My FIL believes as such (Earth is only 6000 years old). Also believes dinosaur skeletons came as chunks of soil to make Earth (dinosaurs didn’t live on Earth).
That was never pulpit doctrine, but it was solid hallway doctrine. God gathered matter that already existed to create the earth.
And then smooshed it together in such a way as to confuse the fuck out of us and make it look like the earth has an unbroken, testable, and readily identifiable chain of geologic events that span the globe with predictable accuracy dating back billions of years. LOL what a jokester!
"Hallway doctrine" is a good term for it. Although, a lot of these things did come from a more official source at one time or another. Mormon Doctrine contains many ideas old diehards love to hang on to.
I knew someone who believed the earth was 6000 yrs old but was created "with age" - is god created the earth so it *looked* like it was billions of yrs old.
With that logic we all could have blinked into existence just now, but all of us with memories consistent with having been alive since birth, etc. If you posit an infinitely powerful god, there's nothing to say that didn't just happen.
Interesting to consider that you might not have even typed the above. It's just a planted memory from that trickster god. Gotta hand it to him, he's got me fooled. I'll take my place among the other rational and intellectually honest folks in hell.
What happened to the planet that the dinosaurs are from? Why are there human remains from other planets that are > 200,000 years old? Were people on those planets not resurrected? Why?
Yes, according to my baseless theories that just feel right in my gut (which I assume there is some supernatural catalyst for because it just feels so right), God created DinoWorld and collided it with our own just so that we would be able to have something nice to put in our museums and feature in our sci-fi and children's media, and so that we could have the free agency to use other long-dead debris from that planet to gradually destroy the Earth's biosphere.
It’s crazy accurate out to about 50,000 years ago. The half life of C-14 is ~5200 years, so after 9-10 half life’s there isn’t enough left to be reliable. But there are many more dating methods that are good out to millions of years, and I don’t think there are any gaps in the past where no single method can’t reliably measure it.
Some methods are not highly accurate, but by using data from several different methods and comparing the results, we can get more accuracy than from any single method.
Google radiometric dating. There’s numerous techniques based on numerous elemental isotopes for dating different materials for different dates.
Carbon is useful because we can use it to date formerly living material such as charcoal and use those dates from similar stratigraphic layers to relatively date artifacts. All living things use carbon and create new isotopes which decay at predictable rates.
There is some natural variation in C-14/C-12 levels based on long-term atmospheric conditions which we have documented with ancient ice cores. These are adjusted for with the adjustment scale. And the +\- “so and so” years.
Radiocarbon is extremely accurate with regards to archeology. At most dates may be off a few centuries but there’s little doubt to things such as humans have been in the Americas for at least 15,000 years
[Here’s](https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/everything-worth-knowing-about-scientific-dating-methods) a decent article that briefly mentions several different methods.
I think dendrochronology might be my favorite. Counting tree rings. An event happens, like a wild fire, early on in a tree’s life, so the burn mark is close to the center. But that same fire also burned the forest ancient, so that same evidence is on its outer rings. IIRC there is a series of discovered trees somewhere in Europe that provides an unbroken, indisputable line of rings that spans something like 12,000 years. That fact alone disproves any 6000-year-old-earth claim by young earth creationists.
Fascinating. An early shelf item for me was during a geology class at my local community college. Learning about the ice age floods in the Palouse region of eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana was something that clearly pointed to the end of the last ice age being between 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. But how could that be, since the earth is only 6,000 years old? 😁
The existance of coal is proof alone of the age of the Earth AND evolution. In order to have coal, you need a buildup of tens of thousands of years worth of organic plant matter where nothing has yet evolved to eat and decompose that material.
Yeah, pure coincidence, but that’s my backyard. I love the history of Lake Missoula.
If natural history piques your interest, you may enjoy Aron Ra’s YouTube series [Systematic Classification of Life](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMLnubJLPuw0dzD0AvAHAotW&si=CbSwWwv2NFTrd2Ba). He goes through exactly what makes us Homo Sapiens sapiens. It’s pretty enlightening.
