WTS explanation of how old the earth is (page 2)

Finally-Free

according to the Reasoning book and a recent Watchtower magazine, days of billions of years.

Ok, here is evidence that I never read my reasoning book™. I never heard that one.

W

Reasoning From The Scriptures p. 88
Creation
Was all physical creation accomplished in just six days sometime within the past 6,000 to 10,000 years?
The facts disagree with such a conclusion: (1)Light from the Andromeda nebula can be seen on a clear night in the northern hemisphere. It takes about 2,000,000 years for that light to reach the earth, indicating that the universe must be at least millions of years old. (2)End products of radioactive decay in rocks in the earth testify that some rock formations have been undisturbed for billions of years.

lowden

The WTS don't deny that the earth could be billions of years old because they have to bow to the fact that earth as a rock in space has been dated at 4 to 4 1/2 BILLION years old. The creative days of Genesis are dealing with the creation of earths matter or material i.e. the stuff 'on it'. See the Insight Book if you still have it (one of the only WTS books i still own)

Peace

Lowden

garybuss

The Watchtower August 15, 2005 page 27 par. 15 A Law of Love in Hearts 15 Love of God moves us to imitate his qualities. When we love a person, we admire his qualities and seek to be like him. Consider the relationship between Jehovah and Jesus. They were together in heaven for perhaps billions of years.

Leolaia

***The New Creation , Volume VI of Studies in the Scriptures, 1904, p. 19***

We believe our readers will agree that although the length of these epoch-days is not indicated, we will be justified in assuming that they were uniform periods, because of their close identity as members of the one creative week. Hence, if we can gain reasonable proof of the length of one of these days, we will be fully justified in assuming that the others were of the same duration. We do, then, find satisfactory evidence that one of these creative "days" was a period of seven thousand years and, hence, that the entire creative week would be 7,000 x 7 equals 49,000 years. And although this period is infinitesimal when compared with some geological guesses, it is, we believe, quite reasonably ample for the work represented as being accomplished therein—the ordering and filling of the earth, which already "was" in existence, but "without form [order], and void [empty]."

From the 15 October 1910 Watch Tower:

Thus, it looks like until the 1980s, the usual WTS teaching since 1904 was that each creative day was 7,000 years in length. I have not yet heard of 1,000 years being used to characterize the creative days. Instead, the 7th day is instead split into 7 shorter periods of 1,000 years each, the last being the "sabbath" or Millennium of Christ.

ballistic

Any astronomers here might find this interesting...

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1996/01/text/

One peek into a small part of the sky, one giant leap back in time...

Mankind's deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe — provided courtesy of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope — was unveiled today to eager scientists at the 187th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Antonio, Texas.

The image, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days between December 18 and 28, 1995.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

Most of the galaxies are so faint (nearly 30th magnitude or about four-billion times fainter than can be seen by the human eye) they have never before been seen by even the largest telescopes. Some fraction of the galaxies in this menagerie probably date back to nearly the beginning of the universe.

"The variety of galaxies we see is amazing. In time these Hubble data could turn out to be the double helix of galaxy formation. We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than ten billion years ago, in the process of formation," said Robert Williams, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Baltimore, Maryland. "As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this. The past ten days have been an unbelievable experience."

Harry Ferguson, one of the HDF team astronomers added: "One of the great legacies of the Hubble Telescope will be these deep images of the sky showing galaxies to the faintest possible limits with the greatest possible clarity from here out to the very horizon of the universe."

The term "deep" in an astronomical sense means looking at the faintest objects in the universe. Because the most distant objects are also among the dimmest, the image is the equivalent of using a "time machine" to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.

The image data are so important (the astronomical equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one scientist quipped) they are being made available immediately to astronomers around the world to pursue research on the formation of galaxies and for probing basic questions about the structure and evolution of the universe.

Though months of detailed research and analysis lie ahead, HDF team astronomers believe they see evidence for a significant population of galaxies that existed when the universe was less than a billion years old.

The landmark research was carried out under Williams' direction, and using a significant fraction of his own director's discretionary time on the Space Telescope. He decided to conduct the Hubble Deep Field program to use Space Telescope's exquisite resolution and high sensitivity to push back the very limits of time and space.

Williams, and the ST ScI team he assembled to conduct the observations, hopes it will unlock clues to fundamental cosmological questions: Will the universe expand forever? How long ago did the first galaxies appear? How have galaxies evolved over the life history of the universe?

Essentially a narrow, deep "core sample" of sky, the HDF is analogous to a geologic core sample of the Earth's crust. Just as a terrestrial core sample is a history of events which took place as Earth's surface evolved, the HDF image contains information about the universe at many different stages in time. Unlike a geologic sample though, it is not clear what galaxies are nearby and therefore old, and what fraction are very distant and therefore existed when the universe was newborn. "It's like looking down a long tube and seeing all the galaxies along that line of sight. They're all stacked up against one another in this picture and the challenge now is to disentangle them," said Mark Dickinson of the HDF team.

ballistic

I posted this because these are not "guesses" at how old the universe is... this is an actual photograph of the outer reaches of the universe.

Shining One

Hi Gary,
The Watchtower August 15, 2005 page 27 par. 15
>A Law of Love in Hearts
15 Love of God moves us to imitate his qualities. When we love a person, we admire his qualities and seek to be like him. Consider the relationship between Jehovah and Jesus. They were together in heaven for perhaps billions of years.

What an error! Look at the last line: it betrays the author's idea that God (and heaven) is WITHIN TIME and not in eternity. Shades of the Pleiades Star Cluster. LOL Do you see how limited their idea of God is?
Rex

WTS explanation of how old the earth is

Share this