water on early earth

HELEN

Sometimes Christians get intimidated by strong 'scientific' pronouncements which contradict what the Bible says. One of the scientific claims, at least up until now, has been that the early earth was a hot mass which gradually cooled.

The Bible says it started covered with water (see Genesis 1:2), which means it started cool.

And, bit by bit, geologists and other scientists are finding evidence which forces them to 're-think' the evolutionary time scale.

In the meantime, the Bible just sits there, being right. The linked article is not too long and should bring a few smiles to young earth creationists:

http://www.geotimes.org/current/NN_earlywater.html

MDKLUGE

Why should this bring smiles to creationists? No creationist can consistently take this as evidence of the presence of water on early earth. A premise of Valley et al is that they could accurately date the zircons they found. That is, they assumed for purposes of their work that conventional dating methods were valid and that the age of their oldest zircon of 4.4 GY is correct. If conventional dating methods were unreliable then there would be no basis for thinking that their supposedly 4.4 GY old zircon was actually one of the earliest zircons formed on earth. Thus, to a creationist it cannot be evidence of the existence of water on the early earth and affords no confirmation whatsoever of anything at all said in the Bible.

SOS

Thanks for the link, Helen. It's nice to see "science" beginning to catch up to the Bible.

But, another issue is related to water as a fundamental component recognized by secular scientists to the formation of not only the primordial rocks but also stars. There is a report initially published by the Weizmann Institute of Science entitled the "Watery Birth of Stars". I used to have the link to the original report but the original article seems to have been removed. The best I can do now is to quote the article from my own personal archives which was copied from the original which was originally written about 1996 or 1997 (I don't have an exact date, sorry):

THE WATERY BIRTH OF STARS

Weizmann Institute of Science - http://www.weizmann.ac.il/

Logically, stars should not exist. They are born when clouds of
interstellar gas collapse inwardly under their own weight, growing denser
and hotter until nuclear fusion causes them to emit energy in the form of
light. However, since heat forces matter to expand, this hot contracting
gas could be expected to immediately move outward again, preventing star
formation from ever reaching completion.

To resolve this paradox, scientists have postulated the existence of a
water-based "cooling system" that regulates the temperature of
interstellar clouds, enabling the contraction to continue. Now a Weizmann
Institute study reported in Physical Review Letters provides experimental
evidence that the billions of stars that populate our firmament indeed
had a watery birth.

Researchers have theorized that water molecules in interstellar clouds
exert a cooling effect by colliding with the gas particles and absorbing
their energy that is later released in the form of radiation. But
attempts to observe water in the stars using Earth-bound telescopes have
always been thwarted by the presence of water particles in our planet's
atmosphere.

Scientists have, however, detected a similar substance that could be an
intermediary product in water formation: hydronium, or H3O+, which
contains three hydrogen atoms (as compared with water's two), along with
one oxygen atom.

Drs. Daniel Zajfman and Oded Heber of the Weizmann Institute's Particle
Physics Department have now completed an experiment demonstrating that
water is indeed formed in interstellar clouds in a reaction involving
hydronium. The experiment was carried out at an advanced installation
called an ion storage ring at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in
collaboration with Aarhus researchers Dr. Lars Andersen, Dr. Dror Kella
and Lisa Vejby- Christensen. The scientists simulated the physical and
chemical conditions in interstellar clouds and showed that water is
formed there in a reaction between a charged hydronium molecule and a
single electron. They also found that a permanent ratio between water and
hydronium molecules is maintained in these clouds.

Special equipment aboard the U.S. research satellite SWAS, to be launched
later this year, will be used to further explore the new findings without
the interference of the Earth's atmosphere, in particular by directly
measuring the quantity of water in the forming stars.

Dr. Zajfman holds the Martha S. Sagon Career Development Chair at the
Weizmann Institute. Funding for the study was provided by the Israel
Science Foundation and the Danish National Research Foundation.

The Weizmann Institute of Science is a major center of scientific
research and graduate study located in Rehovot, Israel.

Click to expand...

