Saturday, June 8, 2019

When and How the Earth Was Formed – Part I

One of the issues theorists have with south America being the Land of Promise, is that Carbon-14 dating shows continued settlements and occupation in South America dating back long before the Tower and before the Flood, to near the time of the last Ice Age.
The wide, flat expanse of the tropical ecosystem of the Amazon Rain Forest

On that basis, the Amazon could not have been underwater until the time of the crucifixion when the “the whole face of the land was changed” (3 Nephi 8:12).
    Much of the work done in claiming that the Amazon basin was occupied is found in the research of American archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Anna C. Roosevelt, who is the great-granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and considered one of the leading American archeologists studying Paleoindians in the Amazon basin.
    She also claims that archaeological evidence from an excavation at Caverna da Pedra Pintada, an archaeological site in northern Brazil in the Amazonian Basin, human inhabitants first settled in the region at least 11,200 years ago (Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, et al., "Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas," Science, vol.272, Is.5260, April 1996, pp373–384).
    Formerly, researchers believed that Amazonian settlements arose later than those in the Andes, and were developed by migrants from the highlands. However, this has not been borne out by the cave dwellings found at Pedra Pintada. The site has cave paintings where hundreds of drops of paint and lumps of pigment have been found that date the cave's wall paintings, the results making them the earliest ones in South America and the earliest known cave paintings in the Americas. Images include a stick figure of a woman giving birth, geometric designs, and hand stencils in browns, reds, and yellows (Jessica E. Saraceni and Adriana Franco da Sá, “People of South America,” Archaeology, vol.49, No.4, July/August 1996).
Serranópolis is a municipality in the southeast Goiás state of Brazil, and is one of the most sparsely inhabited

In addition, Altair Sales Barbosa of the Catholic University of Goiás has discovered two fossilized skeletons in a cave at Serranopolis in central Brazil, tentatively dated to 11,000 years ago. The well-preserved remains of a 25- to 30-year-old man were found in a fetal position with one hand pressed against his forehead. A child's skeleton in poor condition was also recovered, along with necklaces made of human teeth and mother of pearl.
    Barbosa determined the age of the skeletons by carbon dating plant and animal remains found in the same strata; samples of the bones themselves have been sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for carbon dating. Archaeologists await Barbosa's published results. "Unless directly dated, it is still possible that these burials were deposited in a Paleoindian site at a later time," suggested Roosevelt.
    Now here we find distinct evidence of the claim of scientists that the remains and settlement in Brazil predates the Bible’s dating of the Flood by over 9,200 years, and the time of Adam by over 7,500 years. Obviously, in this case, science and the Bible do not support one another. More accurately, here we see how scientific findings do not support the carbon-14 dating evidence. Just as obviously, one or the other is inaccurate.
    Of course, scientists who have been forcefully schooled in a 4.55-billion-year-old Earth, clearly will claim that the Bible is wrong. Also of course, while they claim the Bible cannot be proven and is only a believability issue, they do not realize that their claim to factual knowledge is what they have been taught, which history is but a series of beliefs, assumptions, and theories masquerading as facts.
    According to Richard Harter (Changing Views of the History of the Earth, 1998), there was a time (1600 AD) when the Earth was believed to be 6000 years old, by the 1700s, it had become 75,000 years old; in the 1800s the age was believed to be somewhere between 20 (Kelvin) to 55 million (Wolcott) years, and by 1899, it was 90-100 million years old (Joly). By 1911, Arthur Holmes claimed a dating from 340 million (Carboniferous sample) to 1640 million (Precambrian sample) years old. By 1920, the lower figure had grown to 570 million years; but in 1921, that age was upped to 3.4 billion years old; then 3 to 4 billion, and 4.6 billion by 1929, according to Henry Russell. In 1941, those earlier estimates were changed to only 3.2  billion years by E. Gerling; then to 3.3 billion in 1946 by Arthur Holmes; then in 1953, F.G. Houtermans computed an age at 4.5 ± 0.3 billion years old; and in 1956, the age was thought to be 4.55 ± 0.07 billion years; and in 1998, the figure was adjusted to 4.55 ± 0.02 billion years, which is where it has remained since; however, Harter also claims that the current figure “is almost certain to encompass future changes as well.”
    Whether this will be changed at some point in the future cannot be said, nor can it, based on experience, be claimed that this last figure is the final figure that will be proposed. Science, after all, has never had the last word on almost any matter.
    While science continually changes as additional and more accurate information is obtained, discovered, and improved, none of this is meant to ridicule science or its efforts. Many great and important knowledge has come through the sciences. All that is being suggested here is that at any period in history, the then current knowledge was altered as time passed and more knowledge was achieved.
    Consider as an example, regarding the Age of the Earth—if science was not governed by pre-determined, mostly agnostic to atheist people, other avenues to search might be taken—one such example is the concept that the Earth was not created ex nihilo, meaning “out of nothing,” but was organized by a Supreme Being ex materia, meaning “out of existing, eternal matter.”
Origin of worlds ex materia, that is, organization from unorganized matter (often called chaos)