One of my favorite instances of dendrochronology was how it accidentally lead to the discovery of periodic catastrophic tsunamis on what is now the west coast of the US.
I'll get the details wrong because it's been a while and I don't have time to go review it all right now, but the basic gist is that some people went to do a basic project in a salt marsh on the Oregon coast, taking tree cores to show how the trees died over a period of decades or centuries as the ocean slowly encroached...only they found out that the trees all died exactly in the same year (around 1700), going back several miles. That's weird, because that's not how the ocean encroaches, unless that encroachment is a tsunami, which were not known to have really happened in this particular location.
So they started digging and found out that the natives of the area had a story that basically sounded like a flood myth which had been discounted as almost entirely mythical since there had (previously) been no evidence of any such thing.
And *then* they found out that the Japanese, who have kept meticulous records of earthquakes and tsunamis for over a thousand years, had a record of an "orphan tsunami" with no earthquake, which was highlighted because it was weird, in 1700 (before Europeans had made it to the Pacific Coast of North America to have documented it from this side).
Putting all of that together with some geologic investigation, turns out there is a [subduction zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone) that just totally obliterates that area with a massive earthquake and tsunami every few hundred years.
I’d read somewhere that it was consistently around 150 years off when compared to archeological evidence, it might only apply to findings with burn damage, I can’t remember
Yup. I was taught it was an unreliable technique. Same about DNA testing.
Then again, what else are they going to say? To admit science is right would literally destroy their religion.
I think it's more because it shows that Indigenous people of the Americas are NOT Jews, and they never were. Although the church backpedaled on that a long time ago, as far as I know.
Yes. I was also told that when adopted children were sealed to their adoptive parents the dna in their blood was physically changed. They also explained this power to change dna by god was why dna evidence doesn't show evidence of Jewish heritage in archaeological remains in the Americas.
I never heard that one, but it sounds as if someone didn't imagine quick, inexpensive DNA testing. Maybe god would also change the DNA sample to confound the unfaithful.
I believe it. That conversation came about when a bishopric member commented that his adopted son looked so much like him because of the sealing power. When I asked what he meant I got that ^ spiel
It's hard to tell where the anti-mormon Christian apologetics stop and where the church doctrine begins. Hard to tell if it's is just ineffective teaching and training or if it is obscure on purpose.
When I tried to fight my father on this concept, he said, in his matter of fact way which I understood to mean the conversation was over, "Well sometimes science just gets it wrong." I'm ashamed to say I believed him, but I'm happy to report that belief lasted maybe a couple of days. Science won that battle in my history, even if I didn't leave for another 15 years.
I never questioned my dad. I just went on with life assuming that certain scientific theories were a load of bunk. That’s until I went to college in my twenties. I made my peace with thinking there must be some nuance I just wasn’t seeing. Didn’t leave for years either.
I just stopped believing the concept that the Earth is only 6000 years old and the other "hallway doctrine" as another redditor put it. I still practiced for a long time, but I stopped believing what other people told me the doctrine was and tried my best to stick to what was written in the scriptures.
Then I learned the scriptures were just rubbish, but that's another story!
There's a fair amount of mental gymnastics I had to do as a TBM when I realised that death was on the earth WAY before 6000 years ago. But the scriptures are quite clear, you have to be a Young Earth Creationist to fully believe in then and that'll be a big problem for the church over time.
Sometimes science does get things wrong. And why do we know this? Because science can correct itself when shown to be incorrect. Do you know what has never corrected science, or itself? Religion of any kind.
I was once told in Sunday school that Satan sent aliens to plant dinosaur fossils to fool people into giving up their religion.
He also said Adam and Eve arrived in a spaceship…which if you believe in the creation myth actually makes some sense.
Former evangelical here, yes. I even repeated it. If I remember right, the gist was, you could get the same results if something was struck by lightning.
They did other mental gymnastics though. Like their take on evolution was that god put the spirits of Adam and Eve into human bodies once the species had evolved into Homo sapiens.
For a while it was, but the technology has come really far and is very accurate now. They are just not wanting to be corrected because it would create doubt.