HELEN

Mark, whenever the early earth was, science is getting closer and closer to finding out that things were not as have been suspected by evolutionists. In so doing, the evidence is coming closer and closer to verifying what the Bible indicates is true.

Is that putting it more plainly?

SOS -- good to see you again, too! Even apart from anything to do with evolution and creation, isn't it amazing how science keeps 'self-correcting' through the years? That term, I have also discovered, is a way of saying "We were wrong before, when we thought we were right, but now we know we are right until we are shown to be wrong again." But it allows them to avoid apologizing for misleading the public and they can keep their aura of mystique and superiority.

MDKLUGE

Helen wrote:

Mark, whenever the early earth was, science is getting closer and closer to finding out that things were not as have been suspected by evolutionists. In so doing, the evidence is coming closer and closer to verifying what the Bible indicates is true.

Click to expand...

Even if “things” were not as suspected by scientists/evolutionists, how would that “in so doing” cause the evidence to come closer to what the Bible suggests? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that scientists had hitherto thought that the early earth, say, 4.5 to 4.0 GYA contained copious amounts of liquid water. Suppose further that Valley et al had found in their 4.4GY-dated zircon indications that there was little or no liquid water on earth at that time. In so doing they would have been finding out something that was not as scientists had suspected. Would you and your fellow creationists take the evolutionists/scientists’ findings that something was not as evolutionists/scientists had suspected (that the early earth was drier than they thought) as evidence verifying that the early earth was moist, as indicated by the Bible?

HELEN

Mark, evolutionists are so good at playing 'what if' games as you are proposing above. I'm not much for that. The facts of the matter are that this 'self-correcting' 'science' of evolution is, in reality, reversing itself and/or enlarging its grab bag of arguments for evolution (some of which contradict others) while, in the meantime, emerging evidence keeps on showing, as the title of the Bowden book states, "True Science Agrees with the Bible."

The more evidence we find, the more the Bible is showing itself to have been right all along.

Personally, I enjoy that. I used to think, along with theistic evolutionists and the liberals, that the Bible needed 'interpretation' where it disagreed with modern science. Now I know better. God knows how to communicate clearly to us, and He has. He means what He says and says what He means.

SHANNON DOYLE

The grains supposedly show that the early earth was covered by water, as Genesis says, but the article goes on to show that this was allegedly 'billions' of years ago?

That the earth was covered with water supports Genesis, but how is the young earth position advanced by this when we are supposed to be talking about 'billions' of years ago?

MDKLUGE

Helen wrote:

[E]volutionists are so good at playing 'what if' games as you are proposing above. I'm not much for that.

Click to expand...

Indeed evolutionists/scients as well as all reasoners are good at playing “what if” games, since that is the essence of determining just what is, and what is not, evidence supporting (or opposing) some hypothesis. To be not much for those “games” is to be not much for deciding what is evidence of what

Such exercises are all the more important because we seldom, as in this case with Helen, explicitly spell out the full schema of hypotheses and relative liklihoods of hypotheses given other hypotheses. In such cases the posing and answering of hypothetical questions is useful for clarifying the actual reasoning being used.

Here, after Helen’s initial post I had thought that she regarded the finding of evidence of liquid water in Valley’s primordial zircons as evidence on the early creationist earth some thousands of years ago. As I, and later Shannon Doyle pointed out, however, Valley’s evidence of liquid water on early earth is subject to the correctness of the dating of those zircons, which contradicts creationists’ interpretation of Genesis. Hence I (and later Shannon Doyle) wondered why Helen thought Valley et al’s findings supported creationism.

Helen’s response was curious. She claimed that finding out something to be true that evolutionists had thought false was evidence for creation. This was so curious that I sought Helen’s view of an hypothetical case where something that evolutionists had believed was shown to be false, but where what evolutionists had believed agreed with something said in Genesis. Would she consider finding that something false about the early earth (and so finding disagreement with Genesis) as evidence supporting creationism because it showed something evolutionists had thought true to be false even though creationists had also thought a thing corresponding to that shown to be false to be true? Helen does not answer.

