Stephen E. Jones

Projects: Book (Outline): "Progressive Creation: A Scientific General Theory of Creation":
Chapter 8, Creation of the Earth

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This is Chapter 8, Creation of the Earth, of the outline of a book that I plan to write on Progressive Creation.

"Progressive Creation" (Outline): Chapter 8. Creation of the Earth
Copyright (c) 2004-2005, Stephen E. Jones

1. The Earth in the Bible
2. Age of the Earth
1. Dating the Earth
3. Preparing Earth for Life and Man
1. Mass Extinction - Pruning the Tree of Life
1. The Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) extinction
1. Extinction of dinosaurs enabled rise of mammals (and man)
2. Was a fine-tuned volcanism-asteroid impact "double-whammy"

1. The Earth in the Bible

Raw Material of the Earth. The raw material of the Earth was originally created ex nihilo (out of nothing) by God (Gn 1:1), as part of the unformed matter called "waters" (Gn 1:2) (Calvin, 1554, p.70). [top]
2. Age of the Earth

The Bible makes no explicit statement about the age of the earth (Zimmerman, 1959, p.161). Nor can the age of the Earth be estimated from the Bible. As well as the unstated length of time between Gn 1:1-3, the length of the six creative days (Gn 1:3-31) is not stated (Zimmerman, 1959, pp.161-162; Young, 1949, p.52). There is evidence in the Bible itself that the Bible writers thought that the Earth was very old. Moses, the presumed author of Genesis, himself indicated in a Psalm ascribed to him (Ps 90:4 = 2 Pet. 3:8), that these days were indefinitely long periods of time (Ross, 1994, p.45; Buswell, 1968, p.I:145). It seems most unlikely that Moses (or Peter) would say that "a thousand years in" God's "sight are like a day" (Ps 90:4; 2Pet 3:8) if they thought that the Earth had only existed for a few thousand years. There are also verses which refer to the mountains and hills as "ancient", "age-old" or "everlasting" (Gn 49:26; Dt 33:15; Hab 3:6) (Ross, 1994, p.52; Fischer, 1996, p.83). Other passages which indicate a vast antiquity of the earth include Pr 8:22-31; Job 38:4-7; Ps 90:2-6 and Mic 6:2 (Ross, 1994, p.52; Ramm, 1955, p.147). Well before the rise of modern science, many early and medieval Christian theologians, on the basis of the Biblical text, interpreted the days of Genesis 1 to be long periods of time (Ross, 1994, pp.19ff; Pearce, 1969, pp.37-38; Shedd, 1888, p.475). The current scientific estimate for the age of the Earth 4.54 billion years (Dalrymple, 1991, p.403). [top]

1. Dating the Earth

Most of the early geologists who established that the Earth was millions of years old, in the 18th and 19th centuries were Christian creationists who were opposed to evolution but realised that traditional six thousand-year-old Earth and global Flood interpretations of the Bible could not account for what they saw (Young, 1988, pp.66-67). For example, in Darwin's day the Professors of Geology at Oxford and Cambridge Universities were William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, both Bible-believing Christians and creationists, who on the basis of the evidence came to accept that the Earth was millions of years old and the geological strata could not have been caused by a worldwide Flood (Hayward, 1985, pp.72- 73; Young, 1988, pp.50-52,54). These nineteenth century geologists were already aware that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, by observing the slow rates of geologic processes (Stanley, 1989, p.17). They knew the relative age from the order of the geological strata, but not its actual or absolute age (Stanley, 1989, pp.17, 111; Skinner & Porter, 1995, pp.161-162). [top]

3. Preparing Earth for Life and Man
1. Mass Extinction - Pruning the Tree of Life
1. The Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) extinction
1. Extinction of dinosaurs enabled rise of mammals (and man)

"The fossil record shows that about 60 million years ago, the dinosaurs all died out within a geologically brief time period. One theory offered to explain this is that a large meteor crashed into the earth, sending clouds of dust high into the atmosphere and perhaps causing many plants to die, disrupting the food chain. Some indirect evidence supports the hypothesis levels of the element iridium, rarely found on earth but more frequent in; meteors, are elevated in rocks from that time period." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," Free Press: New York NY, 1996, p.242)

"... from primitive mammalian stock, different types have adapted to a variety of habitats (divergent evolution). The impetus for this adaptive radiation was the extinction of the dinosaurs at the close of the Mesozoic era, which opened many niches in terrestrial and aquatic habitats." (Boolootian R.A. & Stiles K.A., "College Zoology," [1976], Macmillan: New York NY, Tenth Edition, 1981, p.671)

"It is probable, by the way, that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all us mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers. (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.22)

