, and it's honestly very painful and saddening to see religious individuals deny things that can be directly perceived because they're convinced it has to invalidate their beliefs.
I feel the same way. In my view of things, the earth is only about 4,000 - 8,000 years old. But that right there seems to contradict things that take a long time to happen, like fossilization, the amount of light years to visible objects in the celestial sphere, and my all-time favorite: plate tectonics. However, the way I see some of these things, keeping what we know now from science in mind, makes them totally possible.
You know, this'll probably be long and boring to read, but I'm going to give my theory of plate tectonics that I've come up with pretty much myself (there might be other people out there with the same thoughts, but I never heard of them...)
Now we all have heard about Pangaea/Pangea, the supercontinent that supposedly existed before out current seven continents.
Even in such a small time frame with similar speeds that we get today from the movement of the continents, Pangaea could very well have existed and gotten to how we see landforms today. Let's look at how the plates are today.
Take a look at the Atlantic ocean division, commonly known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Here, molten rock hardens and spreads apart. This spreading pushes the nearby plates so that Eurasia and Africa are moving farther away from the Americas. However, if you look at the general shape of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it molds quite nicely with the landmasses on either side, making it totally plausible that Eurasia and Africa were at one time connected together in a larger landmass. At the current rate of 1 or 2 inches per year however, this would supposedly take millions of years right?
So far, everything I've covered is pretty much common knowledge. Now I'll get into the stuff I've come up with.
My theory is that plate tectonics simply were not a thing while Pangaea was still in one piece. All we lived on was a totally solid planet with no cracks or contusions in the crust. There would have been no earthquakes, no volcanoes, and little or no movement of the gigantic land mass. I'm kind of inclined to say that there wouldn't have been regular mountains or hills, but I don't know if they would've, making the assumption that God created all, actually been created.
According to the Bible, mankind became incredibly wicked after the falling out Adam and Eve had in the garden. God decided to destroy every living thing with a worldwide Flood. He had Noah build an ark and sent animals to him, which could've gotten to Noah making the assumption that Pangaea was still in existence (knocks out the argument that animals would have to cross oceans to get to Noah, since humans supposedly didn't exist during Pangaea's breakup in the uniformitarianist perspective).
Next comes how the Flood happened.
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.
Genesis tends to narrate things quite poetically. "The floodgates of the sky were opened" clearly implies rain, but 40 days of the heaviest rain ever recorded would not fill the entire Earth to the point that all land is underwater. That's where we take "the fountains of the great deep burst open". "Fountains" seems to imply water shooting
upward. "Of the great deep" implies coming from inside the Earth or ground. Could we theorize that water had existed underneath the Earth's crust for some amount of time? Actually yes. Scientists using seismograms have found an enormous amount of water still underneath Asia and think it could be as big as the Arctic Ocean (
Citation).
Well, what if the crust suddenly had a massive rupture thereby releasing these enormous amounts of water? That would open up massive cracks all over the world. Even just a couple of miles worth of trapped water would've left the whole planet waterlogged. If one of these cracks happened in the middle of the Pangaea supercontinent, it would cause a divide and water would rush in to fill the gap. Now we have multiple continents all in very close proximity. All of which are underwater.
This comes to another realization. How are scientists finding the fossils of water creatures in deserts, on mountains, and in completely landlocked areas? Well, if the continents were all underwater, such as in a massive catastrophic event such as the Flood, we would have water creatures living and dying where there corpses would then sink onto one of the landmasses to begin the fossilization process.
None of this yet satisfies how the continents got so far apart so fast, or even crashed together so hard as to cause mountain ranges (India to Eurasia with the Himalayas for example). This is where we get into physics. Once again, I will use the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as an example. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a mountain where the American plates meet the Eurasian and African plates. Well what if a mountain suddenly sliced through Pangaea along one of the new fault zones?
Lets say that this mountain is like a hyperbolic ramp, similar to this (pardon the example, not finding good images but you should get the gist)
Imagine that the very top is the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. On one slope, you have the Americas. On the other slope, you have Eurasia/Africa. What happens if you put a ball at the top of one of the slopes? It will slide down at a high velocity. Once the ball reaches the flattened area of the hyperbola (flat, no gradual asymptotes), friction will slow it down. Were the continents at one time moving much faster than they are today? I think a good theory to consider. Clearly the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is creating more crust and spreading it outwards so the continents probably won't completely stop.
tl;dr - sorry, there isn't one
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