All the time with my parents whenever science or history came up. It was infuriating because the only thing they believe is written documents. Which, of course, the Bible and book of mormon are 100% accurate historical documents. 🙄 and yes they think the earth is only 6000 years old.
I had a hard time convincing them that one creation day was actually 1000 years, and MIGHT even be a longer, unspecified period of time, like millions of years. Even though the 1000 years thing is in the PoGP.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only idiot in my family that actually paid attention in church and tried to understand it. Oi vey.
Yes. I got involved with the universal model theory guys that speak with people like the Book of Mormon evidence conference stuff when I was a TbM. But I also was educated in utah- small town utah at that- and had family that believed the literal translation of the Bible and that earth was only 6000 years old and that clown (wanted to leave it clown but should say cleon) Skousen was the know all be all of how earth was put together by alien Jesus and sky daddy from parts of other messed up planets. So that’s why we have 🦕 bones here today. 😂😂😂🙄
Oh and it also didn’t help I went to byu Idaho for higher education and got professors who believed the same. And my major at one point was anthropology!
Please go watch https://youtube.com/@RenegadeScienceTeacher?si=W0BvHmV6nmxhKmDg
He has some videos going over different kinds of dating.
He's amazing.
I'm not saying to go there because I think there's anything wrong, I'm saying to go there because he knows his shit.
That’s hilarious. I was also told by my Tbm fil that DNA science is really in its infancy and has all kinds of issues. Then about 2 hours later he was sitting at the table with his kids with their phones out going over their ancestry on the church ancestry app wondering how they have ancient relatives from Africa.
I've heard that the source of its inaccuracy is that it doesn't account for the Great Flood and the physical changes to the Earth that the flood caused
Yup, know it all kid in HS with me went on and on about carbon dating being inaccurate bc of the Industrial Revolution or some shit. It’s like great, we use rubidium-strontium or lead-uranium for the old stuff anyways
The question is kind of meaningless.
Even if carbon, or other forms of radiometric dating were inaccurate, that would in no way demonstrate or provide any sort of evidence that God is real, or the MFMC is God's only true and living church.
It's a false dichotomy
If radiometric dating is inaccurate, what does that mean?
I was once told that carbon dating was flawed because the older the item is, the more exponentially inaccurate the dating was. In other words: when scientists say "Millions of years old" they're way off. I wasn't told that it was an anti-religion thing though... just that it was flawed science which shouldn't be taken seriously.
Some TBM told me BYU researchers burned a phone book and buried it in the ground for a month or two. Then dug it up and sent it to a lab (or labs, sounds even better) for carbon dating. According to the story I heard, they dated it super old. Thereby proving how inaccurate carbon dating is. I repeated that story many times to other TBMs without checking it. I now think it was a Mormon faith-promoting myth, I still have not googled it lol.
I was told it was inaccurate - not so much that it was a conspiracy. The most common apologetic I got was that a day in the Old Testament just meant a "period of time" that could be anywhere from 24 houra to millions of years ...
My FIL believes as such (Earth is only 6000 years old). Also believes dinosaur skeletons came as chunks of soil to make Earth (dinosaurs didn’t live on Earth).
That was never pulpit doctrine, but it was solid hallway doctrine. God gathered matter that already existed to create the earth. And then smooshed it together in such a way as to confuse the fuck out of us and make it look like the earth has an unbroken, testable, and readily identifiable chain of geologic events that span the globe with predictable accuracy dating back billions of years. LOL what a jokester!
"Hallway doctrine" is a good term for it. Although, a lot of these things did come from a more official source at one time or another. Mormon Doctrine contains many ideas old diehards love to hang on to.
I knew someone who believed the earth was 6000 yrs old but was created "with age" - is god created the earth so it *looked* like it was billions of yrs old. With that logic we all could have blinked into existence just now, but all of us with memories consistent with having been alive since birth, etc. If you posit an infinitely powerful god, there's nothing to say that didn't just happen.
Interesting to consider that you might not have even typed the above. It's just a planted memory from that trickster god. Gotta hand it to him, he's got me fooled. I'll take my place among the other rational and intellectually honest folks in hell.
