Moses Chapter 6

[strappinglad]

Numerology at its finest. There is a problem also with demographics. Starting with 2 people and assuming a population growth rate similar to the world today of around 1.013 % , yields a population of about 2 billion people in 1600 years. A 3% rate gives a population of 7 X 10 to the 20th power. The first rate  seems reasonable. The second rate is , well, ridiculous, no room to breathe .

If Adam and Eve way back then were about the same as now , inbreeding would have wrecked the population .

[thesometimesaint]

Time frames, my friend. Even BYU has a well respected paleontology museum with the scientifically accurate dates. 

Dinosaurs and massively big insects were not contemporaries. Nor were they contemporaries of human's.  Noah nor Jesus rode around on a dinosaur, or massive flying insect.

Depends on the time frames we're talking about. Water vapor, CO2, and free Oxygen levels have varied, but not hugely, over the last nearly one billion years.

SEE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

[clarkgoble]

6 hours ago, snowflake said:

How does the LDS church (and it's members) understand the long life spans and genealogies described in the Book of Moses? Are they to be taken as accurate and literal?  

While individuals have certainly looked at the timelines, and the old Lectures on Faith took them at face value, I don't think the Church formally has said anything on the topic. Most manual assume a more straightforward take of don't doubt unless you have good reasons. But people by and large are able to interpret the life spans as they want.

Personally I just distrust the Old Testament since we don't have the original sources, just bits edited together after the exile from unknown sources. Most scholars, following the Documentary Hypothesis see this as much political as anything. The Book of Mormon likewise warns us about the texts. 

The Book of Moses we still have to be somewhat careful with. There were some changes given by inspiration but it's almost certainly not restoring an original text. Thus if the lineages were left alone that doesn't imply they were correct. Just that God didn't really need them revised.

[Glenn101]

5 hours ago, snowflake said:

So are you going with Adam literally lived 930 years before he died?

Actually I do, and will continue to do so unless further revelation proves that belief to not be tenable.

Glenn

[thesometimesaint]

I'll believe it when revelation reveals the four corners on the globe.

[snowflake]

54 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

Time frames, my friend. Even BYU has a well respected paleontology museum with the scientifically accurate dates. 

Dinosaurs and massively big insects were not contemporaries. Nor were they contemporaries of human's.  Noah nor Jesus rode around on a dinosaur, or massive flying insect.

Depends on the time frames we're talking about. Water vapor, CO2, and free Oxygen levels have varied, but not hugely, over the last nearly one billion years.

SEE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

Carbon 14 has been found in many dinosaur bones putting them in the time frame of humans.

 http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html

[bluebell]

11 minutes ago, snowflake said:

Carbon 14 has been found in many dinosaur bones putting them in the time frame of humans.

 http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html

But those studies still place those dinosaurs as being 22,000 to 39,000 years old. That doesn't work with a literal biblical text.

[Button Gwinnett]

6 hours ago, snowflake said:

11 And the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat many sons and daughters;

12 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

13 Seth lived one hundred and five years, and begat Enos, and prophesied in all his days, and taught his son Enos in the ways of God; wherefore Enos prophesied also.

14 And Seth lived, after he begat Enos, eight hundred and seven years, and begat many sons and daughters.

15 And the children of men were numerous upon all the face of the land. And in those days Satan had great dominion among men, and raged in their hearts; and from thenceforth came wars and bloodshed; and a man’s hand was against his own brother, in administering death, because of secret works, seeking for power.

16 All the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.

 

How does the LDS church (and it's members) understand the long life spans and genealogies described in the Book of Moses? Are they to be taken as accurate and literal?  

While some may, I don't.  I can speak only for myself and not the church at large.

[cinepro]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

If it were so cut and dried, cinepro, it would have been a simple matter to say so in the 1979 LDS Bible Dictionary, which it did not.  Instead it threw cold water on the idea of those lengths of life being dependable by noting the variants in the Hebrew, Greek, and Samaritan versions. 

Where does the Bible Dictionary do this?

[Robert F. Smith]

4 minutes ago, cinepro said:

Where does the Bible Dictionary do this?

At "Chronology."

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, snowflake said:

......................................

Robert, If God created Adam out of dust, is that to be taken literally or not? 

Not at all.  Even though all of us are composed of basic elements from the Periodic Table (which could be described as "dust"), both Brigham Young and Joseph F. Smith (and First Presidency) argued that all humans, including Adam & Eve, were created by normal biological reproduction -- meaning that Adam & Eve had physical parents, even if from another planet.

