Sun and Moon Inhabitants: What Mormon Prophets Said

The Primary Source, Unflinched

What Brigham Young Actually Said — In Context

Start with the strongest version of the critics’ evidence, because it is genuinely strong: the quote is real, it is accurately cited, and it says what they say it says. In an 1870 discourse — recorded in the Journal of Discourses, volume 13, page 271 — Brigham Young was speaking about how much humanity does not know, even about the heavens it can see. He asked his congregation who could describe the inhabitants of the moon, observed that the most learned astronomers were as ignorant of that as anyone, and then extended the thought to the sun: “Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is.” He reasoned that it was not made in vain — that a creation of God would not sit empty. He offered no revelation, cited no scripture for the point, claimed no vision. The register is unmistakable on the page: it is a man musing aloud, in the idiom of “I rather think,” about a question he had just said nobody on earth could answer.

Three features of the statement matter for classifying it. First, its form: it is hedged speculation (“I rather think”), not declaration (“thus saith the Lord”) — and Brigham Young used both registers in his ministry and knew the difference. Second, its occasion: it is a single passing passage in a discourse about human ignorance and the scope of truth, not a sermon about astronomy and not a teaching he returned to, developed, or asked anyone to believe. Third, its fate: it was never canonized, never entered a manual or catechism, never became something a Latter-day Saint was taught, tested on, or asked to affirm. The Journal of Discourses itself — a commercially published, stenographically transcribed sermon series — has never been canon, a point the Church states plainly. A real quote, in other words, is not the same thing as a real doctrine, and the entire remaining question of this article is which one this was.

It is worth adding what the critics’ framing omits: in the same discourse, Brigham Young’s larger argument was that the gospel embraces all truth — that Latter-day Saints should welcome every fact science could establish. The man speculating about the sun was, in the same breath, telling his people to prize learning. He guessed with his century, as §03 will show. He did not bind his guess on anyone.

The Context Critics Skip

The Century That Believed in Moon Men

Drop the quotes into their own century, and the charge of “absurd cosmology” changes shape entirely — because the belief that other solar-system bodies were inhabited was not a religious eccentricity in the 1800s. It was close to the educated consensus, held at the very summit of the era’s science. William Herschel — discoverer of Uranus, the most celebrated astronomer alive — argued in a paper to the Royal Society that the sun was very likely inhabited: a cool, solid globe beneath a luminous atmosphere, suited to beings adapted to it. He believed the moon was inhabited too, and said the likelihood of lunar inhabitants “hardly admits of a doubt” in his private assessments. This was not fringe. The “plurality of worlds” — the doctrine that God’s creation teems with inhabited globes — was standard fare in the era’s natural theology, taught by scientists and clergy alike as the obvious inference from a wise Creator who makes nothing in vain. Note the reasoning: it is exactly the reasoning Brigham Young used in 1870. He was not defying the science of his day. He was repeating it.

The popular culture went further. Thomas Dick, a Scottish minister-astronomer whose books were enormous bestsellers in Joseph Smith’s America, calculated the solar system’s population at nearly 22 trillion — assigning about 4.2 billion to the moon alone, with tables. And in August 1835, the New York Sun ran a six-part series reporting that the astronomer John Herschel had observed a lunar civilization — bat-winged humanoids, temples, unicorns — through a great new telescope. It was a hoax, but the point is what happened next: much of the American public, and a good share of its press, believed it. Moon inhabitants were so plausible to the nineteenth-century mind that a newspaper could sell them as observed fact. That is the world in which a frontier prophet mused that the sun is probably peopled, and in which moon-inhabitant talk floated through the Latter-day Saint milieu along with everyone else’s.

None of this makes a wrong guess right. The sun is not inhabited; the moon is not peopled by Quaker-dressed farmers; and this article says so without embarrassment. What the context destroys is the specific critical framing — that these statements reveal something distinctively deluded about Mormon prophets. On this question, Brigham Young believed what Herschel believed, what Dick published, and what the New York Sun’s readers swallowed whole. The era was wrong together. The interesting question was never whether a nineteenth-century man guessed nineteenth-century science. It is whether his guess was ever the doctrine of the Church — and that question has a published test, applied in the next section.

