Dinosaurs? Did They Go On Noah's Ark Too? Earth is How Old?

[_Moniker]

Moni,

It is LDS teaching that prior to the Fall of Adam, there was no death in the world. There was no death because there was no blood. Blood being the corruptable element. Without blood there was also no procreation, so there were no children until after the Fall.

I think 6,000 years is a general number. You provided a link a short time ago to the oldest known city with a Temple which dated back about 5,000 years ago and which featured three tribal families spreading out from this central hub (Shem, Ham, And Japheth?)

To say that the dinosaurs were all killed in the Flood would not be too great a stretch I don't think. I heard someone state once that we notice that the corpses are all found buried up in mud like they had been washed downstream and buried as opposed to their bodies being eaten away by insects and other critters.

My only stance is that there was no death in the world prior to the Fall. You can timeline any way you want from Adam till now. And Christ himself testified to the Flood of Noah.

Gaz

So you think the dinosaurs died during the flood? That dinosaurs were present in the garden of eden?

[_Jersey Girl]

Very interesting thought: Noah's Ark and dinos... Just imagine, "...two..." of them?? Such questions, to our educated societies, unless concluded as you and Huck articulated, will surely close the lid on Christian sects, such as Mormonism, that continue in their ignorance to teach biblical literalism, as I see things. The thread re Spong, and Evolving Christianity confirm your thinking as well. Warm regards, Roger

Maybe they were dino eggs, Roger. :-)

In any case, there can be no such thing as Biblical literalism. Not for the entire Bible at least. That's really impossible.

[_Moniker]

Reposting this as a mod split it off as they thought it was a derailment.

Repost!

bcspace wrote:
Eeya! Yama zeep maka-keega pooka.



Yama-gonta!

[_huckelberry]

Gazalem observes that Jesus testified of Noah flood.

Actually Jesus made an analogy to the story of the flood. It is possible he did that simply because the story is a picture which worked for the analagy he wanted. He may have thought the story actually happened. He did not say, I testify Noah was a real peson and you all better believe it. I do not think there is reason to be sure what he thought about that. I perhaps more importantly do not think he had any special knowlege about whether or not it happened or not.

However Gaz has listed several reasons LDS would incline to believe in a literal real flood. It gets rid of dinosaurs if you close off the natural explaination that they lived long long long before Adam.. I know LDS who do not believe this no death before Adam. They are influenced by scientific observation and, I suspect, view the little doctrine of no death befor Adam as not important.

Myself being nonLDS Christian I see no reason to believe that animals did not live and die before humans. I think the blood connection to death and procreation to be very strange ideas. I can think of no reason to believe them.

[_Chap]

To say that the dinosaurs were all killed in the Flood would not be too great a stretch I don't think. I heard someone state once that we notice that the corpses are all found buried up in mud like they had been washed downstream and buried as opposed to their bodies being eaten away by insects and other critters.

What on earth do you mean by "the dinosaurs"? Is that just your word for 'ancient life forms no longer extant"?

Look - as you go into deeper and older rock strata, you find some levels in which there are, indeed, dinosaurs in the technical sense of the word. They are there in layers that geologists believe span 160 million years, from the late Triassic period (about 230 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous period.

But deeper than that there are other life forms, some ancestral to dinosaurs and others unrelated to them, and eventually levels are reached in which there are no no land animals at all, and anything that moves lives in the sea .... and even those levels have a sequence of life-forms going back to a time when there were no vertebrates at all.

Do you think that the flood carefully arranged animals in layers like that, so as to give the illusion that millions upon millions of years of evolution had taken place?

[_CaliforniaKid]

D&C 77:7 could be interpreted to mean that the earth will have a lifespan of 7,000 years:

7 Q. What are we to understand by the seven aseals with which it was sealed?
A. We are to understand that the first seal contains the things of the bfirst thousand years, and the csecond also of the second thousand years, and so on until the seventh.


KA

Thanks, KA. That's the one I was thinking of. I recently read James R. Clark's The Story of the Pearl of Great Price, in which Dr. Clark went on quite a tirade about "liberal" scholars who think the world is older than 6,000 years and who argue for evolutionary theories of language, culture, and especially religion. In Dr. Clark's opinion, such evolutionary models are fundamentally at odds with Mormonism. After all, Mormonism holds that Babel was a real event (thus languages diversified miraculously, not by evolution) and the gospel has been essentially the same throughout all of history (thus invalidating the notion that it has developed or evolved over time). I can certainly understand the appeal of such a static conception of the universe, but it obviously stands entirely outside the pale of reality. I put more stock in the reality of ideas than in their appeal, but am not surprised that others have different priorities.

[_Thama]

D&C 77:7 could be interpreted to mean that the earth will have a lifespan of 7,000 years:

7 Q. What are we to understand by the seven aseals with which it was sealed?
A. We are to understand that the first seal contains the things of the bfirst thousand years, and the csecond also of the second thousand years, and so on until the seventh.


KA

While you really have to stretch and calculate from the Bible to get the 7000 year Earth out of it, not so with the D&C, as KA just showed.

And yet, the Mormons I know are much less likely to believe in a 7000 year Earth than members of other conservative, Biblical literalist churches that I've known.

When I was a believer, I just kind of ignored that scripture. I really didn't know how to deal with it. I wonder how other educated members feel about it (and by educated, I mean educated enough to realize just how absurd Young-Earth Creationism really is).

[_Gazelam]

Moni,

So you think the dinosaurs died during the flood? That dinosaurs were present in the garden of eden?

I think that there was no death in the world prior to the Fall of Adam. We know that dinosaurs existed, and that there is no record of them after the flood. Draw whatever conclusions you would like from that.

[_harmony]

Moni,

So you think the dinosaurs died during the flood? That dinosaurs were present in the garden of eden?

I think that there was no death in the world prior to the Fall of Adam. We know that dinosaurs existed, and that there is no record of them after the flood. Draw whatever conclusions you would like from that.

Gaz, there's no "record" of the flood. There are simply several myths, none of which are validated by the geological evidence.

[_Gazelam]

Chap,

Im no geologist. Who knows how things got stirred up during the flood. Some say that during the flood the continents were seperated from a Pangea. That would be fairly catastrophic I would say.

Also I don't fully understand what all was involved in the creation and organization of the earth. We know it was created in stages and layers, but beyond that theres alot of gray areas.

What we do know is that the Fall brought death into the world for the first time, and we can operate and view other things from that solid ground.

Gaz