"And if diatoms prevailed by such good fortune, let us not forget a key reason behind the possibility of this most immediate interaction between me as writer and you as reader. Dinosaurs and mammals had shared the earth for more than 130 million years, fully double the subsequent period of mammalian success that led to the possibility of Homo sapiens among some 4000 other living species in our mammalian clade. If the data of Sheehan et al. (1991) hold, and dinosaurs did persist in respectable abundance right to the moment of impact, then we may reasonably conjecture that, absent this ultimate random bolt from the blue, dinosaurs would still dominate the habitats of large terrestrial vertebrates, and mammals would still be rat-size creatures living in the ecological interstices of their world. In this most vitally personal of all cases, we really should thank our lucky stars that, at least in one cogent interpretation, certain marks of our ancestral incompetence-persistently small size in a dinosaurian world, for example-suddenly turned into a crucial and fortuitous advantage under the different rules of K-T impact, while the former source of triumph for dinosaurs may have spelled their doom under these same newly imposed rules. To be sure, this speculative scenario only references a particular event, and its much later impact upon the possibility of origin for one odd species. Yes, of course, we seek general theory as the goal of science, not the explanation of such odd particulars. But this tale, above all, happens to be our particular, and the most precious source of our possibility." (Gould S.J., "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory," Belknap: Cambridge MA, 2002, Fifth printing, p.1320)

"Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness. To cite just four among a multitude: (1) If our inconspicuous and fragile lineage had not been among the few survivors of the initial radiation of multicellular animal life in the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, then no vertebrates would have inhabited the earth at all. (Only one member of our chordate phylum, the genus Pikaia, has been found among these earliest fossils. This small and simple swimming creature, showing its allegiance to us by possessing a notochord, or dorsal stiffening rod, is among the rarest fossils of the Burgess Shale, our best preserved Cambrian fauna.) (2) If a small and unpromising group of lobe-finned fishes had not evolved fin bones with a strong central axis capable of bearing weight on land, then vertebrates might never have become terrestrial. (3) If a large extraterrestrial body had not struck the earth 65 million years ago, then dinosaurs would still be dominant and mammals insignificant (the situation that had prevailed for 100 million years previously). (4) If a small lineage of primates had not evolved upright posture on the drying African savannas just two to four million years ago, then our ancestry might have ended in a line of apes that, like the chimpanzee and gorilla today, would have become ecologically marginal and probably doomed to extinction despite their remarkable behavioral complexity." (Gould S.J., "The Evolution of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, Vol. 271, No. 4, October 1994, pp.63-69, p.64)

"About sixty million years ago the dinosaurs, which at that time were the dominant vertebrates especially on land, suddenly became extinct, together with a large number of other species of both animals and plants. ...Alvarez and Alvarez ... proposed that an asteroid, some six miles in diameter, hit the earth, producing a tremendous cavity and scattering a large amount of material into the atmosphere which, spread by winds all over the world, blocked out the sunlight for several years until at length even the finest dust particles had time to settle. ... As a result of this massive loss of plant material the food chain was totally disrupted. This would have been especially lethal to the larger animals at the top of the food chain. Thus, all the dinosaurs became extinct except possibly a few small ones, the ancestors of the birds. The earliest mammals had evolved about 200 million years ago, but at the time of the catastrophe they had not had a great deal of success, probably because they were kept down by the dominant dinosaurs. These early mammals were mainly small, nocturnal insectivores and might thus have survived the years of darkness. When the light eventually returned, the mammals rapidly evolved to occupy all the various ecological niches vacated by the now-extinct dinosaurs ...soon forming the many species whose descendants we see all around us today. One branch, the primates, developed good color vision and an enlarged cerebral cortex, eventually producing man. The key question is whether the dinosaurs, if they had been left undisturbed, would have evolved any animal intelligent enough to develop science and technology. This we cannot answer with any certainty, but one has a sneaking suspicion that the dinosaurs had specialized in the wrong direction. If so, then the evolution of a higher intelligence on earth depended crucially on this very drastic jolt given to evolution by the asteroid." (Crick F.H.C., "Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature," Simon & Schuster: New York, 1981, pp.109-111. Ellipses mine)

"When the skies cleared after the impact, the Cretaceous period was over. The giants were gone. The long- necked sauropods that converted whole forests into muscle and bone were extinct, along with Tyrannosaurus rex and the other big meat-eating dinosaurs. Giant marine reptiles and spiral-shelled ammonites disappeared from the seas. After a few thousand years the plank ton in the oceans rebounded, as did the plants on land. But the ecosystems of the early Tertiary period were bottom-heavy and top-light. Once again, a mass extinction had cleared the way for a new burst of evolution: the age of dinosaurs was followed by the age of mammals. "The death of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to evolve into many ecological niches that were not available for them," says Ward. "It was the removal of the dinosaurs through mass extinction that allowed so many lineages of mammals to come about through the evolutionary process. In that sense, it's really a good thing. There would not be humans here but for that mass extinction." (Zimmer C., "Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea," HarperCollins: New York, 2001, p.165)[top]