Helen’s claim is all the more peculiar since it is verbally close to one she has made frequently in the past, but analytically vastly different. Helen has frequently claimed that the current state of earth must either be the result of creation or evolution, broadly speaking. If this premise of Helen’s be granted, then Helen correctly infers that evidence against evolution is evidence for creation and vice versa.

Now, however, Helen makes a (perhaps subtly) different claim. She says that evidence against WHAT EVOLUTIONISTS HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT evolution is evidence for creation! Note the capitalized words in Helen’s new argument. They make an argument very different from her old one. Does Helen really mean to make this new argument? I put my hypothetical question to her to find out. She has declined to answer, so we cannot know what she means to say.We cannot know how Helen thinks that Valley et al’s findings support creationism.

HELEN

Shannon, I was wrong to mention young earth creationists in conjunction with this article. I think the age of the earth is a separate issue here. I do think the creation is young, but that is not a matter of the composition of the zircon grains, but of other things. The point being made here was more simple than that: mainstream science is finding itself forced closer and closer to what the Bible has been saying all along. That, actually, should bring a smile to the face of all creationists, age issue aside.

"Water" in liquid form appears to be the point of Genesis 1:2 which means that possibly the geothermal events of the planet were creating warmth.

But you also have "light" created - as a one-sided single source light that shines on one side of a planet that is clearly in rotation (evening and morning).

And all this - on day 1.

In Christ,

Bob

Bob, the sun which you refer to wasn't created until the fourth day. Genesis 1:14-19.
When God said let there be light in v.3, He wasn't
necessarily saying let the sun come into existence.

Genesis 1:14-19 states explicitly that on day 4 God made "TWO GREAT LIGHTS" one to rule by DAY and one to rule by night.

If you are proposing that those TWO great lights WERE NOT the Sun and Moon. Then please explain.

IN fact - if you think that evilutionism proposes "TWO GREAT LIGHTS" that are NOT the sun and moon - where ONE rules the day and another the light- please feel free to expound on that point.

I believe you will find that - ONLY the sun and moon fulfill that role in EITHER the Bible account OR the evilutionist's view.

Bob

If you will allow me --

I would suggest that the light of the first day was a quasar in the middle of our galaxy (the Milky Way). Our sun is a population 1 star, meaning even astronomers understand it was formed after the population 2 stars, which are near the centers of the galaxies.

The further out we look in space, the further back in time we are looking. This holds no matter how long you think the universe has been around. And when we look back in time, or further out, we see that EVERY galaxy has a quasar at the center of it. Quasars are certainly associated with black holes and may actually be caused by them. The closer in you get to earth, however, the more the quasars have disappeared and only the black holes seem to remain in the centers of the galaxies.

This gives us at least a good clue that at the beginning the Milky Way may well have also had a quasar. Quasars are brigher than entire galaxies, and so a quasar at the center of our galaxy, combined with the very fast initial speed of light, would certainly have served to light the newly created and rotating earth in such a way as to give night and day.

Genesis 1:14, and the rest of the verses associated with day 4 gives us, even more than the information about the newly 'lit' (or perhaps also newly formed, I don't know) moon and sun, the information that these were now not only to be the great lights for earth, but that they were to be our time-keepers. And so they are.

One other word about the waters on the newly-created earth. This indicates that the earth was cool, actually, and not the seething, swirling mass of hot gases that evolutionary theorists and cosmologists try to make us believe it was. The heating came from the combination of both long and short half-lived elements during their initial periods of radioactive decay. These elements were buried well under the crust of the earth initially (this is actually a result of current secular science research, but fits exactly with the biblical model), and so their heating up of the central body of the earth and up through the mantle would have gradually driven the water literally out of the rocks, and put it under great pressure.

Thus, we see in Genesis 2:5-6, that even from the early earth water was seeping or steaming out of the ground, long before the hydrological cycle we know began. This was what watered the early earth. Then, in Genesis 7:11, we see that the initial event of the Deluge was NOT the rain, but the bursting forth, all at once, of ALL the great fountains of the deep. This would indicate that the early pressure driving the waters to the surface in Genesis 2 had built to a critical and explosive point by Genesis 7.