[JLHPROF]

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

If God created Adam out of dust, is that to be taken literally or not? 

Brigham taught that was not literal.
I believe the Adam and Eve story to be historical, but symbolic in much of its content.

[snowflake]

36 minutes ago, bluebell said:

But those studies still place those dinosaurs as being 22,000 to 39,000 years old. That doesn't work with a literal biblical text.

Agreed, but it destroys the idea of millions of years of evolution and gives evidence of a young earth. 

[Stargazer]

5 hours ago, JLHPROF said:

I am.

Peter says that a day in the Lord's time is equivalent to 1000 years.
The penalty put upon Adam is that instead of being immortal that  "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." which is exactly what he did.
As we moved further from the immortality of Eden and our biology became more and more fallen that lifespan continued to shorten.

And then D&C 101 describes the Millennial period "30 In that day an infant shall not die until he is old; and his life shall be as the age of a tree;" indicating that lifespans will begin to lengthen again as we move nearer to the Celestialization of the earth.

But the Church as far as I know has no official position on it, and other explanations as to these ages have been speculated.

I used to take that 1 day = 1000 years literally, but I don't any longer. I take it to be quite figurative, meaning that the Lord is in it for the long haul, not taking things day to day like we mortals do.

And then you get to that Genesis thing, where the creation takes 6 days. Which is fine and all, but then God takes the Sabbath and rests. This might account for Adam and Eve going off script, as it were, and chowing down on the fruit they weren't supposed to eat -- all because the Lord was taking the Sabbath and didn't notice what they were doing!  Then it turns out that the creation actually only took a day (Gen 2:4). Except that after "male and female created he them", then suddenly there's Adam, but not Eve, and the Lord has to take a rib to make Eve. But wait! wasn't she there already?

That's why I take "day" in these cases to mean "a non-specific period of time".

So, did Methusaleh actually live all those years? I think not.  But if others want to believe that, I have no problem with it. My salvation does not depend upon the veracity of those long lifespans. It depends upon the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

[JLHPROF]

12 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

I used to take that 1 day = 1000 years literally, but I don't any longer. I take it to be quite figurative, meaning that the Lord is in it for the long haul, not taking things day to day like we mortals do.

And then you get to that Genesis thing, where the creation takes 6 days. Which is fine and all, but then God takes the Sabbath and rests. This might account for Adam and Eve going off script, as it were, and chowing down on the fruit they weren't supposed to eat -- all because the Lord was taking the Sabbath and didn't notice what they were doing!  Then it turns out that the creation actually only took a day (Gen 2:4). Except that after "male and female created he them", then suddenly there's Adam, but not Eve, and the Lord has to take a rib to make Eve. But wait! wasn't she there already?

That's why I take "day" in these cases to mean "a non-specific period of time".

So, did Methusaleh actually live all those years? I think not.  But if others want to believe that, I have no problem with it. My salvation does not depend upon the veracity of those long lifespans. It depends upon the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's surprising for an astronomer.
How long is a day on Jupiter?  How long is a year on Jupiter?

Now, how long is a day on Kolob?  How long is a year on Kolob?
D&C 130:4 In answer to the question—Is not the reckoning of God’stime, angel’s time, prophet’s time, and man’s time, according to the planet on which they reside?

Why can one day on Kolob (one rotation) not equal 1000 years (1000 solar orbits) on earth?
Scientifically speaking, there is no need for the 1 day = 1000 years to be figurative.  It could literally take Kolob 1000 years in our time to complete a rotation.
Adam could easily have lived 930 years (or died in the same day) .

And then we get into cosmic years...
And then we get into what Joseph described as "an eternity"...

Edited October 23, 2017 by JLHPROF

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, snowflake said:

Agreed, but it destroys the idea of millions of years of evolution and gives evidence of a young earth. 

Not necessarily.  Other dinosaur bones have dated much older than these ones in the study.  Is there any reason to doubt the older dating but believe the younger dating?

[Stargazer]

13 minutes ago, JLHPROF said:

That's surprising for an astronomer.
How long is a day on Jupiter?  How long is a year on Jupiter?

Now, how long is a day on Kolob?  How long is a year on Kolob?
D&C 130:4 In answer to the question—Is not the reckoning of God’stime, angel’s time, prophet’s time, and man’s time, according to the planet on which they reside?

Why can one day on Kolob (one rotation) not equal 1000 years (1000 solar orbits) on earth?
Scientifically speaking, there is no need for the 1 day = 1000 years to be figurative.  It could literally take Kolob 1000 years in our time to complete a rotation.
Adam could easily have lived 930 years (or died in the same day) .