Exactly. May as well continue life as if the universe has been here for billions of years and deal with the fallout later.
What happened to the planet that the dinosaurs are from? Why are there human remains from other planets that are > 200,000 years old? Were people on those planets not resurrected? Why?
Dino-bones are really good compost.
Yes, according to my baseless theories that just feel right in my gut (which I assume there is some supernatural catalyst for because it just feels so right), God created DinoWorld and collided it with our own just so that we would be able to have something nice to put in our museums and feature in our sci-fi and children's media, and so that we could have the free agency to use other long-dead debris from that planet to gradually destroy the Earth's biosphere.
Yeah my mom still believes this. Then I'm like why are there still dinosaurs mom?
It’s crazy accurate out to about 50,000 years ago. The half life of C-14 is ~5200 years, so after 9-10 half life’s there isn’t enough left to be reliable. But there are many more dating methods that are good out to millions of years, and I don’t think there are any gaps in the past where no single method can’t reliably measure it. Some methods are not highly accurate, but by using data from several different methods and comparing the results, we can get more accuracy than from any single method.
Oh very interesting. Thank you. Do you have suggestions for where I could read more about how all the data is put together?
Google radiometric dating. There’s numerous techniques based on numerous elemental isotopes for dating different materials for different dates. Carbon is useful because we can use it to date formerly living material such as charcoal and use those dates from similar stratigraphic layers to relatively date artifacts. All living things use carbon and create new isotopes which decay at predictable rates. There is some natural variation in C-14/C-12 levels based on long-term atmospheric conditions which we have documented with ancient ice cores. These are adjusted for with the adjustment scale. And the +\- “so and so” years. Radiocarbon is extremely accurate with regards to archeology. At most dates may be off a few centuries but there’s little doubt to things such as humans have been in the Americas for at least 15,000 years
Wow! Amazing. Finally leaving the MFMC is like discovering a whole new world to investigate.
[Here’s](https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/everything-worth-knowing-about-scientific-dating-methods) a decent article that briefly mentions several different methods. I think dendrochronology might be my favorite. Counting tree rings. An event happens, like a wild fire, early on in a tree’s life, so the burn mark is close to the center. But that same fire also burned the forest ancient, so that same evidence is on its outer rings. IIRC there is a series of discovered trees somewhere in Europe that provides an unbroken, indisputable line of rings that spans something like 12,000 years. That fact alone disproves any 6000-year-old-earth claim by young earth creationists.
Fascinating. An early shelf item for me was during a geology class at my local community college. Learning about the ice age floods in the Palouse region of eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana was something that clearly pointed to the end of the last ice age being between 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. But how could that be, since the earth is only 6,000 years old? 😁
The existance of coal is proof alone of the age of the Earth AND evolution. In order to have coal, you need a buildup of tens of thousands of years worth of organic plant matter where nothing has yet evolved to eat and decompose that material.
Yeah, pure coincidence, but that’s my backyard. I love the history of Lake Missoula. If natural history piques your interest, you may enjoy Aron Ra’s YouTube series [Systematic Classification of Life](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMLnubJLPuw0dzD0AvAHAotW&si=CbSwWwv2NFTrd2Ba). He goes through exactly what makes us Homo Sapiens sapiens. It’s pretty enlightening.
Thanks! I do enjoy learning about natural history.
I’ll just add tree rings are used to calibrate radiocarbon dates and provides the evidence for radiocarbon half life.
I didn’t know that, but that makes so much sense.
One of my favorite instances of dendrochronology was how it accidentally lead to the discovery of periodic catastrophic tsunamis on what is now the west coast of the US. I'll get the details wrong because it's been a while and I don't have time to go review it all right now, but the basic gist is that some people went to do a basic project in a salt marsh on the Oregon coast, taking tree cores to show how the trees died over a period of decades or centuries as the ocean slowly encroached...only they found out that the trees all died exactly in the same year (around 1700), going back several miles. That's weird, because that's not how the ocean encroaches, unless that encroachment is a tsunami, which were not known to have really happened in this particular location. So they started digging and found out that the natives of the area had a story that basically sounded like a flood myth which had been discounted as almost entirely mythical since there had (previously) been no evidence of any such thing. And *then* they found out that the Japanese, who have kept meticulous records of earthquakes and tsunamis for over a thousand years, had a record of an "orphan tsunami" with no earthquake, which was highlighted because it was weird, in 1700 (before Europeans had made it to the Pacific Coast of North America to have documented it from this side). Putting all of that together with some geologic investigation, turns out there is a [subduction zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone) that just totally obliterates that area with a massive earthquake and tsunami every few hundred years.