I would suggest that the event of the Flood itself was not miraculous, but the timing certainly was! Ancient legends recall these bursting waters as being boiling hot. This also fits with what the Bible is implying. These heated waters would have evaporated en masse immediately and then, cooling as they rose, would have rained down as massive floods along with the falling pulverized debris from the explosive force of the bursts all at once. It must have been a truly horrid and nightmarish thing to those not on the Ark. It must have frightened those on the Ark as well, I would think!

Don't we also get frightened when, knowing we are under God's protection, we nevertheless see disasters all around us?

Originally posted by Helen:
I would suggest that the light of the first day was a quasar in the middle of our galaxy (the Milky Way). Our sun is a population 1 star, meaning even astronomers understand it was formed after the population 2 stars, which are near the centers of the galaxies.

Click to expand...

I have two problems with this statement.

First the idea that the quasar that once lived at the center of the galaxy could have provided the light the first day. The brightest known quasar, 3C 273, has a luminosity of about 10^12 the luminosity of the sun. Using the inverse suare law for how brightness changes with distance and using a distance of 28000 light years to the center of the galaxy lets us calculate how bright the quasar would appear from Earth if placed at the center of the Milky Way. As it turns out, the calculation says the brightness of the sun would be over three million times the brightness of the quasar. And the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is rather small compared to many quasars, by at least three orders of magnitude, so it is doubtful that an appreciable amount of light would have reached here from a quasar at the center of the galaxy. As a non-yechnical way of thinking about it try this. You state that a quasar can give off more light that the rest of its galaxy. Go outside on a moonless night far from any city lights an see how much light the Milky Way that stretches across the sky produces. Of course the light from the entire galaxy is so feeble that you will be unlikely to be able to see it at all if there is much background light.

My second question concerns the acceptance that there are Population I and II stars. You seem above to accept that these populations exist. How do explain these populations in your cosmology? Astronomy tells us that Population II stars formed first as metal poor stars because they were among the first stars to form after the Big Bang when the universe consisted essentially of H and He. The Population II stars that remain are the very low mass stars that have been able to survive the billions of years without exhausting their H fuel. The other stars that formed at the same time as the other Population II stars have died either as supernovas or by forming planetary nebulas as they turned into white dwarfs. Both of these actions would release metals (anything heavier than He) into interstellar space and allow the Population I stars to form as relatively metal rich. How do you explain these observations? I doubt you will allow that there was time before the sun was formed for a whole generation of stars to form, mature , die, and have their remains incorporated into a second round of stars. How will you also allow for only low mass, long lived stars to be present as Population II stars?

Editted to add the following information:
I made an attempt to calculate what the magnitude would be if you take the brightest known quasar at place it at the center of the Milky Way to finish the first thought above. If I did the math right, it comes out to be -10. This would certainly be the brightest star in the night sky. For comparison, the full moon is about magnitude -13 and Venus is about -4.4 at its brightest. Another comparison is that the supernova of 1006 was estimated to be about -9 (+-1).

[ April 18, 2003, 08:15 AM: Message edited by: UTEOTW ]

Hard science can experiment, measure and observe. It can test and verify results.

What it can not do is go back in time and "observe" God. So a "God-centered" mechanism of origins is beyond the "ability" of science to "see". It can "ASSUME" a non-God system of origins that it must then "speculate" and "conjecture about" using what it DOES observe today. But speculation and conjecture about past orgins based on invalid starting assumptions are not "proof".

Obvious in normal circumstances - but when evilutionism is in play - even some Christians toy with the idea that "speculation is proof".

IN Christ,

Bob

In the Genesis account of day 1 - God is the origin of the light and God is the source of the dividing of the Night and the day.

On Day 4 the Sun is the source of the dividing of the night and the day - as is seen from the language of the text.

In Christ,

Bob