In this interesting discussion in the 'What Seventh-day Adventists Believe' forum, Steve9534 wrote:



I thought this forum was the more appropriate venue to spend some time looking at these issues.

Bob Ryan had also raised the 'Adam was created mature' issue in relation to the age of the earth in that thread.

To take that one first - it takes us some distance, but not all the way.

If God created the world mature, that would make sense. Not only Adam and Eve, but the trees and animals would have been created mature, as part of a functioning ecosystem. So it's true that on Sabbath morning of creation week, the world might look as though it had been there for a very long time - at least the couple of hundred years it takes for large trees to grow. There would presumably also have needed to be riverbeds and ravines, though, so perhaps it would look as though thousands of years of erosion had taken place.

This would all work, except for that pesky fossil record/geological column. There's a pretty clear sequence of fossils that goes from very simple to more complex creatures. It has been argued that that was all laid down in the Flood, but it's hard to see how it could be as well-sorted as it is by a 40-day to one year process of catastrophic flooding.

This is why it's a hard question - if God created the fossil record to look the way it does, either he was actively trying to trick us, or he made the world look mature by making it look as though life had evolved (in the same way Adam and Eve and the trees looked like they had lived).

Or, you know, maybe life actually did evolve...

Now to take the various issues Steve raised.

By way of groundwork though:

(a) I agree that not all evidence is subjective, but at the same time my consistent observation has been that people will draw different conclusions from the same evidence. I can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. In the vast majority of these discussions all of the (active - not sure about the lurkers) participants end up going away with the same beliefs and opinions they came with. We hope that we've enjoyed the process, and maybe learned a few things along the way... but realistically more often people just harden their positions.

(b) It's not my goal to turn anyone into an evolutionist, and definitely not to shake anyone's faith. I'm a science educator, and I'm interested in treating science with appropriate thought and respect. I'm also a Bible-believing Adventist and believe in treating faith and Scripture with respect. On issues of Origins I don't have a firm position... but I do find that very bad science is often brought forward in support of Young Earth Creationism, and I do tend to critique that bad science.

OK, now that's out of the way (I think the regulars here know that stuff, but Steve and Bob are new):

the rates of mineral accumulation in the sea point to a young earth age

This is a theory that has been discredited for quite a long time, since Wegener came up with his theory of plate tectonics. We now know that new rock is formed in the centre of the oceans, moves outward from there to the edges of the continental plates then dives (is subducted) under the plates, carrying its burden of sediment with it.

the rate of decay of the earths magnetic field is such that if it had occurred at a constant rate, no life could have existed here a million years ago

But we know very well that it has not occurred at a constant rate. Magnetic 'striping' of sea floor rocks show that the earth's magentic field has repeatedly 'flipped' so that south is north and vice versa. It's possible that the current observed decreases in the field mean we are moving toward another flip. But the argument is incoherent for another reason - the magnetic field is protective, not dangerous. It protects us from solar radiation. If it was stronger in the past that would be better for living things, not make life impossible.

Have you read of the rate of slowing of the earth's rotation? Again, if it is slowing at a constant rate, the earth would have been rotating too fast for life to exist as we know it millions or billions of years ago

The effect is tiny - 0.0018 seconds per century was one estimate I found (on a creationist site). If Earth is 4.5 billion years old, as many scientists believe, and if this trend has been constant (and given that it is essentially caused by the moon, that seems plausible), the difference in the length of the day would be 81,000 seconds. The current length of a day is 86,400 seconds, so the day would have been considerably shorter. Life larger than a single cell, though, is believed to have been around for only about 1.5 billion years, so that would yield a day 27,000 seconds shorter than now at that time, or about 16.5 hours. I'm not sure how that would preclude life...

The rate and number of genetic mutations in human mitochondria point to a young age for the first man/woman

Evolutionists date the first humans at only about 100,000 years ago. That's a blink in evolutionary terms, and not enough time for any very great genetic mutations to arise.

Radioactive defects in granite rocks imply they were formed quickly, not over millions of years

Granite is a metamorphic rock, formed in volcanoes. It would make sense that it is formed quickly as granite, though the pieces of rock that make it up may be older. I'd need to see more detail on this issue to really comment.

The presence of radioactive C14 in virtually everything argues for a young earth age

Carbon-14 is consistently produced by cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere, and has a relatively stable presence in the atmosphere, with a few well-known patterns of change. Since it is constantly replenished, the claim that it should all have decayed by now is not correct.

One of the theories for the way we see the earth vs the million of years theory is the flood. Could you explain how that would be possible or impossible, from a science point of view. To have a world wide flood, everything covered, would truly be horrendous event on a planet body of any size. If you don't believe in the possibility of such an event, would you please try to explain what the world might look like in the aftermath of such an event.
Thanks!

I think the Flood has come to be a bit of a catch-all explanation used by creationists to counter evidence about the age of the earth. Things like the erosion of the Grand Canyon, which would take hundreds of thousands or millions of years to happen with the river, are explained as happening quickly in the flood. Similarly multiple layers of deposition and so on.

