your hat. Mormons and the others have nothing to prove, because . . .God . . . .magic . . . duh. Besides, the creation is in the KJV and that is all we need to know.

On the other hand, if the sun and the plants and the animals all developed slowly and simultaneously it all works together in a logical symbiotic way. Even makes sense. But that would point to evolution and we can't have that, now can we?

They have a website - it's not outta sight.

The earth was created on sunday october 23, 4004bce.

Whatever you say, Bishop.

were you there ?

A few years ago, when my TBM mother came to visit, she commented on how much she liked the big print of the Andromeda galaxy I had hanging on my wall.

I told her it was the result of several nights of exposures with my telescope, a total of 15 hours of exposure time. And that the photons that my telescope/camera recorded from that galaxy had taken about 2.5 million years to go from there to my camera, because it was about 2.5 million light years away.

"Oh, that can't be right," she said.
"After all, the universe is only about 6,000 years old."

Yes, she saw my face-palm.

Jeffy Holland said in a conference talk (I'm paraphrasing)
"Adam and Eve were real people who actually existed. I don't know what happened before that..."

Evolution, perhaps?

lapsed Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Jeffy Holland said in a conference talk (I'm
> paraphrasing)
> "Adam and Eve were real people who actually
> existed. I don't know what happened before
> that..."

He's a prophet. He's supposed to know.

The church has fallen strategically silent on the subject and are just waiting for my Mother's generation to finish dying out. Eventually, they will officially flip and trot out an old quote from some apostle who thought it was older and then pretend they always knew it was. Standard mode of operation.

BYU biology profs teach evolution straight up and geo classes are old earth , while across campus religion teachers are young earth. When they do flip, some time in the future, the religion teachers will have to shut up and fall in line - then the church can trot out their science guys as proof they were science nerds all along.

Why, is that confusing to you? (sarcasm tag)

When I was young, David O. McKay was LDS president, and he clearly believed in a "form of evolution" and an ancient cosmos, but his successor, Joseph Fielding Smith, was strictly a young earth creationist.

Be careful researching that subject to much; you might run across that "translation of the Book of Abraham" (the Chandler Papyri) that Joseph Smith made where he pointed to a critter and claimed it was a snake, saying "Before the fall, snakes had legs."

There's evidence of the truth in that one; some of the larger pythons and boas have actual vestigial legs.

Joseph Fielding Smith was very clear in his book Doctrines of Salvation where he stated in volume 2 that "We know by revelation that the earth is 13,000 years old" and when I was in the MTC and this was very clearly quoted I was told if I didn't believe this then I didn't believe JFS was a prophet and if I didn't believe JFS was a prophet then I didn't believe the Church was true. I almost came home from the MTC two weeks into my mission and looking back on it, I have wished for years that I had come home at that time

I've heard Mormons say that the 'creation process' was gradual, & therefore not subject to a certain, definate "Start" date as One (day) it wasn't Earth, the next it was...

Besides, who was around then to notice?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/2017 05:01PM by GNPE.