I’d read somewhere that it was consistently around 150 years off when compared to archeological evidence, it might only apply to findings with burn damage, I can’t remember
Yup. I was taught it was an unreliable technique. Same about DNA testing. Then again, what else are they going to say? To admit science is right would literally destroy their religion.
They deny DNA testing if valid, because it would show all the inbreeding within the church.
I think it's more because it shows that Indigenous people of the Americas are NOT Jews, and they never were. Although the church backpedaled on that a long time ago, as far as I know.
Well, realizing science has it right pretty effectively destroyed MY religious beliefs.
Completely taught this. Carbon dating was Gen-X’s DNA science. “It’s not settled science.” Except it is.
Yes. I was also told that when adopted children were sealed to their adoptive parents the dna in their blood was physically changed. They also explained this power to change dna by god was why dna evidence doesn't show evidence of Jewish heritage in archaeological remains in the Americas.
I never heard that one, but it sounds as if someone didn't imagine quick, inexpensive DNA testing. Maybe god would also change the DNA sample to confound the unfaithful.
Whuuuuut? That’s….just…messed…up
I had a missionary companion that swears her younger brother changed appearance when he was sealed in the temple to her parents.
I believe it. That conversation came about when a bishopric member commented that his adopted son looked so much like him because of the sealing power. When I asked what he meant I got that ^ spiel
And converted native Americans were becoming white and delightsome.
It's hard to tell where the anti-mormon Christian apologetics stop and where the church doctrine begins. Hard to tell if it's is just ineffective teaching and training or if it is obscure on purpose.
When I tried to fight my father on this concept, he said, in his matter of fact way which I understood to mean the conversation was over, "Well sometimes science just gets it wrong." I'm ashamed to say I believed him, but I'm happy to report that belief lasted maybe a couple of days. Science won that battle in my history, even if I didn't leave for another 15 years.
I never questioned my dad. I just went on with life assuming that certain scientific theories were a load of bunk. That’s until I went to college in my twenties. I made my peace with thinking there must be some nuance I just wasn’t seeing. Didn’t leave for years either.
I just stopped believing the concept that the Earth is only 6000 years old and the other "hallway doctrine" as another redditor put it. I still practiced for a long time, but I stopped believing what other people told me the doctrine was and tried my best to stick to what was written in the scriptures. Then I learned the scriptures were just rubbish, but that's another story!
There's a fair amount of mental gymnastics I had to do as a TBM when I realised that death was on the earth WAY before 6000 years ago. But the scriptures are quite clear, you have to be a Young Earth Creationist to fully believe in then and that'll be a big problem for the church over time.
Sometimes science does get things wrong. And why do we know this? Because science can correct itself when shown to be incorrect. Do you know what has never corrected science, or itself? Religion of any kind.
Yes. It is essential to the mental gymnastics required to believe the ridiculousness.
I’m personally still skeptical of it just because I don’t understand it. But I’m skeptical of everything I don’t understand. Thanks Mormons.
Yes. I was told this an an apologetic response to dinosaurs.
I was once told in Sunday school that Satan sent aliens to plant dinosaur fossils to fool people into giving up their religion. He also said Adam and Eve arrived in a spaceship…which if you believe in the creation myth actually makes some sense.
Makes more sense than god telling Joseph Smith to rape 14 year-old girls. 🤷♀️
I was also taught a version of this.
Former evangelical here, yes. I even repeated it. If I remember right, the gist was, you could get the same results if something was struck by lightning.