And then we get into cosmic years...
And then we get into what Joseph described as "an eternity"...

What part of that is surprising for an astronomer? Or for a computer programmer with delusions of being an astronomer?

When the scriptures speak of days, unless they speak specifically of days that can be understood to be 24 hours in length, I figure that those days are figurative.  There is sufficient evidence (presented in this very thread) that years, in connection with the lives of the antediluvian patriarchs, are also figurative.  

Kolob is not a planet. It's a star. I don't know how to understand it in terms of time measurement, especially with regard to rotation about its spin axis. For one thing, can you see the sun's rate of rotation?  Without burning your eyeballs out?  Not really, and the other thing is, the rate of rotation of any star varies with latitude. It's slowest nearest the poles, and fastest nearest the equator -- although a few have been found where this is reversed, oddly enough.  Also, a star doesn't have a day/night cycle. It's always day.  How do you measure a day on it? You don't, unless you're being figurative.  You remember the old joke about NASA sending astronauts to the sun?  They'd burn up, you'd say!  But NASA has the problem licked: they're going at night.

JLHPROF, an astronomer would look at the astronomy portrayed in Abraham and just shake his or her head in consternation. What makes a star a "governing star"?  What does that even mean, for crying out loud? What does it govern, exactly?  Considering a star whose equatorial band of gas rotates once every 1000 years -- is it the rate of revolution that makes it the "capital", as it were, of the governing stars, or something else?  The rotation rate of the sun is about 12 km/sec, which means that it rotates about once every 25 days. More massive stars tend to rotate faster.  Black holes have been observed that rotate at 98% of the speed of light. Less massive objects would seem to rotate slower, but even Proxima Centauri, a low-mass red dwarf (and the closest star to the earth), still rotates with a rotational velocity of less than 100 m/sec, once every 82 days or so, far from 1000 years.  Would Kolob have to be smaller than a red dwarf to be able to take 1000 years to rotate?  Stars smaller than red dwarfs aren't stars, anyway. They're brown dwarfs and they're too small to have a nuclear fire in their cores.  For a star to take 1000 years to rotate once would require a star of a type nobody has yet seen, in any case.

The point I'm trying to make is that Kolob is figurative, because it certainly isn't literal.  You're welcome to believe that there are stars which literally rotate at incredibly slow rates, if you want, but I don't.  If they exist, fine, but it seems unlikely. 

Ultimately, I don't know what Kolob signifies. There appears to be no lesson involved in its existence, nor of Oliblish's.  I don't think the Lord reveals things to us that are of no consequence, but whatever consequence might pertain to those stars mentioned in Abraham hasn't been made clear.  Perhaps one of these days it will be. 

 

[strappinglad]

Given that 95% of the mass of the universe is postulated to be unseen ' dark '  stuff, we obviously have no clue how that spins or orbits or whatever. Kolob could easily be a part of that stuff and govern a lot of the seen stuff.

[mfbukowski]

11 hours ago, snowflake said:

11 And the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat many sons and daughters;

12 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

13 Seth lived one hundred and five years, and begat Enos, and prophesied in all his days, and taught his son Enos in the ways of God; wherefore Enos prophesied also.

14 And Seth lived, after he begat Enos, eight hundred and seven years, and begat many sons and daughters.

15 And the children of men were numerous upon all the face of the land. And in those days Satan had great dominion among men, and raged in their hearts; and from thenceforth came wars and bloodshed; and a man’s hand was against his own brother, in administering death, because of secret works, seeking for power.

16 All the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.

 

How does the LDS church (and it's members) understand the long life spans and genealogies described in the Book of Moses? Are they to be taken as accurate and literal?  

For about the 50th time. the LDS church does not have dogmatic interpretation of the scriptures- we are to be guided by the spirit

It is not widely known that the Beatles were commenting directly on this feature of Mormon theology in one of their famous songs.  

 

Quote

You say yes, I say no
You say stop and I say go go go, oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello

I say high, you say low
You say why and I say I don't know, oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
(Hello goodbye hello goodbye) Hello hello
(Hello goodbye) I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello
(Hello goodbye hello goodbye) Hello hello
(Hello goodbye) I don't know why you say goodbye
(Hello goodbye) I say hello/goodbye

Google "Mormon Orthopraxis " if you do not believe me

But of course we have said this before and you still ask unanswerable doctrinal questions.

You will get a difference of opinion on this question and that is why.   Perhaps you will listen next time.

