It's been a few days since I've posted. . . . Hope you junkies aren't yelling, "I'll be danned, where is he?" Ha ha. Neal Adams' ideas on our expanding planet have given me pause (to follow the debate, go to the s8int.com blog). His premise is that Earth has expanded, forcing the original land mass apart and forming continents and crustal plates. Apparently gravity has also increased. My question is: where did the additional mass come from? Adams invokes "pair production", which, if I understand it at all, involves photons hitting nuclei and producing electron-positron pairs, which annihilate to release energy. Conservation applies. I don't buy it. God creates; man converts.
What I want to discuss is the cause of the Deluge event. This event and its aftermath is the most important thing that has ever happened to us and our planet. The ultimate cause, of course, is God. His dismay at the depravity of man and the fallen angels led Him to initiate our destruction. His love for us gave Noah and his family a chance to try again. The question is: was the mechanism of the cataclysm internal or external? That is, did God activate something on or in the Earth or did the impetus for destruction come from outside? Traditional creationist models, some of them quite ingenious, center on an internal cause. I cannot accept these. Overhead oceans collapsing onto the surface ("vapor canopy") and other absurdities would seem to invoke such special circumstances that we might as well quit and just say, "God did it." Allan and Delair and many others agree that an external cause makes much more sense. As I said in a previous post, why would God create a damaged, chaotic Solar System and call it good? I believe God made Planet Five--Phaeton--explode, thus bombarding many of the planets, specifically Earth. The remnants of Phaeton are the Asteroid Belt; the rest hit the other planets or escaped into space. A fifty-mile-diameter chunk of Phaeton hitting the ocean with sufficient force could penetrate the crust and raise tsunamis up to 10,000 feet high. A number of bolides this big or bigger would break the crust and swanp the continents, at the least. Allan, Delair, and others think that a supernova explosion relatively close to the Solar System blew super-dense chunks through our system and adversely affected the Earth and other planets. Tom Van Flandern's exploding planet hypothesis (EPH) makes more sense to me. Occam's Razor applies, I think. God does as He pleases, but He doesn't seem to complicate things unnecessarily.--Dan Moore
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I looked on s8int.com but did not see that pair production expanding planet business. You should link it directly.
I don't see the difference between a God that creates a universe that works in exactly the way God wants and a God that intervenes in it in miraculous ways.
Basically, if God can do anything, then God can create a 'rigged' system, so to speak. He or She or It would have built any sort of catastrophic events in at the beginning. If Phaeton blew up, regardless of the reason, fine, but for an all-knowing and eternal God it does not make sense to say that miraculous intervention caused it. Everything is miraculous intervention.
This line of thinking makes a difference if you look at it this way: since everything is miraculous, we can regard the self-consistency apparent in the laws that govern the universe as being something that God maintains always. It does not matter what you regard as imperfect; it is beyond the ken of humanity to see why things are the way they are. I do know, the laws that govern the universe seem to be inviolable. Any systematic approach to making sense of it all reveals tremendous patterns free of any inconsistencies. The further we look, the harder they become to understand (which makes sense, because all of the simplest things have already been explained), but they always work out.
So nobody is any judge of what is perfect. I suppose if we are made in God's image, then we have a natural sense of the way things ought to be, but that is subjective. I am just fine with the way the solar system is. It doesn't seem chaotic to me.
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