Hi Martin,
The LDS Church doesn’t emphasize or even talk about Joseph Smith’s King Follett sermon, which he delivered in April, 1844, shortly before his martyrdom. It would have been fascinating if he had lived long enough to elaborate on it. Anyway, one of the most astounding things that JS said was to explain how God came to be God. We are the only religion that I know of that ever even asked such a question, let alone provided an answer to it. The answer–from JS– suggests that the Universe exists primarily as a machine for creating gods–at least the God of this earth. Which suggests that it may be very old indeed, but that does not affect the question of how old our earth is. The question of all dating of our earth depends on whether radio-metric dating of rocks is correct or not, because this is the way fossils are dated by modern science—the age of the rocks they are found in. The UM strongly suggests that there are flaws in radio-metric dating systems. I believe, though, that this comes out in the Age Model, which is part of Volume 2. Frank
