Talk:Old earth creationism

To do. Please write a brief definition or description of this article at Old earth creationism/Definition.

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I have just imported Wikipedia's article Old_earth_crationism and deleted the WP template reference we won't be using. I am interested in doing something similar for the referenced articles about Gap Creationism and Day Age Creationism.

My own interpretation is also old earth creationst, but taking literally that God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, predating the first day by some unknown time (similar to gap). I understand that God does not spell out literally when the Sun, moon and stars were created relative to the earth. A literal reading of Genesis one indicates the sun must exist prior to the first day, in order for that to be a normal literal day.

Specific references to the sun, moon, stars, and earth in Genesis one are about when they were made complete for His purposes, not about when each of them was created from nothing. There are other literal passages within Genesis one about for example the "land producing vegetation" or "land producing animals", which are not obvious sudden miracles of God but a gradual process controlled by God and clearly taking multiple seasons and possibly multiple years. Classical creationism interprets the days of Genesis as 24-hour days in contradiction to other literal passages within Genesis one without resolving that contradiction.--Tim McCully 14:04, 30 June 2007 (CDT)

Noah's Flood Section at the end

I would recommend that most or all of this section be dropped entirely from the article. The purpose of an encyclopedia article is to review known facts and offer a few careful and prudent judgments about them, not to delve into speculation about how to reconcile various theories. The first half of the "Old Earth Creationism" article strikes me as meeting this standard, but the Noah's flood part does not. Most of this section is on the nature of speculation and therefore is out of place in Citizendium. There are most likely other websites where speculation is appropriate and useful, but I would say, not Citizendium.

Regarding the last subsection of the Noah's flood section, I find it full of numerous inaccurate speculations. Here are some examples (with my comments indented between the text):

The above events all converge at the end of the Ice Age. The possiblity is that the late Ice Age comet impact on the Laurentian Ice Sheet, melted enough ice to create the evidence of super flooding seen in the St Lawrence and Mississippi water ways and created the fresh water spike seen in the sediments on the floor of the gulf of México. This impact event could have been large enough to created a "Nuclear Winter" type impact event resulting in the 40 days of world wide rain described in the Bible account of the Flood.

This is highly speculative. A comet nucleus large enough to have the effects described above would leave a crater. The Tunguska event in Siberia left no crater and knocked over trees over thousands of square miles, but it produced no nuclear winter and no melting. That object was probably a hundred meters in diameter or less. If an object several kilometers in diameter hit the Laurentide ice sheet, it would probably punch through it and make a crater in the bedrock, which should be detectable by geologists today. Anything less, and the object would not melt much ice, nor would it have kicked enough dust into the air to produce global cooling ("nuclear winter"). It is worth remembering that the Earth has something like 350 million square kilometers of ocean. Therefore, to raise the sea 1 kilometer would require 350 million cubic kilometers of water; to raise it 10 meters (1/100th of a kilometer) would require 3.5 million cubic kilometers of water (a large fraction of the Laurentide ice sheet). A comet big enough to melt that much ice would certainly leave a crater. A sea level rise of less than ten meters might not be enough to trigger the speculated chain of events that follows.

As the super flood of water entered the Gulf of México and the North Atlantic ocean, the sea level began to raise. The rise in sea level, though small, was enough to lift the edges of the grounded Continental Ice Sheets which were in a precarious balance with the warming of the climate and frequent surges into the sea, and tipped the balance and caused a massive entry of glacial ice from the Laurentian Ice Sheet into the Atlantic ocean and created the 1A event of scatted stones found throughout the North Atlantic floor sediments which dropped from the ice as it melted in the ocean as the huge surge of glacial ice drifted far and wide. This wholesale entry of Glacial ice into the world oceans in the massive 1A event, raised sea level world wide in a matter of days by quite a number of feet.

How many feet? This is a crucial part of the argument. Without more detail, this argument becomes hand waving, rather than a serious suggestion.

This sudden huge rise in sea level could have destabilized the other Ice Sheets and Glaciers which existed in Ice Age, and could have resulted in a domino chain reaction as one glacier after another slid into the sea, with each one rasing the sea level higher and causing more glaciers to surge into the sea in a run away chain reaction. The effect of such a rising sea level would be that the water line would have moved inland and the early winter landscape in the norther hemisphere would have been progressively submerged without any wholesale destruction or erosion. Then before the next summer, the water could had already receded before the trees budded.