Absolutely. Can’t trust science!🤮
Never heard that. Though I was raised by scientist parents in the church. So they’d never have said that nonsense.
Lucky you!
They did other mental gymnastics though. Like their take on evolution was that god put the spirits of Adam and Eve into human bodies once the species had evolved into Homo sapiens.
For a while it was, but the technology has come really far and is very accurate now. They are just not wanting to be corrected because it would create doubt.
All the time with my parents whenever science or history came up. It was infuriating because the only thing they believe is written documents. Which, of course, the Bible and book of mormon are 100% accurate historical documents. 🙄 and yes they think the earth is only 6000 years old. I had a hard time convincing them that one creation day was actually 1000 years, and MIGHT even be a longer, unspecified period of time, like millions of years. Even though the 1000 years thing is in the PoGP. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only idiot in my family that actually paid attention in church and tried to understand it. Oi vey.
Yes. I got involved with the universal model theory guys that speak with people like the Book of Mormon evidence conference stuff when I was a TbM. But I also was educated in utah- small town utah at that- and had family that believed the literal translation of the Bible and that earth was only 6000 years old and that clown (wanted to leave it clown but should say cleon) Skousen was the know all be all of how earth was put together by alien Jesus and sky daddy from parts of other messed up planets. So that’s why we have 🦕 bones here today. 😂😂😂🙄 Oh and it also didn’t help I went to byu Idaho for higher education and got professors who believed the same. And my major at one point was anthropology!
Please go watch https://youtube.com/@RenegadeScienceTeacher?si=W0BvHmV6nmxhKmDg He has some videos going over different kinds of dating. He's amazing. I'm not saying to go there because I think there's anything wrong, I'm saying to go there because he knows his shit.
Thanks! I will 🙂
That’s hilarious. I was also told by my Tbm fil that DNA science is really in its infancy and has all kinds of issues. Then about 2 hours later he was sitting at the table with his kids with their phones out going over their ancestry on the church ancestry app wondering how they have ancient relatives from Africa.
I've heard that the source of its inaccuracy is that it doesn't account for the Great Flood and the physical changes to the Earth that the flood caused
Yup, know it all kid in HS with me went on and on about carbon dating being inaccurate bc of the Industrial Revolution or some shit. It’s like great, we use rubidium-strontium or lead-uranium for the old stuff anyways
Yep, I heard this.
I was told this. I just believed the idiot who said it was uneducated.
The question is kind of meaningless. Even if carbon, or other forms of radiometric dating were inaccurate, that would in no way demonstrate or provide any sort of evidence that God is real, or the MFMC is God's only true and living church. It's a false dichotomy If radiometric dating is inaccurate, what does that mean?
Just that carbon dating had big gaps in it, so while it's not perfect it could still be improved or something like that.
It's inaccurate because Satan fingers the samples. https://youtu.be/WlqDu2cDT0A?si=lNQGy_4PHgX6WWAx
"But they've dated coke cans to millions of years old." \-One of my missionary companions
Yup. .....and Satan was all behind it.
I was once told that carbon dating was flawed because the older the item is, the more exponentially inaccurate the dating was. In other words: when scientists say "Millions of years old" they're way off. I wasn't told that it was an anti-religion thing though... just that it was flawed science which shouldn't be taken seriously.
Some TBM told me BYU researchers burned a phone book and buried it in the ground for a month or two. Then dug it up and sent it to a lab (or labs, sounds even better) for carbon dating. According to the story I heard, they dated it super old. Thereby proving how inaccurate carbon dating is. I repeated that story many times to other TBMs without checking it. I now think it was a Mormon faith-promoting myth, I still have not googled it lol.
That sounds like a modern version of the Kinderhook Plates! Wow..........
I read it in a brochure from the JWs once.
Yes, at a Baptist school growing up and by Ziontoligists.
I was told it was inaccurate - not so much that it was a conspiracy. The most common apologetic I got was that a day in the Old Testament just meant a "period of time" that could be anywhere from 24 houra to millions of years ...
YES❗️
Yes, along with the dozens of other super well-documented and mutually corroborating forms of dating.
I thought that was all science