Ok ,heres my first post....
I believe in the Younge earth theory.Basicly:
*The Universe and its organisms were created in 7 days according to the bible.
*After about 2000 years a great flood covered the earth.
*about 4500 years since then we stand here today.
Now let elaberate...in my opinion:
God is, he exists, but not quite how we understand existence. Our existence in defined through the matter, physics, space, and time that God created.
Isaiah 42:5 "Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out", aka, Big Bang. How God spread everything out and slowed it down and cooled it off in a day I don't know. Then again, this is God we are talking about, the being that created and defines physics. Nevertheless, the universe must currently expand at a certain rate. If it expands too slow (or not at all) it would collapse apon itself, and if it expands too fast spherical bodies of matter such as the sun apparently couldn't form.
Before the flood there is theorized to have been a "envelope" of moisture around the earth. This moisture both blocked UV rays (allowing Reptiles to live indefinitely, and because they never stop growing they get big, aka, what we today define as dinosaurs). It also replaced the earths need for rain.This is also refered to in the bible. Genisis 2:5,6 "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and [there was] not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground." This gave the earth a tropical climate, perfect for dinosaurs and mammoths (studies on mammoths have shown that they would not good at surviving in the cold. It has to do with their sweat glands I believe). Great flood comes and wipes out most of the humans. The flood gets rid of the envelope of moister resulting in climates not friendly to dinosaurs. Dinosaurs have trouble surviving after the trip on the ark due to the lack of plants.
The dinosaurs caught in the flood were buried by the shifted ground created by the huge torrents on oncoming water. The mixture of water and great pressure (not just from the ground but from all the water above the ground) fossilized the dinosaurs in a much faster time than we assume fossilization takes. Given the right conditions fossilization can take place in less than a century (shown by the discovery of a fossilized cowboy boot).
What happened to those other dinosaurs from Noah's Ark though? Well some did survive and they have both been observed in the bible, as noted before, and in other legends such as the Chinease legends conscerning dragons. In fact, I read an article about these artifacts from Africa I believe that contained drawings of dinosaurs on them, Triceratops for example and Stegasaurus. Sorry about my lack or memory or url for the article. I read it a while ago, maybe someone else here knows where to find it?
As far as Carbon 14 dating goes, the debate can go on and on. I personally have concluded that, while it can prove accurate in certain given cases, it relies largely on assumtions that can in no way be scientific given our current knowledge. We could exchange different articles on this one all year. It probably deserves another topic.
As far as us being able to see the stars. There are two explinations for this. The first being how God created everything mature, including forming the state of the universe. The second being that light does not travel at a constant speed relative to us. Changes in time allow it travel much faster than our defined rates say.
And now for my own question:
If humans exhisted for the last 4.5 million years, wouldn't the population rise to huge amounts, resulting in numerous fossils and such? Yet we have trouble finding even one human fossil. Assuming that 2 humans started the population and the population doubled every century (death is not counted in this example, but a century is a good amount of time), then after 4.5 million years we'd have...well...a larger amount of humans than my calulator can handel
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