I see that our good friends at Answers in Genesis have been publishing a series of articles in their research journal about their heat problem:
The main conclusion of this article is that the total amount of geological heat deposited in the formation of the ocean floors and of LIPs is overwhelming: it cannot be removed from the biosphere within a biblically-compatible timescale by known natural processes. Using CPT-style Flood models as our theoretical framework, no more than a tiny fraction of the total could have been released into the atmosphere and oceans during and after the Flood. Given that the highest bulk ocean temperature in the early Cenozoic did not exceed 13°C in contrast with the present-day value of ~2°C (Worraker 2018; the lower figure of 2°C may be taken as a representative pre-Flood minimum temperature), the total heat absorbed by the oceans, earthâs main environmental heat sink, would have been of order 6 Ă 1025 J at most, assuming a thermal capacity of 5.5 Ă 1024 J/K (as estimated above). This is only 0.04% of the total heat deposition: the remaining 99.96% must have been removed or absorbed elsewhere. It seems that this must have been accomplished by some special, hitherto unrecognized mechanism.
Looks like itâs the fourth in a series, all highlighting other aspects of the same problem. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Seriously, isnât it easier to admit that maybe, just maybe, 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4 might possibly have something to do with creation after all?
Erika has a good video on this article. She mentioned AIG has come up with more heat problems than she has and are promising more articles on the additional sources of heat. AIG just can not come up with the willingness to admit that a miracle, or miracles, is required. Unlike some of the other YEC organizations.
Yes, and as I have said before, it doesnât just require miracles, it requires pointless miracles. The only purpose they would serve would be to make the earth look older than it really is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable.
The point of the miracles would be to make the literal reading of Genesis correct. And as Erika points out, once you admit to a miracle then it is no longer science.
The Bible speaks of flooding the Earth. What does speeding up radioactive decay to do with water everywhere? Just create the water and you do not have to worry about vaporizing the planet to plasma.
And slamming the moon and Mercury with meteorites during the flood. Why does Mercury get creamed and not the Earth? Did the fleeing earthlings even notice Mercury above the clouds? What did Mercury ever do to warrant punishment? Was the lump of rock sorry afterwards? The point is that YEC has come to invest the flood as a magic erasure for any inconvenient scientific fact, without the slightest regard for scriptural intentionality. It is industrial apologetics.
Intrigued, I explored a couple of features of âthe heat problemâ and discovered that there are few radioactive isotopes in the human body, so very little heat output during the Resurrection. I figure the biggest consequence of the Resurrection wasnât the radioactive decay but the flash of light output which could well have been what put the image on the Shroud.
Plasma that emits as much light as a small galaxy, as I calculated here:
The other option (besides messing with the strong nuclear force) for speeding up decay is to dramatically decrease the speed of light, which would decrease atomic binding energy by the same factor, which would solve that part of the heat problem. Unfortunately, it would also make protons and neutrons fall apart, so it doesnât really fix anything.
Consider the possibility that Earthâs main volcanism, like the creation of angels and water, and all of the huge meteorite events, arenât in Genesis because they happened BEFORE GENESIS, as my book by that name claims.
The Earth has been pummeled just as much, if not more than the Moon due to the Earth being larger. The difference is that Earth is geologically active which erases much of the evidence for those impacts. As one example, the massive 75 km diameter Chicxulub impact crater that marked the end of the dinosaurs was only discovered in the last 60 or so years, and it took some powerful instrumentation to find it.
As @T_aquaticus explained, observed cratering in the solar system is what we would expect, with bodies that are subject to little erosion and geologic activity displaying the accumulated cratering of billions of years, and active bodies such as Earth showing much less obvious cratering. Meteorites do not discriminate, but erosion can vary tremendously.
This presents YEC with a problem. The number of lunar craters is orders and orders of magnitude too high to be consistent with the current rate of impacts, and so is wildly inconsistent with a 6,000 year history. This is data that cannot be reasonably interpreted with a âcreationist lensâ, and can be directly verified by anyone with a pair of binoculars.
The relevance to the heat problem is that meteorites capable of producing large craters pack enormous kinetic energy, and essentially all that is turned into thermal energy. Like all the speeded up processes that YEC appeals to, such as tectonic movement and radioactive decay, the effect of compressing the time interval over which such releases of energy take place, each result in temperatures which would liquefy, vaporize, or ionize the Earth, even before adding the various contributions all together. These are gross amounts, not the output of close, fudgy, calculations you need to rely on scientists to understand.
So when AiG says, a miracle is central to dealing with heat in their model, that may be a rare moment of honesty, but it undermines the whole enterprise. All that discussion of Polonium haloâs? What is the point? The rocks are gone, their minerals vapor. Noahâs flood becomes Noahâs steam bath, the Earth an incandescent ball. As I stated, if a miracle is invoked, why not just send water, as the Biblical narrative reads. What is the point of this elaborate YEC flood model with accelerated radiometric decay and meteorite bombardment? What is all that for? The answer is that it is all to wave away evidence for an old Earth, ridiculous explanations Trojan horsed into the Biblical story even though that has nothing at all to do with it.
Of course they have their own silly definition of that and what they allow as âhistoricalâ, or else they just ignore it and rant about the âclear teachingâ.
Most planetary scientists think that our moon was formed from a collision between the earth and a rogue planet. In other words, a chunk of earth broke off and became the moon.