The Baby in the Bathwater

What the Doctrine Actually Is

Strip away the era’s guesses and something remains — and it is worth stating carefully, because the doctrine underneath is one of the restoration’s boldest claims, and it has aged in precisely the opposite direction from the speculation. Latter-day Saint scripture teaches that God’s creative work is not confined to this earth: “worlds without number have I created” (Moses 1:33), and, of Christ’s creations, “the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God” (D&C 76:24). The doctrine, canonized and current, is that inhabited worlds exist — that this earth is not the lone peopled speck in creation. What was never revealed, canonized, or taught is which worlds. Scripture gives no address. Brigham Young’s 1870 musing took the true, revealed premise — God’s creations are not made in vain — and extended it to the nearest bright objects with the astronomy of his day. The premise was doctrine. The address was opinion.

Keep the two apart and the scoreboard a century and a half later is striking. The opinion is dead: the sun is a fusion furnace and the moon a vacuum, and no Latter-day Saint is asked to believe otherwise. The doctrine is thriving: astronomers have now confirmed thousands of planets beyond this solar system, and the working assumption of the field has swung decisively toward a cosmos crowded with worlds. A nineteenth-century church declaring “worlds without number,” each one God’s, was making a claim that looked extravagant then and looks prescient now. Critics who lead with the sun quote have, in effect, chosen the one part of the passage that was the man’s — and skipped the part that was the doctrine’s.

Steelmanning the Critics

The Strongest Objection

The serious critic does not actually care about astronomy, and the strong form of the objection concedes everything above: fine — the quote was hedged, the era believed it, it was never canonized. The problem is epistemic. Latter-day Saints sustain prophets precisely because a prophet’s words are supposed to carry more than one man’s judgment; “follow the prophet” is the operating instruction of the faith. If a prophet can stand at the pulpit, in general conference of the Saints, and assert a falsehood about the visible sun — and if the congregation had no way to know, in that moment, that this was opinion rather than revelation — then the category “prophetic teaching” has no reliable boundary in real time. The Doctrine Test works retrospectively: it tells you now that 1870’s musing never became doctrine. It could not have told a Saint in the Tabernacle that afternoon. And a boundary that can only be drawn after the fact, the critic concludes, means members are always betting that today’s pulpit statements will still be doctrine tomorrow — which is exactly the trust the sun quote should shake.

That is the argument at full strength, and it deserves a straight answer in three parts. First, the boundary was visible in real time — in the statement’s own form. “I rather think it is” is not how Brigham Young announced revelation, and his hearers knew the registers: hedged musing, reasoned counsel, and “thus saith the Lord” were distinct speech-acts in that pulpit, as they are in scripture itself. The Saint in the Tabernacle had the same cue the reader has today. Second, the faith never asked for the trust the critic says it did. The proposition “everything a prophet says is doctrine” is not Latter-day Saint teaching — it is the position the Church’s own standard explicitly rejects, and rejected before this controversy needed it. The critic is measuring Mormonism against an infallibility doctrine that belongs to no one; in Matthew 16 the chief apostle himself rebuked Christ over the coming Atonement and was answered “Get thee behind me, Satan” — six verses after receiving revelation from the Father — and the biblical faith survived it, because it never rested on inerrancy and canonized the correction alongside the calling. Third, the retrospective test is not a bug; it is how canon works everywhere. Doctrine in every scriptural tradition is what endures the winnowing of canonization, consensus, and time — the New Testament itself is a retrospective boundary drawn around a much larger body of early Christian speech. What honestly remains is a real but modest cost: members of a church led by living, fallible men will sometimes hear a leader’s era in his words, and must listen with discernment — which is precisely what the Church teaches them to do, by study, by the canon as the measuring rod, and by what Latter-day Saints hold as the final check: the confirmation of the Spirit. A faith that told its members to outsource all judgment would be vulnerable to this objection. This one, on its own published terms, does not.

Our Editorial Standard, Shown

The Nine-Principle Review: How This Article Was Stress-Tested

On an article about prophetic fallibility, the eighth principle — owning the facts as they are — carries the load: the sun quote is quoted, not softened.

Principles drawn from published teachings including: D. Todd Christofferson, “The Doctrine of Christ” (Apr. 2012); Neil L. Andersen, “Trial of Your Faith” (Oct. 2012); Dale G. Renlund, “Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny” (Apr. 2022); Boyd K. Packer, “The Pattern of Our Parentage” (Oct. 1984); Russell M. Nelson, “Hear Him” (Apr. 2020) — all available at churchofjesuschrist.org. The same nine-point review is applied to every doctrine article we publish.

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