Hebrews 11:3; “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”
Mr. Smith and cohorts like Orson Pratt and his brother Parley Parker Pratt, all had fanciful imaginations didn’t they? They seem to have been cut from the same cloth as Joe Smith.
When I learned of this teaching as a child growing up in Mormonism, I often wondered why the good Lord had stuck some of his kids over on another planet and how they ‘d hear about Jesus. Thankfully, we don’t have to be a rocket scientist or theologian to figure out this isn’t true!
While reading some articles on Creation.com I came across a great piece of info you can share with your Mormon friends on this subject matter. In fact, it’d be a great article for anyone who believes there’s life on other planets.
I’ve used snippets of the article and listed them below explaining why God didn’t plant other species of His creation over on other planets. I highly encourage everyone to read the whole article when you have the chance – it’s awesome!!!
Did God create life on other planets?
Otherwise why is the universe so big?
by Gary Bates
‘The word ‘worlds’ appears in the KJV translation and some others, and some claim that it refers to other inhabitable planets. However, the word is αἰῶν (aiōn), from which we derive the word ‘eons’. Thus modern translations render the word as ‘universe’ (entire space-time continuum) because it correctly describes ‘everything that exists in time and space, visible and invisible, present and eternal’. Even if it was referring to other planets, it is an unwarranted extrapolation to presume intelligent life on them.
It should also be remembered that expressions like “the heavens and earth” (Genesis 1:1) are a figure of speech known as a merism. This occurs when two opposites or extremes are combined to represent the whole or the sum of its parts. For example, if I said “I painted the whole building from top to bottom.” One would understand this to mean everything in the whole building. Similarly, biblical Hebrew had has no word for ‘the universe’ and can at best say ‘the all’, so instead it used the merism “the heavens and the earth”. It is clear that New Testament passages like the aforementioned Romans 8:18–22 and Hebrews 11:3 are pointing back to the Genesis (“heavens and earth”) creation, and thus, everything that God made and when time as we know it began. See this further explanation.’