In Ancient Middle East religions, such as Judaism, as well as Ancient Near Eastern mythology, it was envisioned that the creation took place ex materia, created by God, or the gods, out of already-existing eternal or primeval matter, known as chaos, which was then seen as a complete disorder and confusion. As an example, an early 50 AD conflation of Greek philosophy with the narratives in the Hebrew Bible came from Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, writing in the context of Hellenistic Judaism. A Jewish philosopher trying to develop speculative and philosophical justification for Judaism in terms of Greek philosophy, he equated the Hebrew creator-deity Yahweh with Aristotle’s primum movens (First Cause), in an attempt to prove that the Jews had held monotheistic views even before the Greeks. However, this was still within the context of creation from pre-existing materials, that is, "moving" or "changing" a material substratum.
    Should science ever come to the conclusion that study on the creation of the Earth affirms God's purpose and role, while recognizing creation as organization of preexisting materials, and not created from nothing, such as a “big bang,” a future understanding of the Earth’s age would be drastically curtailed. However, it is extremely doubtful that science would ever consider such an intellectual pursuit, let alone base any credibility on what evidence exists to support such a matter.
    Despite the fact that there are Flood legends in almost every country of the world, all dating to antiquity or pre-history, and almost all having common ingredients in each, by 1836, the idea of a Noachian flood as a source of major geological change was abandoned by scientists in favor of postulated numerous antediluvian catastrophes.
(See the next post, “How the Earth Was Formed and When – Part II,” for more information on the rejection of the Biblical development of the earth and the Flood, and also regarding the Time Clock and its incorrect setting by which almost all archaeology is today dated)

10 comments:

  1. In the book of Moses creation account, in Moses 3:5 it says:

    And EVERY plant of the field BEFORE it was in the earth, and EVERY herb of the field BEFORE it grew. For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, SPIRITUALLY, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth. For I, the Lord God, had not caused it to rain upon the face of the earth. And I, the Lord God, had created ALL the children of men; and not yet a man to till the ground; FOR IN HEAVEN CREATED I THEM; and there was not yet flesh upon the earth, neither in the water, neither in the air;


    This verse is much clearer than Genesis 2:5 which it parallels. It brings to light a truth not understood before the latter day restoration: that all living things were created as spirits before they were created physically on this earth. D&C 29:31-32 also affirms this:

    "For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal—
    First spiritual, secondly temporal, which is the beginning of my work; and again, first temporal, and secondly spiritual, which is the last of my work--"


    So the creation of ALL mankind, male and female in Moses 2:27 (Genesis 1:27) was the spiritual creation. But the creation of Adam in Moses 3:7 --breathing the breath of life (his spirit) into him-- was the beginning of giving all the spirits created in Moses 2 (Genesis 1) physical bodies.


    Moses 3:5 also makes it clear that the creation account of Moses 2 (Genesis 1) is an account of God creating all spirits IN HEAVEN. It is NOT an account of the creation of our physical earth.


    Thus, we do not know the age of our earth based on Moses 2 (Genesis 1). We only know that ALL the spirits that were prepared to come to our earth were created in six heavenly days -- 6000 of our years, and then God rested one heavenly day before bringing those spirits to this physical earth.


    No revelation has been given yet indicating the age of our physical earth.



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  2. George Washington. The Christian scientists at ICR.org did a study 15 years ago on the leakage rate of Helium from Zircon crystals in so-called 1.5 billion year old granite. They found the age of the earth to be approximately 7,000 years old.

    You are right though we don't know completely what the age of the earth is, but we do know it is young and not billions of years old.

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    1. "Christian scientists" usually want to prove that the earth was created out of nothing 7000 years ago. I do not trust them any more than I trust the mainline scientists who want to prove that all life came about by gradual evolution without a Creator.

      Since the elements are eternal, there is no reason rocks could not be billions of years old.

      "And worlds without number have I created; ... But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you." Moses 1:33-35

      This indicates to me that the Creation accounts in Genesis and Moses and Abraham are just of our earth, and NOT of any other planet or moon or sun etc.

      When Adam and Eve were told to "replenish" the earth it may be that what happened in Genesis 1 and 2 had happened before on this very earth, and eventually that set of spirits were all given bodies and were resurrected, and now another set under Adam was to come and replenish the earth.

      I admit that is speculation, but since the scriptures do not give the age of our physical earth, it is a possibility.



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    2. The moon, sun and stars mentioned in Moses 2:16 (Genesis 1:16) cannot be the moon, sun and stars in our present physical earth, but were part of the spiritual creation in Heaven.