From just a textual position, it's not hard to understand the Bible writers seeing a very large local flood in their region as a global flood. Without modern media and without a helicopter to check the extent of the flooding, if your region floods it seems as though the whole world is flooded. The only way around this is some kind of direct word (e.g. vision or speech) from God to confirm that the whole earth is covered, or 'verbal inspiration' of the Bible. Interestingly, since the declared purpose of the flood was to wash away human iniquity, and since humans may not have spread over the entire globe in the years between Eden and the flood, a large local flood would have got the job done anyway...

Scientifically speaking there are two main issues:

1. Where did the water come from, and where did it go? Certainly adding enough water to cover all of the existing mountains on earth now would be an immense miracle, and it would have to be miraculously made to vanish after the flood.

2. There just is not the evidence over the whole world of a catastrophic flood about 4000 years ago. There would be expected to be a consistent layer of sediment at the 4000 year ago strata all over the world that would provide the evidence, and no such strata are found. Of course, creationists will (somewhat circularly) point to all the evidences for a long earth that they want to reinterpret as evidences for a flood, and say that they provide evidence for a flood.

As I've said before, I believe God's power is infinite. There is nothing God cannot do. Importing, or creating from scratch, a few trillion tons of water and then getting rid of it again - easy stuff for God. So the question is not 'can He?' but 'did He?'

Okay, lets assume there was one large land mass, all continents/plates whole. Since we are no sure of what a perfect world looks like, perhaps not even the high mtn peaks that we now have, just low to medium hill and valleys. Could not the amount of water needed to cover such still cause a massive imbalance as to have restructuring of the surface of the world? Not trying to be stupid, naive or unthinking, but these are alternatives suggested.

Is there a good source book looking at the flood story vs natural happening for the look that we have of the world today. Not looking for proof of either, just a good scientific examination. My personal view point is "I don't know based on Bible explanation, but any thing is possible outside of God creating an earth made to look ancient." I have come to the place where I do not see it as a salvation issue, for me, as it does not change how I view and understand God. Not a 'slippery slope' that some would have us believe.

I don't want to completely derail this thread into consideration of the Flood, since it is only a small part of the evidence around a young earth.

And no, CoAspen, I'm not aware of a good book that addresses the evidence for an against a global flood - I'd have to google, but it's probably better if you do that yourself since you'll be better able to judge what you'd enjoy reading.

It seems extremely improbable to me that a flood could reconfigure the continents from a single large landmass to their current configuration - or that if it did so that flood would be survivable by people in a wooden boat, since it would involve exposing magma to the waters of the flood. Water is incredibly powerful, but we would be talking about trillions of tons of rock being moved thousands of kilometres in a few days.

God could do it, of course, but did he?

Incidentally, just for fun, given that Everest is about 8800 m high above sea level we can do a rough calculation of the total amount of water required to flood the whole world deeper than the tallest mountain. Earth's radius is about 6400 km. That gives a volume for the planet of 514,718,540 million cubic metres. If we increase the radius by 8800 m we increase the volume to 516,134,989 million cubic kilometres. The difference is 1,416,449 million cubic metres, otherwise expressed is 1.4 trillion cubic metres. One cubic metre of water weighs one metric tonne, so 1.4 trillion tons of extra water would be required, on top of what is already in the world's oceans.

Indeed and this would also be true of the radioactive content of the earth's crust that causes heating. It would be fully functional.

We would also have balanced concentrations of parent and daughter product (Potassium - Argon for example). And we would have both C12 and N14 -- possibly even C14 but that is debatable.



There is the catch - how many laboratories can accurately simulate a world wide flood and then measure the effects of turbidity currents and silt deposits at all stages of land dranage?

We learned a lot of interesting things with Mt St Helens and Spirit lake. Including the nicely layered and carved "insta-canyon" in that first year complete with a small stream running down the center as the finished product.



Or we are still grasping at straws in our pursuit of nature that we call science.

For example - check out the soft tissue finds in dinosaurs -- in fact that "dino mummy" is pretty interesting for surprises about soft tissue.

What do you bet the C14 content of those soft tissues would also be "surprising"??

The doctrine was that soft tissue could not survive 60 million years and so would not be associated with dinosaurs -- yet when they accidently found the first example -- suddenly they turned up examples all over the place and the reason that it was not found before? "Nobody looked because nobody expected to find it".

in Christ,

Bob

The problem there is that YEC has never done anything to compare with the pure junk-science history of Darwinist evolutionism.

Haeckle's fraudulent exhibits supporting his "Ontogenty recapitulates phylogeny" mythology -- hypped in science text books for 50 years.

Osborn's "Ape Man" (Nebraska man) used to promote Darwinism just prior to the Scopes monkey trial.

Simpson's reproduction of Marsh's fraudulent horse series that was later admitted by atheist darwinists to have "never happened in nature".

The 50 year fraud of Piltdown man.

the 30 year fraud of the recent Neanderthal hoax.

The list goes on and on.

It is so rife that darwinists themsevles come to believe this fraudelent practice is status quo (as Haeckle tried to argue at his trial).

Atheist Darwinist Colin Patterson - Sr Paleontologist British Museum of natural history was quite correct when he observed "Stories about how one thing came from another ... stories easy enough to make up but they are not science because they can not be tested".

in Christ,

Bob