Who likes science?  Hey, me too!

So I thought it might be fun to post a science question.  And this one has to do with the Young Earth vs. Old Earth debate.  So I guess we should start off at the beginning…get it?

Anyway, the Big Bang Theory says that nothing exploded and created the universe.  It started off as a bunch of gas that squished together and made stars, which in turn made dust, which made planets—including Earth.  And all this took a looooooooooooooooong time—gazillions of years.

Once the Earth had been made by the stars’ dust, our planet created life—I’m not sure who owns that theory.  But then Darwinian Evolution takes over and says that whatever life the dirt and water created eventually turned into everything we have today.  For example tomatoes made tomato clownfish.  The clownfish turned into bullfrogs, which turned into Tyrannosaurus Rex, which turned into a turkey, and then a cute little puppy dog, which turned into a dancing monkey (without a hat, because they didnt have hat shops gazillions of years ago), which turned into you!  I might not have the order right.  They like to change it up every once in awhile, but you get the point.  And again this took so many years that even Joe Biden can hardly remember what came first.  So that’s one idea.

Then you’ve got what the Bible says.  The Bible says God made all that stuff in less than a week.  He started off making light, and then the sky, and then land.  And he planted trees and flowers and bushes and grass and all the other plants.  After the Earth was created and covered with plants, it says, God then made the Sun and the Moon and all the stars.  Then the Bible says God made the fish and all the birds.  And after the fishes and the birdies, God made all the land animals—from little creepy crawlies to the big ol’ brontosaurus.  Finally God topped it all off with people.  The Bible says that God took some dirt, shaped it into a man, and breathed into its nostrils changing the dirt into a real, live man named Adam.  Then he did a little surgery and made Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs…a spare rib.  And the first time Adam saw Eve he said “Woah…Man!”, which is where the title came from.  And all the people who have ever lived are descendants of Adam and Eve.  So that’s another idea.

Now lots of people have tried to put these two ideas together somehow.  They try to stretch out the days in the Bible and say a day is like a thousand years, so it really took thousands or millions or billions of years to create.  But you probably noticed that the order is all messed up too.  One idea says stars turned into planets.  The other idea says the planet was finished before any stars were made.  One idea says dinosaurs turned into birds.  The other says all the birds were created before any land animals.  Plus it would be kind of difficult for plants to go millions of years without sunlight.  One idea says that things have been dying for millions and millions of years, which led to Darwinian Evolution, which eventually made people.  The other idea says nothing died before everything was created, and everything was really great and nothing even got sick until the 2 people broke God’s rules and then everything started dying.  So you can see that these two ideas just don’t play together very well.

And there are lots of scientists who argue for both sides.  They both look at the evidence we have today and try to figure out which story is best supported by it.  Of course it seems to me that the reason they argue so much about the different sides is because the truth determines who’s really in charge.  If the stars made the planets and the planet made us, then we can worship the planet.  But the Earth doesn’t really care about how people live their lives.  If people want to sleep with whoever or whatever, or if people want to lie, cheat, and steal, or kill each other off, or whatever, the Earth isn’t going to complain about it.  I mean aside from a few earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanoes and tornadoes and hurricanes and landslides and flash floods and little things like that, the Earth is happy just to leave us alone and let us make up our own rules and be in charge of how we want to live.  If the Bible is right though, that means God is in charge, which means we have to live by his rules.  It sounds like something your parents might say, “As long as you live in my universe, you will live by my rules.”  But a lot of people don’t want to have to follow any rules.  So the debate rages.

