Biblegems #225
Question: How
does the biblical scenario of a young earth / universe deal with scientific
data showing the earth has experienced 5 major Ice Ages, including our current
time Quaternary Ice Age beginning 2 1/2 million years ago?
According
to the Bible, glaciers would have followed the worldwide Flood of Noah’s day,
around 4,500 years ago. Because the Flood was due in large part to the eruption
of super-heated water from beneath the earth’s crust, in addition to torrential
rainfall, the floodwaters would have been very warm.
Gen. 7:11-12 In the
six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second
month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the
floodgates of the heavens were opened.
And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
Current
scientific models depicting multiple Ice Ages (extending back in time millions
of years) are based upon assumptions, not observable, measurable
scientific fact. The most critical assumption is that the relation between
temperature and precipitation has remained relatively constant throughout
earth’s history. Consequently, the past is measured by what can only be
observed in the present.
Not only
is such an assumption un-provable, there is much evidence to contradict it.[i] Consider
the glacier evidence at the Yosemite National park, for example. The evidence shows
that glaciers once covered the Yosemite valley to a depth of 3,00 feet. Recent
computer simulations demonstrate that “Glaciers thousands of feet thick could
have readily developed in hundreds of years following the Genesis
Flood.”[ii]
The book
of Job, likely the most ancient book of the Bible, contains recorded memories
of the Ice Age following the Flood:
Job
38:29 From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as
stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
Likewise,
a man named Peleg (translated: “division”),
one of Noah’s great-great grandsons, is noted in biblical history as from the
generation that witnessed the conclusion of the post-Flood Ice Age:
Gen. 10:25 Two sons were born to Eber: One was named Peleg, because in his
time the earth was divided…
This
“division” of the earth recalls a significant geological event, probably the
recession of the vast ice sheets, and the rising sea levels caused by the
melting ice, that “divided” the global landscape into the continents, as we now
know them.
Scientifically,
millions of years—even hundreds of thousands of years—are not required to
create the multiple ice layers scientists point to as evidence of Ice Ages in
the pre-human past. On the contrary, the rocks cry out in harmony with written
testimony from eyewitnesses that a great Ice Age covered much of the earth
following Noah’s Flood. This created land routes over which Noah’s descendants
could populate the earth. As the Ice Age ended, people groups were left stranded
on the seven continents.
The
evidence is there for all to see, but people who trust scientists more than
God’s Word “deliberately forget that long
ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and
by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and
destroyed” (2Pet. 3:5b-6).
