John Supp
2272
Answered
at 3:15pm on April 4th, 2008
Good question. I personally subscribe to an interesting, yet somewhat complex theory that does explain dinosaurs, Noah's flood, and apparent age descrepancies all at once. It's long, so bear with me. When describing creation and Noah's flood, the Bible makes reference to waters of the heavens. Obviously this became the rain, but where did enough rain come from to fall for forty days and forty nights, worldwide? The answer is the antedeluvian (pre-flood) canopy. Basically, it was a pretty thick cloud cover over the entire planet. It let enough light through to allow plants to live, but kept out the more harmful cosmic radiation, like UV rays and such. Now, it is theorized that the outer shell of this canopy, being exposed to basically hard space, would have frozen. This would also lead to a pressurization of the inside atmosphere to about twice the pressure we have today. Interestingly, studies performed on plants and animals inside hyperbaric (high-pressure) chambers have shown them to grow to amazing size. In one of these studies, single tomato plant yielded over 100 tomatoes. Also interesting, based on the skeletons of dinosaurs, we can extrapolate the necessary size of their organs in order to support such a creature. As it happens, dinosaurs would not have had the lung capacity to breath an atmosphere as thin as our own. However, double the pressure, and the lungs can come down to a reasonable enough size to allow for the other organs to fit. Those creatures in the hyperbaric chambers, they also lived significatly longer than those species normally do. Another interesting side effect of living at 2 atm pressure, the blood gets saturated with oxygen and lactic acid doesn't build up in the muscles nearly as fast. This means that you could run at a rather fast pace for a very long time before needing to rest. Combine that with the size factor (Adam was believed to be about ten feet tall, and capable of jogging at more than forty mph), and you could take an afternoon jog to grandma's house...eighty miles away. So, if you combine these factors, no harmful cosmic rays, twice the air to breath, it's not all that far fetched that the dinosaurs were created as the Old Testament says, and that they simply couldn't survive the collapse of the antedeluvian canopy and the lower pressure atmosphere it created.
Now, regarding geologic time, there are plenty of episodes even in modern history of very rapid geological change. The eruption of Mt. St. Helens was a case study in rapid climate change. It had an horrific effect on the local geography in a matter of hours and days, not millions of years. It even lowered global temperatures a degree or two due to the massive amounts of ash it blew into the air. Krakatoa did a similar thing when it created the "year without summer". Basic point, geology can change a lot faster than evolutionists are willing to admit, besides all the other evidence for why the earth might be more than ten thousand years old, but can't possibly be millions. My favorite is the shrinkage rate of the sun. Did you know that, due to the fact that it's a huge hydrogen bomb, the sun is constantly losing massive amounts of, well, mass. Astronomers have actually measured it's rate of shrinkage to be approximately four feet a second. At this rate, all else being equal, the suun would have been as big as earth's orbit only a few million years ago, not hundreds or thousands. Anyway, sorry it's so long, but a theory as complex as this one doesn't make much sense if it's condensed much further. For more info on young-earth science, search for a man named Dr. McMurtry. He knows this stuff a lot better than me.
