How old is the Earth, according to Latter-day Saint scripture?

People ask this expecting a number. Scripture does not give one, and neither does the Church. That sounds like an evasion until you look at what the texts do say, at which point the absence starts to look deliberate.

The question behind the question

"How old is the Earth" is usually shorthand for something narrower. Most of the time it means: does my faith require me to reject what geology teaches?

It is worth answering that plainly before going near the verses. For Latter-day Saints, the answer is no. There is no revealed age of the Earth, no canonised creation chronology, and no First Presidency statement fixing a figure. Church-owned universities teach conventional geology and have done so for a century.

That leaves the more interesting question, which is what the scriptures are actually doing when they describe the Creation.

What a "day" is in Genesis

Genesis 1 divides the Creation into six days and a seventh of rest. The Hebrew word is yom, and in Hebrew, as in English, it stretches. It can mean the daylight hours, or a twenty-four hour period, or a stretch of time with no fixed length at all — the sense carried by an English phrase like "in my grandfather's day".

The first three days of Genesis 1 pass before the sun is set in the heavens on the fourth. Whatever those first days were measured against, it was not sunrise. That is a difficulty in the text itself, not one imported by geologists, and readers noticed it long before anyone had dated a rock.

Alongside it sits a habit of speech that runs through the whole of scripture. "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day," Peter writes, echoing the ninetieth Psalm. Scripture is not shy about saying that God's clock and ours are different instruments.

Abraham uses a different word

The book of Abraham retells the Creation, and the change of vocabulary is easy to miss.

Where Genesis says the evening and the morning were the first day, Abraham 4 says the Gods called the light Day, and then, at the close of each stage, that this was the first time, the second time, and so on. The account keeps the sequence of Genesis and drops the word that implies a length.

The chapter before it goes further. Abraham 3 describes reckonings of time that differ from one another according to where the observer stands, and gives a set of measurements belonging to Kolob in which one revolution is a thousand years by our counting. The point of the passage is not astronomy. It is that duration is relative to the one measuring it — and that God's reckoning is not ours.

A modern scripture that wanted to fix the age of the Earth had every opportunity here. It does the opposite. It loosens the units.

The seven thousand years of D&C 77

This is the passage most often quoted as a young-earth proof text, and it is the one most often quoted out of its setting.

Doctrine and Covenants 77 is a set of short answers to questions about the book of Revelation. Asked what the book with seven seals represents, the answer is that it contains "the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence". Each seal, the next verse says, covers a thousand years.

Read in place, that is a statement about the span from the Fall to the end of the millennium — the earth's temporal existence, the period of mortality. It is a frame for reading Revelation's seals. It says nothing at all about how long the earth existed before Adam, and it does not claim to.

Whether the seven thousand years are exact or symbolic is itself an open question. Either way, the passage answers a different question from the one it usually gets drafted into.

What the Church has actually said

The formal statements are fewer and narrower than most people assume.

The First Presidency issued "The Origin of Man" in 1909. It teaches that Adam was the first man, that man was created in the image of God, and that human beings are the offspring of Heavenly Parents. It does not date the Creation, and it does not date the Earth.

Later statements in 1910 and 1925 touch the same ground and keep the same silence. In 1992, at the request of the Board of Trustees, Brigham Young University gathered the official statements into a single packet for students. What that packet establishes is mostly negative, and deliberately so: on the age of the Earth, and on the mechanism by which life came to be, the Church has no official position.

The decision of 1931

The reason the silence is deliberate is a specific argument that got out of hand.

Through the 1920s, B. H. Roberts, Joseph Fielding Smith and James E. Talmage disagreed publicly and sharply about the age of the earth, the fossil record, and whether death existed before the Fall. All three were men of standing. None of them convinced the others.

In April 1931 the First Presidency put a stop to it. Their instruction to the General Authorities was that the Church's mission is to preach the gospel, and that the disputed questions were not part of it. Upon the fundamental doctrines, they wrote, the Brethren were agreed; geology, biology, archaeology and anthropology, none of which has to do with the salvation of souls, were to be left to scientific research.

Later that year Talmage delivered "The Earth and Man" in the Tabernacle, plainly accepting the vast ages of geology and the reality of pre-Adamic life, and the Church published it as a pamphlet. Joseph Fielding Smith continued to argue the opposite in his own books, and those books remained his own. Neither view was ever made binding.

That ruling has held for nearly a century. It is why a Latter-day Saint palaeontologist and a Latter-day Saint young-earth creationist can sit in the same ward and both be in good standing.

What a timeline can honestly show

A timeline has to start somewhere, and any starting point is a choice that ought to be declared.

The earliest entries on this site follow the conventional dates used in Latter-day Saint study materials, so the line matches the manuals and lesson books readers already have. Those entries are marked as traditional, because that is what they are: a scholarly convention with a long history, not a measurement and not a revelation.

What the timeline does not do is turn a convention into a claim. The line begins where the record begins. It does not pretend to know when the Earth did.