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ELDER, WHERE IS YOUR PLANET?
By Former LDS Elder Claude H. O’Donovan
I vividly remember that Sunday morning in Syracuse Utah. It was in the early 1960’s and I was sitting in the Syracuse second ward Elders Quorum and listening to Elder Sheldon Child teach. I was in my mid twenties; a student at Weber State College, Ogden, Utah, majoring in Political Science. I had only been an Elder about six months and was feeling quite privileged to be included with such a group of successful men and leaders of our Ward. My wife, Patsy and I had just recently been sealed and received our endowments in the Salt Lake Temple. We had a son, Claude H. the second.
Sheldon was teaching on living the proper Mormon Elder life by tithing, attending Elders Quorum meetings, doing Temple work and living the “Word of Wisdom”. Then he said something like “Can you all imagine, that by living this way, and entering the Celestial Kingdom, how amazing it will be when we each have our own planet like earth where we create spirit children and populate it with them.”
He went on to explain “Exaltation” and how we would eventually advance to the state of Godhood. I was shocked and awed with this teaching. My thoughts immediately were “Are you kidding, me a God?” But I looked for the same reaction from the Elders in the room and found them to be in agreement with Sheldon and reveling in the thought. Being one of the youngest men in the room and not an ex-missionary, I deferred to their seniority and wisdom and somewhat reluctantly swallowed this teaching.
Sheldon talked about astronomers at BYU confirming that there were literally millions of planets like earth out in the cosmos just waiting for us to populate them. In Mormon speak these planets or worlds would have to be organized or created by either the new gods or the senior gods like Christ. They teach that their Christ has created worlds without number and organized them.
Fast forward to April 2008. I, very happily have been an ex-Mormon for over twenty-eight years. I had accepted the real Jesus in January of 1980 and subsequently requested ex-communication in 1981 after reading Dr. Walter Martins “Maze of Mormonism”. Reading this book made me realize that I had been deeply involved with a very sophisticated religious cult that claimed super Christianity.
Time and scientific knowledge has been particularly hard on the LDS Church. Not a single finding in any of the scientific disciplines has verified the Book of Mormon or any other Mormon teaching. In fact science has “ganged-up” on Mormon theology. DNA studies have proven that the Native Americans do not have Jewish roots but that their ancestry is Mongolian. Not a singe Archeological finding in either North or South America can point to the validity of the Book of Mormon story.
Now even astronomy has disproved the idea that there are “millions of planets like earth” for Mormon Elders in good standing to claim as home for their spirit children.Over the last two decades with cosmological research enhanced by advancements like the Keck and Hubble Space Telescopes, science has discovered a great deal about the universe.
Many books have been written regarding what is called “The Anthropic Principle” which is the effort by astronomers to understand why, mathematically, the universe and more specifically life on earth, had to be designed rather than be the result of some haphazard cosmic accident. I reference books like “Cosmic Blueprint” by Paul Davies and “Rare Earth” by Peter Douglas. These are both secular men, wrestling with what, on their face, are unchallengeable facts, now known, about the creation of the universe that unblinkingly point to a creator.
A most interesting book is “The Creator and the Cosmos” by Hugh Ross, Ph.D. a highly regarded astrophysicist, known for his research on quasars and galaxies, as a post doctoral fellow at the highly prestigious California Institute of Technology. Hugh is a totally committed Christian and Christian apologist who has authored multiple astronomical books and lectures world-wide on creation and the cosmos.
Now, let’s get to the point of the title of this article. Every single one of the recent discoveries confirms one fact. There is and can be only one habitable planet in the universe and that is Earth. The millions of planets that Mormonism teaches is a complete fabrication. From time to time it is announced that some team of astronomers have found a planet that could sustain life. Later announcements negate this with further data that contradicts their early findings.
Hugh Ross points out in “The Creator and the Cosmos” that there are forty-nine different disciplines in physics necessary to explain the earth. In each of these there are mathematical possibility factors that confirm that the earth and our life on it is impossible.
For instance, since the publication of Stephan Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” establishing the “Big Bang Theory”, discoveries about the nature of the universe and the probability of a earth have shown that the odds are and astounding 1 X 10 to the 120th power against another habitable planet anywhere in the universe. That’s a one with 120 zeros behind it or:100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to one odds against there being even ONE other planet like earth.
Why these great odds. Since the acceptance of the “Big Bang” they have discovered that the expansion of the universe from a pinpoint to what we know today could not be at a constant speed. It had to speed up and slow down at a extremely critical times in order to form a planet with the elements we have present on earth.
Additionally there are three basic types of stars, very large young and unstable stars, midlife and still unstable stars and smaller old stars in their more stable life cycle. Our sun is one of the latter. But this is over simplification of the problem because the earth could only happen if we were near two very rare nebulae that had to inter react creating just the right menu for the earth’s makeup.
Add in the moon and the fact that the earth is far too small to have a satellite as large as the moon (all other moon like bodies known in the universe are relatively small when compared to their host planet.).
All of this points to the bottom line that there must be a lot of homeless Mormon Elders (gods) floating around in the cosmos trying desperately to find their planet to organize and populate.
So, Again I ask: Elder Where is Your Planet?
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