2. Was a fine-tuned volcanism-asteroid impact "double-whammy"

Volcanoes score one in dinosaur extinction debate, CNews, August 10, 2005. ... CALGARY (CP) - In the ongoing debate about whether a giant meteor or spewing volcanoes killed the dinosaurs, notch one up for the volcanoes. At a scientific conference on Wednesday, a French researcher presented a study of Indian lava fields that suggested ancient volcanic activity was intense enough to have caused the climate changes believed to lie behind the extinction of the giant lizards. "We can see that due to the surface degassing of the lava flow we have a potential impact on climate," said Anne-Lise Chenet of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. Some scientists theorize that dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago - along with more than 70 per cent of all species on Earth - as a result of climate change caused by the impact of a massive asteroid crashing into our planet. ... But other scientists believe earth's climate changed as a result of gases belched into the air from an upswing in volcanic activity. Eruptions release both carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, and sulphur dioxide, a source of acid rain. They also load the atmosphere with fine dust and soot. Pro-volcano researchers have long pointed to the Deccan Trap in India, a vast area of volcanic rock thought to have originally contained up to three million cubic kilometres of ancient lava. That many eruptions could have released enough gas to be climate-altering - if they happened in rapid enough succession. According to Chenet, that's exactly what happened. ... Chenet estimates that a layer of lava 600 metres thick may have piled up in as little as 30,000 years, and that the entire volcanic episode lasted about a million years. ... As well, right in the middle of the lava, Chenet also found a layer of iridium thought to have come from the Yucatan asteroid, which would prove the volcanoes predated it. "Our view is that impact added to the stress already generated by an ongoing massive eruption, enhancing significantly the extent of the extinction - which would have taken place even if the impact had not occurred." ... [See also "India’s Smoking Gun: Dino-Killing Eruptions," The Geological Society of America, 9 August 2005; Volcanoes score one in dinosaur extinction debate, Cnews, August 10, 2005. More evidence that it took a one-two punch to extinguish the dinosaurs, by a precisely angled impact in the midst of an already major environmental crisis. The dinosaurs exothermic metabolism could not cope with a combination of a greenhouse global warming caused by the volcanism and then a sudden global cooling caused by the asteroid impact dust in the atmoshere blocking out the Sun. The mammals (which includes us) with their preadapted endothermic metabolism did survive and they afterward explosively radiated into the empty ecological niches left by the dinosaurs. I accept the evidence that if that had not happened, we would not be here: ...]

Did double whammy of volcano and asteroid wipe out dinosaurs?, Steve Connor, The Independent 17 August 2005 ... 16 August 2005 Volcanic eruptions may have triggered the demise of the dinosaurs. Many scientists believed that an asteroid caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago. However, a new study points to a more complex event that began with a series of eruptions which took place in what is now north-western India. The Deccan Traps in Maharashtra state are flows of lava resulting from huge outpourings of molten rock and ash. A mile deep, they cover about 200,000 square miles. Vulcanologists have long thought the eruption, dated to about 65 million years ago, could have caused the extinction. However, the Deccan Traps resulted from a series of eruptions that occurred over perhaps a million years. This would have given the global climate plenty of time to adjust. But the study shows a major part of the eruption occurred over a short period. Scientists from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Pariscalculated that at least 2,000ft of lava was deposited in 30,000 years, which could have greatly altered global climate. They have also shown that the Traps were erupting when the asteroid crashed into what is now Mexico. This was a spectacular and almost unprecedented double whammy for Earth. Mike Widdowson, a vulcanologist, said it seems the end of the dinosaurs may have begun with climate change brought about by the eruptions and ended with the asteroid. "The eruptions pre-conditioned the global environment toward a catastrophic tipping point before the impact occurred. The asteroid was the coup de grâce," he said. ... [Another article on this that makes it clearer that the K/T mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs was an "almost unprecedented double whammy for Earth", in a short period of global warming caused by the greenhouse effect of volcanic emissions, then a sudden period of global cooling by the asteroid impact's `nuclear winter'. Since without this `one-two punch' we would not be here, I regard this as another fine-tuned event (like the origin of the Moon) by an Intelligent Designer (who I assume is the Christian God). ... ][top]