{"id":73,"date":"2012-07-05T21:33:34","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T03:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/?p=73"},"modified":"2021-04-02T18:08:05","modified_gmt":"2021-04-03T00:08:05","slug":"earth-was-made-by-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/2012\/07\/05\/earth-was-made-by-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth was Made by God"},"content":{"rendered":"

The formation of Earth is an important question, since it is our home.\u00a0 I feel this is an important issue and no creationist has seriously dealt with this topic to my knowledge.\u00a0 Creationists as well as Intelligent Design proponents have written often about the design of the Earth for life.\u00a0 But the real issue is what or who do we attribute Earth formation to?\u00a0 Do we thank God and give him glory for it or do we attribute its existence to natural processes?\u00a0 The Old Testament is very emphatic about God creating the Earth (see for instance Isaiah 6:3, 44:24, 45:18, & 1 Samuel 2:8<\/span>).\u00a0 It has often been argued that Earth is designed because it is the right distance from the Sun, has the materials needed for life, etc.\u00a0 These are basics and I certainly agree with this.\u00a0 But there is a need to go farther and critique the naturalistic theories of Earth formation.\u00a0 There is now a large body of research on how Earth allegedly formed by known natural physical processes.\u00a0 The theory for this has been developed based on research on our solar system and its origin, on the general theory of planet formation, and even on theories about extrasolar planets orbiting other stars.\u00a0 Ideas put forward to explain other solar systems with exoplanets have been applied to our own solar system in recent years and they are now being applied to explaining Earth.\u00a0 Planetary science is coming home.\u00a0 But creationists have not had an answer to many aspects of these theories.<\/p>\n

I began studying this topic to prepare for the International Conference on Creationism in 2013.\u00a0 But after delving into it some I became convinced I was not ready to do a paper on it yet.\u00a0 So I backed out of doing my ICC 2013 paper.\u00a0 It saddened me to do this because I had presented at the ICC for the 4 previous conferences.\u00a0 I didn’t present anything in 2013.\u00a0 I attended though.\u00a0 I wanted more time and flexibility in approaching the topic.\u00a0 I collect technical material sometimes for years before writing something, especially on major topics that are important.\u00a0 I don’t want to address something on a technical level until I feel I can adequately support what I’m saying.\u00a0 I hope that my technical papers will stand the test of time.\u00a0 Below is a short version of the story scientists are believing today when they do not believe the Biblical account of God supernaturally creating Earth in six literal days.<\/p>\n

There are some surprising things in the theories of Earth formation that scientists accept today.\u00a0 The early Earth is a place you would not recognize, according to the scenario scientists believe about how our planet formed.\u00a0 By early I mean the first few hundred million years of Earth’s existence by the accepted naturalistic or evolutionary ideas.\u00a0 Scientists would say Earth is about 4.55 Billion years old.\u00a0 You could think of it as in three stages, I would say.\u00a0 The first 10 million years after the beginning, then the next 45 million, then the next 100-200 million.\u00a0 Earth’s rapid accretion stage is the first 10 million years.\u00a0 This stage is about 10 million years (or less) because its believed that the disk of gas and dust that Earth formed from would be most conducive to forming planets and other objects during this time.\u00a0 After about 10 million years the gas and other material in the disk would dissipate and objects like planets or moons or asteroids would grow more slowly.\u00a0 Many objects drifted around the solar system for a long time, and Earth (and other planets) grew in size from impacts of small bodies.\u00a0 At the end of the 10 million years Earth was not yet full size, one estimate would say it was about 60% of its present mass.\u00a0 Also Earth was not separated into layers as it is today.\u00a0 Scientists call this differentiation, where the planet has a metal core in the center, with a mantle and crust outside that.\u00a0 A differentiated planet (or asteroid or moon) will be in neat layers with the most dense metallic material in the core, with less dense material in the mantle, and the least dense material in the crust.\u00a0 This structure in a planet may make it more stable and makes a magnetic field possible.<\/p>\n