Wait a minute, now: you're going to submerge thousands or millions of square kilometers of forest under seawater for months and argue that the trees will survive because they are hibernating? I doubt that. The salt water, after all, will progressively invade living wood and kill it. And how are you making the sea level "recede"? Isostatic rebound will adjust sea level over a few thousand years, but at the rate of inches a year. It won't drain water off of huge areas of forest in a few months. Isostatic rebound is still occurring to this day.

By the way, there are fairly extensive deposits of marine shells around Lake Champlain, currently about 90 feet above sea level; I saw them on a geology field trip about 1974. After the melting of the continental ice sheets, the land around Lake Champlain had not yet isostatically rebounded and was below sea level for some hundreds or thousands of years. But I have never heard of anyone claiming to find marine sedimentary deposits several hundred feet higher above sea level.

There is no massive break in the tree ring record, and the Biblical account also indicates the flood was on the order of months and not years which would have killed off the trees.

I wouldn't call the tree ring record "massive"; it isn't that many trees. And the trees that are studied are mostly on the tops of mountains, not in flood-prone lowlands. And does the tree ring record usefully go back 15,000 or 20,000 years? I doubt it, but I am not an expert.

A few months of submergence of frozen winter ground would of had little effect on the landscape, in terms of erosion or plant life, but the effects on animal life would have been profound.

So, we have flooded thousands of square kilometers of land with sea water and subject it to waves up to five meters or ten meters high during winter storms, moving massive amounts of loose material around, then drained the water away, and the plants just pop up and grow again?

In the Pleistocene extinction event, huge numbers of Ice Age animals all over the globe disappeared. None of the possible suggested causes for this event has proved satisfactory in explaining the size or the pattern of distribution of the extinctions. The theory that man hunted the animals to extinction fails to explain why so many animals disappeared in North America while many of the same animals survived in Africa where they had been hunted by a larger population for a longer period of time, or why the greatest number of extinctions occurred in Australia which in the Ice Age had very small human population.

On the contrary. The animals in Africa and Eurasia evolved with humans around for millions of years and understood that they were predators. The species therefore grew wary of humans as their spears and other weapons improved. The American and Australian fauna were suddenly exposed to sophisticated Pleistocene hunters and had no awareness that the new species was dangerous until it was too late. So the theory goes.

But the high level of extinctions in Australia is very understandable if it is remembered that Australia has the lowest average elevation of all the continents and the effects of sudden brief rise in sea level would naturally have had the greatest impact there.

And which presumably was undergoing summer during the flood, while the northern hemisphere was in winter. Where's the evidence of the flood there?

While the occurrence of a global flood is not accepted by mainstream science and is even ridiculed by many scientists, there is evidence that seems to support just such an event.

In conclusion; this is poorly thought through, at the moment, and probably should be dropped. Robert Stockman 13:42, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

Part of the problem here is someone imported this from WP and hasn't touched it yet, so it's a mess. I agree with you that the Noah's Flood information doesn't seem to fit well into this article, at least in it's current format. It could almost definately be shrunk in size, needs to be better cited and organized, and it needs to be more clear that it is generally unaccepted science. We have to remember that while it may not make sense to us, it still might be important enough to the topic that we need to report about it - we aren't here to prove or disprove creationism. --Todd Coles 14:03, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

The speculative part that I have focused on wouldn't be important to their theory; it appears to be the personal comments of the article's author. I think I will wait a day or two, see what others say, and then delete the last subsection of the article. Someone can always restore it later if they think it's that important (and in the process, clean it up massively!) Robert Stockman 14:11, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

Without question OECs (and YECs, too) hold views on geology and connect them with the Noahic flood mentioned in Genesis. Theories thereof are integral to understanding OEC. The section does need re-working, however.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 14:20, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

Stephen, did you see the note that the Old earth creationism article and the Framework interpretation (Genesis) article are identical? The latter should be deleted from Citizendium. Are you someone who can do that? Robert Stockman 14:37, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

Furthering the Topic of Creationism

I just want to make sure that I understand the differences in the different theories of creationism. I understand the two that are posted, but with theistic evolution I have a question. I believe in the bible, but also believe many mistranslate the original Hebrew, and don't understand why it reads like it does. For example v.5 ch.1 says "And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day." In the original Hebrew Day (אוֹר)and day (אֶחָד) are not spelled the same. As far as I understand (excuse me because I don't have any reference on hand) the second "day" is better translated "period", which in Hebrew is a period of unspecified time. This would easily allow for the evolution of the earth, and not contradict the Bible. If this is along the lines of theistic evolution, please let me know. I'm trying to take everything I post in citizendium very seriously, so if this wasn't the place to post the idea, excuse me. Trevor J. Norris 00:28, 19 March 2008 (CDT)