Mountain Building and the Boring Billions

Adherents of minerals-to-microscopist evolution have problems with not only making their deep-time dogmas seem plausible to thinking people, but also providing rational explanations for huge gaps of time. Earth was populated by single-celled organisms for a inconceivably long spell. Then after humans evolved, they did nothing for a long while. Similarly, Earth had a boring billion years of no geologic activity. What gives?

Cape Breton Highlands National Park
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Dr. Wilson (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Some scientists commenced to pondering why there seems to be a correlation between gaps in making mountains and the evolution of life, and they came up with a doozy of a hypothesis. It seems reasonable, but it's built on a number of presuppositions, including evolution, billions of years, radiometric dating, and more. Radiometric dating requires several assumptions that make it fundamentally flawed. As with so many other secular problems, when we run the data through a creation science Genesis Flood model, things make a lot more sense.

Most geologists today are uniformitarians; that is, they believe that past geological processes occurred uniformly in the past at much the same intensities and rates as today, punctuated of course by storms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis. So, erosion of the landscape, transport of sediments, and their deposition in layers elsewhere has always been slow and gradual. Similarly, the earth’s tectonic plates have moved in the past to form mountains at the same snail’s pace as they do today. And radioactive decay is assumed to have always occurred at today’s measured rates, so the earth has been supposedly dated at about 4.56 billion years old.

All this makes for engaging storytelling with much hand-waving, but it’s all based on the assumption that “the present is the key to the past.” In reality, this is purely a belief, however reasonable sounding it seems. That is because there were no geologists to witness, measure, and record the geologic processes back in the remote past to verify for us today that this assumption is correct. However, this belief has become so ingrained in today’s global culture that very few stop to question the stories most modern geologists tell us about the earth’s remote past. After all, our everyday experience is that the processes around us are very slow and gradual.

You can read the entire article by climbing on over to "Mountain-Building Quiescence in Earth’s 'Middle Age'”.