A Breakup and a Cooling Off Period

No, this post’s (deliberately misleading) title is not about romantic relationships.

We have lately been covering various aspects of a young earth creation by God and how a great deal of evidence points to a universe of only a few thousand years of age. That is roughly 6,000 years according to the chronology recorded in the Bible.

One gap in our coverage has been to explore the scientific finding that there was at least one ice age on earth. Since the Bible does not seem to specifically mention an ice age, evolution-minded scientists point to this as a weakness of the young earth creation model.

As it turns out, the standard models that try to explain multiple ice ages over about 2 million years are even weaker.

If we wanted to make an ice age, what would we need? The short answer is that we need warm water and cold land. Temperate regions such as New York state would need to be cooled by an average of 24 degrees Celsius on average to allow the land to retain ice coverage to accumulate.

No non-creationist model comes even close to this kind of cooling.

While the Bible does not specifically mention an ice age (the events are all located in the Middle East, after all), we may find a clue in Job 38, specifically in verses 22-23 and 29-30. Note that in verse 30 the “surface of the deep” is frozen. This seems to mean that even some seas end up frozen.

So how would God expect Job know about that kind of snow and ice unless he had seen it nearby or had visited glaciers? We do know that glaciers covered about 30% of the land surface at their farthest extent.

Remember that Job lived a very long time – long enough for him to father a second family of 10 adult children after his first set of adult children had died. He also lived to see the fourth generation of great-grandchildren before he died (apparently 140 years after the birth of his tenth child. This suggests that he may have been born relatively shortly after the Flood, when lifespans are recorded to have been longer than our current 70-80 year average.

For this reason creationists suspected that the ice age (the one and only) must have taken place shortly after Noah’s Flood. This and other observations eventually led to a new model of the mechanism of the Flood and its aftermath.

The creationist model of Noah’s Flood known as Catastrophic Plate Tectonics provides the initial conditions needed to make an ice age happen. As the “fountains of the deeps” break open, the crust of the earth shifts, allowing hot materials from underneath to contact the sea water, heating it up.

Meanwhile, aboveground volcanic activity spews unimagineable amounts of dust into the air, causing something akin to a nuclear winter that cools the land. By blocking a significant portion of the  sunlight from reaching the ground. The whole ice age lasted about 700 years according to this model.

You can find more detail at the Creation Ministries International web article What Caused the Ice Age?.

They also have an approachable YouTube video of the same explanation.

So there we have it: a breakup of continental proportions followed by a cooling off period of geologic proportions.

So why are we bothering with this kind of repudiation of what is commonly accepted scientific theory?

We believe that the accounts in the Bible are trustworthy history recorded by people who knew the eyewitnesses or were the eyewitnesses of the events described. More than that, Jesus and his Apostles recognized that the events described in the book of Genesis are accurate history. If we are going to understand the geologic record we need to compare it with reliable historical accounts instead of merely ignoring them to assume great ages that accommodate evolutionary theory.

Why is this important to us now? The Apostle Peter, who personally knew Jesus, wrote two letters to a large number of churches near the end of his life.  I encourage you to read his closing remarks in 2 Peter 3.

Look especially at what the scoffers are deliberately ignoring and at what the consequences are. I personally find it chilling. We ignore the warnings of judgment by that same Creator God at our peril.

This God is not someone to be trifled with.