Oh yes- and I was joking about the Beatles.

[mfbukowski]

So we are repeating the conversation between Cardinal Bellarmine and Galileo and because of which Galileo spent the rest of his life in prison.

The Scopes trial did the same thing in the 1920's regarding evolution.

Scripture is not about time reckoning or astronomy.

It is not about science at all.

 

[Stargazer]

36 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

Given that 95% of the mass of the universe is postulated to be unseen ' dark '  stuff, we obviously have no clue how that spins or orbits or whatever. Kolob could easily be a part of that stuff and govern a lot of the seen stuff.

Actually, only 85%, but your point is well taken. We know nothing about Kolob, because the description given doesn't tell us much at all. I'm willing to accept that the astronomy in Abraham means something -- but don't try to tell me what it means, because unless you've been specially blessed with knowledge, you don't know either.  

And then there is the other issue: does dark matter form stars?  If it did, it wouldn't be dark, would it?

Edited October 24, 2017 by Stargazer

[Bobbieaware]

4 hours ago, JLHPROF said:

Brigham taught that was not literal.
I believe the Adam and Eve story to be historical, but symbolic in much of its content.

I have no problem with Preident Young’s take on the creation of the physical bodies of Adam and Eve, but the fact of the matter is that in the resurrection of the dead, as believed and taught by the Church, there are going to be multiple billions of human beings whose physical bodies have long since turned completely to dust who are going to be ‘recreated’ from the dust of the earth without any need for process of human procreation. This basic doctrine of the Church indicates that God clearly has the ability to create billions of human bodies from the dust of the earth in the precise manner President Young mocked as a fairytale.

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Bobbieaware said:

I have no problem with Preident Young’s take on the creation of the physical bodies of Adam and Eve, but the fact of the matter is that in the resurrection of the dead, as believed and taught by the Church, there are going to be multiple billions of human beings whose physical bodies have long since turned completely to dust who are going to be ‘recreated’ from the dust of the earth without any need for process of human procreation. This basic doctrine of the Church indicates that God clearly has the ability to create billions of human bodies from the dust of the earth in the precise manner President Young mocked as a fairytale.

I wouldn't worry about it either way there are multiple solutions to the problem for those who take it literally and for those who do not.

For those who do not, there IS no problem- as usual.   Only literalists have problems confusing science and religion.  Sorry- you know you are my sister though.   We get to disagree in "families" especially in the family of the gospel.

But even taking it literally, Jesus fed thousands with a few loaves and fishes.   As documented in the scriptures if you take them literally, there should be no problem multiplying matter to cover resurrected bodies  

I love President Young's take on so many things- he was definitely gifted in coming up with scriptural interpretations.   Of course I don't agree with all of them but that's the way it works with gospel siblings isn't it?  

[sunstoned]

13 hours ago, snowflake said:

11 And the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat many sons and daughters;

12 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

13 Seth lived one hundred and five years, and begat Enos, and prophesied in all his days, and taught his son Enos in the ways of God; wherefore Enos prophesied also.

14 And Seth lived, after he begat Enos, eight hundred and seven years, and begat many sons and daughters.

15 And the children of men were numerous upon all the face of the land. And in those days Satan had great dominion among men, and raged in their hearts; and from thenceforth came wars and bloodshed; and a man’s hand was against his own brother, in administering death, because of secret works, seeking for power.

16 All the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.

 

How does the LDS church (and it's members) understand the long life spans and genealogies described in the Book of Moses? Are they to be taken as accurate and literal?  

I have heard it explained that it was scribes of a bronze age nomadic culture romanticizing and giving power to their leaders and holy men by endowing them with super human powers, such as long life spans.  We even have a modern day example of this with the North Korean scribes (state news agencies) calming the Kim Jong-un is so perfect he doesn't have to go to the bathroom like the rest of us mortals do.

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Not at all.  Even though all of us are composed of basic elements from the Periodic Table (which could be described as "dust"), both Brigham Young and Joseph F. Smith (and First Presidency) argued that all humans, including Adam & Eve, were created by normal biological reproduction -- meaning that Adam & Eve had physical parents, even if from another planet.

And of course as we believe from a scientific account, the elements organized themselves after the big bang from all the elemental particles as shown here  https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1727-how-elements-are-formed

And our theology speaks of "matter unorganized" being "organized" by God.  As Carl Sagan was fond of saying "We are made of star-stuff".

All we have to do is add God as the Organizer to the science and we have Mormon theology.

Of course you know this- I am posting for others who never caught that vision!