The second stage is from 10 million to about 55 million years after the “beginning.”\u00a0 During this stage, Earth is not totally solid but much of it is melted from the frequent impacts and from great heat from radioactive decay from various elements.\u00a0 So the Earth is alleged to have been covered in what is called a magma ocean, which was a few hundred miles deep.\u00a0 The magma ocean is essentially partially molten or largely molten rock.\u00a0 Impacts from space continue to add more matter to the Earth.\u00a0 Earth’s atmosphere during this time is very different from today also.\u00a0 There are different proposed models of what the atmosphere was composed of but the main idea is that it was extremely dense.\u00a0 It is an atmosphere much thicker than even Venus’ atmosphere is today.\u00a0 One model says the mass of the early atmosphere was about the same as the mass of the early Earth.\u00a0 One approach looks at Earth’s atmosphere as similar to Venus, mostly Carbon Dioxide and Water.\u00a0 Another model thinks of it as more like the gases in Jupiter, which has hydrogen, helium, and some organic gases.\u00a0 The key idea in Earth’s early atmosphere is that it has a strong greenhouse effect that keeps the surface hot enough to melt most metals.\u00a0 This way the surface stays molten for tens or hundreds of millions of years.\u00a0 In Earth’s formation it is important that the surface be molten so that materials that come from space via impacts can mix into the Earth.\u00a0 As material rains down on the Earth from impacts, metals and minerals are separating by density in Earth’s interior.\u00a0 So by the time you get to about 55 million years after the beginning, some iron (and small amounts of other dense materials) has sunk into the center to form part of the core.\u00a0 Between 10 and 55 million years, the impacts become less frequent but the impacting bodies average larger and larger in size.\u00a0 Earth’s atmosphere changes perhaps multiple times in this period because large impacts blow some of it away and gases add to the atmosphere from the impacting bodies themself as they are vaporized by the impacts.\u00a0 Note that some of Earth’s liquid water could have come from vaporized impacts from asteroid like objects and some comets.\u00a0 However today scientists only believe that about 10% of Earth’s water got on the surface from late impacts in this way.\u00a0 Scientists also believe it is possible life could have evolved multiple times in this period, only to be wiped out by the harsh conditions or destroyed by the large impacts.<\/p>\n

At about 55 million years, a really big object hits the Earth.\u00a0 This was an object that was about the size of Mars.\u00a0 This object has come to be referred to by scientists as Theia, a name from Greek mythology.\u00a0 The Theia impact melts a big part of the Earth and ejects a lot of material into orbit around the Earth.\u00a0 This material then forms into our Moon.\u00a0 Most of the core of the Theia object sinks into Earth, merging with Earth’s core.\u00a0 This leaves the Moon with materials that are very similar to Earth’s mantle but the Moon is only left with a very small iron core of its own.\u00a0 After the Theia impact, the impacts from space continue but decrease in frequency.\u00a0 As these impacts slow down, the surface begins to cool.\u00a0 While impacts were continuing gases were released from Earth’s interior.<\/p>\n

As metals and various minerals form and separate inside the Earth, water and other gases are released from Earth’s interior, sometimes by the melting of rock and sometimes by chemical reactions. So water accumulates on the Earth and Earth’s atmosphere changes its composition over millions of years.\u00a0 Oxygen gets in Earth’s atmosphere largely from water vapor in the atmosphere that dissociates from the heat and from strong ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.\u00a0 When water dissociates it essentially splits into hydrogen and oxygen gases.\u00a0 As Earth cools the gases remain in the atmosphere and the liquid water remains on the surface.\u00a0 Some gases in the early Earth atmosphere are lost to space and some disolve into the liquid water on the surface (the forming oceans).\u00a0 Some of the gases in Earth’s atmosphere are organic (such as methane, hydrogen cyanide, and others) and thus they contribute to the evolution of life from chemicals in “warm little ponds” scattered across Earth’s surface.\u00a0 Life is believed to have got started when the first living cell evolved from chemicals sometime between 3.5 and 4.0 billion years before the present, which would be several hundred million years after the beginning.\u00a0 It is generally believed that life could not get started until impacts from space mostly ended and Earth’s surface had cooled off.<\/p>\n

These are the main ideas of the naturalistic formation of Earth according to planetary scientists and Earth scientists.\u00a0 Which is more miraculous, this story or Genesis 1?\u00a0 I’m not sure!\u00a0 Though scientists would not like me calling the above scenario miraculous, I think you could argue it is, practically speaking.\u00a0 It would be an amazing series of accidents that caused Earth to form as a beautiful blue habitable planet by natural forces alone.\u00a0 Would you rather believe in natural processes doing all the above over millions of years, or in an all powerful God who could form the Earth in six days?\u00a0 I choose to believe the latter, but I don’t believe it irrationally.\u00a0 I try to investigate the naturalistic models of Earth formation so I can honestly evaluate them scientifically.\u00a0 It is rational to choose to believe God created as Genesis describes, because the God of the Bible can do it.\u00a0 It is very debatable whether natural processes can do it.<\/p>\n

Updated 4\/2\/2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The formation of Earth is an important question, since it is our home.\u00a0 I feel this is an important issue and no creationist has seriously dealt with this topic to my knowledge.\u00a0 Creationists as well as Intelligent Design proponents have written often about the design of the Earth for life.\u00a0 But the real issue is … Continue reading Earth was Made by God<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-related"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":536,"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creationanswers.net\/answersblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}