Anyway, there are plenty of different evidences you can look at and think about how the two ideas fit the evidence.  For example the Evolution side says that all the fossils we find—billions of them buried all over the planet—they are from creatures and plants who died slowly over gazillions of years and got fossilized.  The same with the oil and coal fields—“fossil” fuels…those used to be plants and critters that got sick and died and got buried and gazillions of years later they turned into oil.  And the Evolution side says, “Death has been around as long as life, it will always be around.  I might be the top of the food chain now, but some other thing will evolve that’s even better than me someday.  So I might as well do whatever I want while I’m here.”  From another viewpoint, the Creation side says that God caused a flood.  It says the Earth split apart like a pair of pants tearing at the seams and underground water gushed out and rains fell and the whole planet was covered with water.  Everything died except for 1 family that was saved on a giant wooden ship with a bunch of animals.  So billions of people and animals and even plants would have been drowned and buried in mud layers in the shifting waters and land masses.  The land masses would have shifted as the waters gushed out from under them, so they would have pulled apart in some spots making huge trenches and they would have smashed together in other places creating ranges of mountains that followed the shape of the land masses.  Vast amounts of organisms would be buried together and crushed under the immense pressure of water and earth.  And the Bible says after the flood, the mountains rose up, the valleys sank down and the water was gathered into the oceans.  So the Creation side looks at the mountains and ocean trenches and continents and billions of fossils buried in rock layers that were laid down by water all over the Earth and says, “Yeah that flood was a terrible thing.  We should live our life according to God’s rules, because death is awful.  And we don’t want to make God sad like the people did before the flood.”

On a side note, neither fossils or oil or coal take millions of years to make.  There are laboratories today making oil by pressurizing organic material in half an hour.  And I have seen modern fossilized sacks of flour, pickles, even a cowboy boot with the cowboy’s leg still in it.  All of that kind of stuff happens rather quickly.

So…my question is about Mount Everest—the highest place on the world today.  It’s just a little over 29 thousand feet tall.  That’s almost 5 and a half miles above sea level.  Big mountain!  Quite a few people have climbed it now, but over 200 have died trying.  In fact it’s so difficult just to get yourself up and down again, that many who have died on the mountain have had to be left there because nobody has enough strength to carry the bodies down again.  And so they stay there frozen on the mountain.

Well, one of the first guys to make it all the way to the top and back again was Sir Edmund Hillary.  Guess what he said he saw all around the top of Mount Everest?  Clams!  By the thousands!  Tons of petrified clams all over the highest place on the planet.  And of course lots of other climbers have reported about them too.  They have even brought some of the clams back and point out how they are all petrified in the closed position.

So my question is…how to you think clams got to the top of Mount Everest?  Did they crawl up there?  Were there thousands of clams that wanted to accomplish great things who set forth to conquer Everest?  Did they meet the same fate as the hundreds of people who died climbing whose bodies remain amongst the clams?  Are there thousands of other clams back in the ocean telling their friends about how they made it all the way up and back again?  Of course you know that probably didn’t happen because everybody knows that clams can’t talk.

But they got up there somehow.  Our two ideas about the where the world came from share similar ideas.  First of all they must have been buried—all of them, at the same time.  When clams die they open up.  So the fact that they are all closed shows that they were all buried alive together.  Besides, fossils aren’t made out in the open.  If something dies and is left, other animals and bugs and worms and bacteria break it down.  The only way to make fossils is to bury them or cover them in water without predators.  So like all the other fossils found all over the planet, these clams were buried alive in some sort of catastrophe.  And since clams are probably not the best of climbers, both of our popular theories state that Mount Everest didn’t always exist, but used to be lower and was covered with water and was lifted up to the point where it is today.  The only real difference between the two ideas is how quickly all this happened.

So it’s Old mountain versus New mountain.  Did the clams get covered gazillions of years ago in a relatively small accident that just killed a bunch of clams under water and then get slowly lifted up inch by inch over millions and billions of years to where they are today?  Or were they buried under shifting mud along with billions of other creatures in a planet wide catastrophe a few thousand years ago that killed and buried almost every creature under water and mud, and then get lifted up in a matter of months or even days by the shifting continents?  Are all the other fossils around the world mere coincidence or did they suffer the same fate as the Mount Everest clams?  Is Mount Everest going to keep climbing so it will be twice as high in a gazillion years?  Or is it more likely to be like all the other mountains in the world and slowly crumble and erode away?

What do you think happened to the clams?  AND…does your answer have any implications on real life—like who is in charge of the world and how should we respond to that idea?  It’s good food for thought, isn’t it?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.