Has anyone attended a missionary discussion lately?

[bluegoose]

The past couple of weeks I have gone to gospel principles class, as an acquaintance of mine is investigating the church, along with his less-active wife. He's a great guy, and appears to be very sincere in his desire to find some answers, so for the most part the missionary discussions (given during gospel principles class due to scheduling conflicts) have been fairly enlightening.

Until, of course he asks a question to the elders outside of what they had planned to teach him. Yesterday the idea of the Creation came up, more specifically the 6 creative periods. This new elder starts spouting off on this anti-science tirade in similar fashion to Jos Fielding Smith material from Doctrines of Salvation. One of the better statements he made sounded something like this : "New studies have recently come forth disproving previous methods of dating earthen materials, thus proving beyond a doubt that the earth is, in fact, not billions of years old and is actually only about 6,000 years old as we learn in the scriptures".

I've observed similar digressions in other missionary discussions, even with different elders. For anyone else who has observed or taught using this new approach, are my experiences a product of the new, less-structured system of teaching or just isolated episodes?