Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Water, Evolution and God (Is our vision of God too small?)

From a discussion on FreeRepublic.com related to a story on World Net Daily called
Research: God did speak world into existence
Student's scientific documentation offers evidence of biblical account


>>1."Where did the water come from?
why is this a question as if it shows God cant exist?

2.Evolutionists cant explain it, yet say that Evolution is a forgone conclusion, and nothing else can be taught in schools...?

3. If the Evolutionists cant explain where the water came from ...why can they teach Evolution as Fact? yet God is
disproved by it??? <<

1. Water (on earth at least) is largely the product of volcanic outgassing (i.e. it came out of volcanoes) (footnote A)

2. Much of the water predated life on earth and thus it isn't primarily an evolution question but the early life forms added to the water content. (footnote B)

3. The theories related to evolution in no way disprove God. It was actually through the study of science and seeing the beauty, majesty and symmetry of the universe that I became open minded enough to be ready to believe when the time came and I had a personal experience with God. There is no conflict between exploring and learning about the universe and belief in God. Man, during the time the bible was written would not have been able to understand beyond the level of detail in the bible. We did not yet have concepts like "billions" or light years or atoms. (footnote C)

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Footnote A. Other gasses produced by outgassing include carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrochloric acid (HCl), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), nitrogen (N2) and various sulfur gasses sulfur gases. BTW, the CO and the CO2 were largely used up by the weathering of minerals. That likely why there is so much calcium carbonate (limestone, seashells, chalk marble etc.) and silica (sand, quartz and part of limestone). There is some debate about the water content- there is a competing model called the accretion theory but it is contradicted by the banded iron formations and sulfide minerals.

Footnote B. I'm only a physicist - you could probably get a better answer from someone with a biology related background. But basically there was no free oxygen - rocks older than about 2 billion years contain banded iron layers that would not have formed if there was very much oxygen available. Outgasses from volcanoes contain basically no free oxygen so the oxygen of the atmosphere is almost completely the product of the photosynthetic activity of green plants.

Footnote C. Some of the things that led me to be open minded were the way that the math for the flow of water and the math for electricity are so similar - the way that the number pi appears everywhere from the tiniest particles to circles to distant stars and the way that everywhere we look patterns are found among seeming chaos. I concluded that my vision of God was too small - that he is not limited by what he told Abraham and the other prophets. It makes me wonder what else there is that we are not yet ready to understand. It make me want to try harder to examine creation and better under. I suspect my vision of God is still too small - I just don't know in what way it is too small, much as Abraham couldn't forsee what we would later learn about chemistry and physics..

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