Serious Q for creationists - is plate tectonics OK?

Yes, tectonics is OK...it's just that the global flood of Noah (which is dismissed by science) and the enormous forces that were involved caused the earths crust to crack and plates to move and mountains to form in a fairly short period of time...not millions of years. Many mountains have evidence of fossil sea creatures indicating they were under water in the past and many others have rock formations in what appear to be flowing waves indicating the rock was formed in layers of flowing water-born sediments Some would argue that the earth was created by God with a built in "clock" or internal forces that were preset to cause a global flood at a certain point in history since He knew of man's sin and corruption from the beginning of Creation. Methuselah's name means "when He dies, it will be sent" which some believe is pertaining to the flood and evidence that the flood was foretold 969 years prior...He died just prior to the flood. It's all part of an over-arching theory or explanation that man's sin caused the whole of creation to degrade including the earth and it's geology. Romans 8:22 tells us..

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

Dr Walt Brown has developed a Hydroplate Theory of the flood and the events surrounding it which point to how the plate tectonics occurred during that period.

Video..

http://www.thetaxpayerschannel.org/graphics/creati...

Online book...

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/

BTW, Darwin suggested that his theory would be false if the numerous transitional fossils one would expect from his theory were not found. Such is the case today after 150 years of exhaustive searching. And that's not just according to Creationists but paleontologists, professors, museum directors, etc...many of them evolutionists.

“But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 163.

“... the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed [must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory [of evolution].” Ibid., p. 323.

Darwin then explained that he thought that these gaps existed because of the “imperfection of the geologic record.” Early Darwinians expected the gaps would be filled as fossil exploration continued. Most paleontologists now agree that this expectation has not been fulfilled.

u The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the largest collections of fossils in the world. Consequently, its former dean, Dr. David Raup, was highly qualified to discuss the absence of transitions in the fossil record.

Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection. David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1979, p. 25.

u “Surely the lack of gradualism—the lack of intermediates—is a major problem.” Dr. David Raup, as taken from page 16 of an approved and verified transcript of a taped interview conducted by Luther D. Sunderland on 27 July 1979.

u “In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” Stanley, p. 95.

u “But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.” David S. Woodruff, “Evolution: The Paleobiological View,” Science, Vol. 208, 16 May 1980, p. 716.

u Dr. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum (Natural History), was asked by Luther D. Sunderland why no evolutionary transitions were included in Dr. Patterson’s recent book, Evolution. In a personal letter, Patterson said:

I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be asked to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader? ... Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say that there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. Copy of letter, dated 10 April 1979, from Patterson to Sunderland.

u “But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don’t exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn’t, or might be, transitional between this group or that.” [emphasis in original] Hitching, p. 19.

u “There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely ‘transitional’ types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today.” [emphasis in original] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 32.

u “This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.” George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 107.

“... the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted.” Ibid., p. 23.

u “... there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged by known intermediates.” Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine, Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park, California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.

“Most orders, classes, and phyla appear abruptly, and commonly have already acquired all the characters that distinguish them.” Ibid., p. 266.

u “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” p. 23.

u “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. ... We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, May 1977, p. 14.

“New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region.” Ibid., p.

Well, Young Earth Creationists think the world is about 6000 years old. I kind of doubt they accept that. Anything about the world changing gets lumped together, the Big Bang, evolution- they all go against their blind belief that God did it just as it is.

They obviously can't see reason, they pick the evidence they want. SOme may find some way to accept it but they would still be ignoring the fact that it take millions of years which shows a poor understanding of these theories and science in general.

Though those are just the YECs, you can believe God created over billions of years through the Big Bang and evolution.

From a creationist standpoint. Tectonic shift is a reality. So is natural selection. Where you and I will disagree is the degree to which both happen.

Plate shifting did and does cause changes in the surface of our planet. I cannot and will not argue against that.

Natural selection does exist -- but from my observation and research it happens within species and does not change one species to another.

Yes, the continents have changed.

Natural selection cannot account for the development of arms and hands and things like a brain, a heart, and blood, and random mutations could not have produced those things either.

As I christian i do not completely reject evolution.

I believe in micro-evolution: evolution within the species.

we know at some point the earth was all joined together (pangea) and has split since.

Goddidit

This is an interesting hypothesis. Check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI

im gonna guess that anything that god didnt say or approve is wrong. i mean its proly more offensive as many christians belive that we were made in gods image so higher than animals etc

good luck getting a real answer to this one.

Evolution = FALSE.

Creation = TRUE