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....
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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.
