Could the Earth REALLY have been created just 6,000-10,000 years ago? HELL no! Today in busting Young Earth Creationism: Plate Tectonics!
So the continents drift around the earth on tectonic plates which themselves are moving around on the Earth's mantle. It happens very slowly, like an inch per year. According to conventional science, this has been happening for 3.4 billion years and has released mind-bending amounts of energy...very slowly over time.
But the YECs need this process to have happened over a very short time: the one year period of Noah's flood when the crust of the Earth split open and water poured out. They need to cram 3.4 billion years of released energy into just one year.
Unfortunately for the Young Earth camp, this means that the continents need to be zipping around the globe at the speed of a cars on a freeway and the energy released would literally boil the oceans and vaporize that granitic crust of the Earth....many times over. To put in some more tangible terms, the energy released would be equivalent to every square kilometer of earth being hit with a little over 10,000 H-bombs.
But it gets better. Let's start by cutting that energy in half, just to be generous. Creationists sometimes don't like to recognize all the supercontinents that have formed, only accepting Pangea and Rodinia. So we can just cut that halved energy down by another 5/7 and guess what? That's still so much energy that the Oceans would be boiled away...35 times over.[/b]
[b]Whew! That's hot!
*tap* *tap* *tap* Can you hear that, guys? It's the nails in the Young Earth coffin....
I've always seen religion as a simple answer to hard questions when humanity was nowhere near figuring out anything, so when it's the time of the Romans it's much easier to accept that some Jewish man is the son of the creator when you don't have any real way to know how the world came to be, we haven't answered all the questions but we're much closer and know loads compared to those times.
@Pikachu Because it's easy to swallow, can you imagine me telling people from 2000 years ago that they're sick because of small microscopic organisms infecting them? I'd be burned as a heretic.
It's interesting that YECs acknowledge the role of plate tectonics and have included it in their "science". The science wasn't accepted until the 1960s so it looks like YECs are slowly catching up with reality. Unfortunately, the heat death of the universe may arrive before they are fully caught up.
But to address the main point of your post, it's God's creation so he can do whatever he wants with it. If God doesn't want too much heat from fast moving continental plates, then there won't be any. It's as simple as that.
I think they're feeling the pressure to have scientific backing for their beliefs though. Hence organizations like AiG who really try to make their absurd worldview seem scientific.
@Bushranger One can put serious scholarly research into any cultures foundation mythology. One can study up on the children of Zeus or the warfare of Thor or the avatars of Ganesh or the 6-day creation in Genesis. It is real and respectable scholarship.
If, however one starts to believe this crap and take it seriously then the cheese has slipped off the cracker.
We live on a cold wet rock and no invisible sky friend is pulling the strings to reward the good and punish the evil.
@Pikachu Bishop Ussher added up his best guess at the listed genealogy given in the Bible and came up with a date of October23, 4004 BC for the earths creation
@redredred Bishop Usher wasn't the first to reach to come up with that number. There was a book called Seder Olam, and possibly more than one book by that name since it is sometimes known as Seder Olam Rabbah, possibly to separate it from an earlier and less complete work. ( I think this predates Usher by 400-600 years)
I've often wondered if Usher was aware of Seder Olam or if his calculations were really from scratch. There's definitely 6000 years accounted for there, give or take about 250. The mistake is believing that this was the actual starting point of the Earth and not just a point the bible writers chose to start their story.
