Feb 21 2008
What’s On - Or Under - Your Plate?
I’m continually amazed at how far people will go not to recognize the hand of God. The title of this piece from Discovery News pretty well describes the secular view of creation - it’s all just random, ‘lucky’ accidents that gave us a habitable planet.
Plate Tectonics: Earth’s Lucky Geology
Jan. 11, 2008 — Four decades after the rise of the great, unifying theory of plate tectonics, geologists are still scratching their heads over a lot of the details.
Unanswered, for instance, are basic questions like how the shifting and colliding of plates got started, what keeps plates moving, why other planets in our solar system lack plate tectonics, and how important all the geological turmoil might be to the evolution of life.
“We didn’t get it all right the first time, so let’s ask the questions,” said geologist Vicki Hansen of the University of Minnesota at Duluth, referring to the fact that despite decades of work, many mysteries remain.
Hansen recently stirred the pot with a controversial hypothesis published in last month’s issue of the journal Geology. Meteorite impacts early in Earth’s history, she suggested, created the first rifts in the crust, jump-starting plate tectonics.
Prior to the 1960s, geologists were hard pressed to explain such basic things as how most mountain ranges formed and why volcanic regions and earthquakes were clustered in certain parts of the planet. Plate tectonics put these phenomena, and many others, into a single, unified framework.
That framework is an Earth with a rocky crust divided into plates that are moving, rifting, colliding and overrunning each other. It finally made sense of a previously nonsensical geography and is now recognized as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century.
Hugh Ross from Reasons.org understands that it’s no accident, and that plate tectonics is a necessary part of God’s Creation if we are to have a stable, habitable planet.
Two known mechanisms were involved in the delicate process of gradually removing greenhouse gases from Earth’s atmosphere as the ancient Sun brightened: (1) a continuous supply of exposed-to-the-atmosphere silicates (compounds containing silicon, oxygen, and metals that comprise more than 90% of Earth’s continental crust); and (2) a continuous burial of carbon-rich organic matter.
In the presence of liquid water, silicates gobble up (chemically react with) carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming carbonates and sand in the process. (See figure.) Bringing these silicates into contact with the atmosphere, where they can do their part in carbon dioxide reduction, requires a balanced cycle of crustal uplift and erosion. First, efficient plate tectonics must help create silicates, then push them above the ocean forming islands and continental land masses. Then, erosion must “plough” the crust so that more silicates are constantly brought into contact with the atmosphere.
This sounds like ‘intelligent design,’ but Ross is not a fan of ID as advocated by William Dembski and the Uncommon Descent crowd, because Dembski argues for a generic cause behind ID without explicitly stating that God is that cause. Ross makes no bones about God being the Creator.