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  3. Thankfully, there are wonderful, genius scientists out there who realize that a lot of what has become "settled" or "consensus" science is merely the dogmatic attachment to incorrect theories.

    Example:
    https://youtu.be/FjdSbhOeg_s

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  4. I believe the earth is as old as our pre-existence at least from the beginning of our second estate. That is when God made man in his likeness and image both male and female and commanded them to multiply and the finished all the hosts thereof. This was Adam and Eve entering into their Eternal Life or the continuation of the Seeds both In and Out of the world. Notice that the man and woman have to be assumed to be married. They were never given or assigned to each other from the beginning, they were told to multiply. How long would it take to conceive and bring forth the billions who are assigned to this world? AND the dinosaurs epics were huge entertainment for all those billions wouldn't ya think? In creating the Garden we can assume the world was made perfect for human life.

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  5. Nearly all people of the LDS heritage miss the fact that the first creation was the organization of intelligence, when God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, gave INDEPENDENCE to light and truth by appointing spheres of existence to all things. This is where God is Father of all things by the word of his power. D&C 93. God is the Father of Lights. A ball of independent light is exactly what we were and all intelligent life began as. And this 'ball of light' our primal independent existence, is what the Devil and his angels still are, as they would not enter into the Second Estate. And there is a compelling reason why devil minded spirits WOULD refuse the second estate. Might get back to that now or later. The Second Estate began when all those chosen to continue were appointed a world that God took of 'these' elements to create a world for the chosen to dwell upon. Abraham 3:24. Those who refused (Satan and the one third) were therefore NOT chosen and remained without being added upon. The world made was given to the man and woman who were commanded to multiply. This was the creation of spirit bodies. Which is what glorified and exalted celestial couples CAN multiply. When God formed man out of the dust of the earth and breathed life into it, that was the glorified and exalted Father Adam being tethered to the physical earth, so that he could not simply go about the universe in the power of his exaltation and celestial state. That was not an easy assimilation, so after Adam processed the shackles of a physical existence,some of those assimilated elements were take from his side and given to Eve. A genteel sort of help a man would do for his woman. What also gets missed is that Adam and Eve have the pleasure of forgetting all. Similar to how God becoming man also forgets all. Imagine God taking a break from all he knows, only to prove himself God again and return to where he was before. John 6:62. That is adding glory upon glory. Hope that helps.

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    1. I always thought the scriptures say that God did give the uncreated intelligences that became the devil and his angels spirit bodies. But they rebelled as spirits and did not qualify for a physical body. Those spirits were cast to this earth and tempt us, trying to take over our bodies.

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  6. The Bible clearly shows the age of the earth since the fall or since death began. It does so by giving how long Adam and his descendants lived. It has been around 6,000 years since the fall.
    No other humans lived until after the fall. The animals were created and lived in the garden of Eden but did not reproduce or die until after the fall.
    Dinosaurs coexisted with humans during the early Old Testament times and became extinct at the time of the flood.

    God gave us all these truths through his prophets in the Old Testament. They don’t need to be a mystery.

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  7. “Nephi’s statement is that he did not work the timbers after the manner of men” and “neither did I build the ship after the manner of men; but I did build it after the manner which the lord had shown unto me” (1 Nephi 18:2-3). This suggests two things: 1) the manner in which the main frame (timbers), including the keel, hull, deck and other such areas were laid down and built; and 2) the appearance and function of the ship was different.
    In addition, in 1828 the word “timber” related to “Standing trees which are suitable for the uses above mentioned, as a forest contains excellent timber; or to the beams, rafters, scantling, boards, planks, etc. hewed or sawed from such trees,” and “In ships, a timber is a rib or curving piece of wood, branching outward from the keel in a vertical direction. One timber is composed of several pieces united in one frame.” Thus, the manner in which shipwrights of Nephi’s day constructed a ship or boat was not the method of construction Nephi used.
    What exactly was the difference is not known; however, it would have had to be far stronger than coastal boats of the day to have withstood four days of constant pounding during the storm that threatened to capsize the ship when Nephi was tied up and the Liahona stopped working. Thus, it would be assumed that the design, whatever it was, would be seaworthy in the deep ocean, which by convention, even today, requires a deep keel to keep the ship upright in both bad weather and in the use of sail(s).
    Such a design, from all that we have been able to learn would not have succeeded in going from the deep sea into small rivers and inland shallow waterways.
    As for not being built after the manner of men in Nephi’s day, particularly within the sphere in which he lived, there were no “deep sea” vessels built. The boats they had were dhows, a simple fishing vessel, from one-man size to ones that held a dozen men. These were shallow-draft coastal fishing boats not capable of enduring the pounding of deep ocean sailing. The deep-sea vessels used for comparison were those built nearly a thousand years after Lehi’s time.

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