This is the third installment in my "A Serious Question" series. The first two have been a success, marked by reasonable, on-topic discussion directly addressing the question at hand. Hopefully we may continue in that vein.
This week's question: Do creationists believe in Pangea - the idea that all of earth's continents used to be interlocked a geologically long time ago? I suppose there are four responses.
1) Yes, the continents have all shifted upon earth's plates from their original interlocking position from the Triassic age.
2) No, God created the continents just as they are today. Nobody has ever actually observed Pangea, and nobody has actually observed a continent in a different position, so there is not conclusive evidence that the continent's positions have drastically changed from the hypothesized original configuration. Pangea is not a testable theory, and thus unscientific.
3) Yes, but the continental rearrangement has taken only several thousands of years; there was no Triassic age.
4) No, although like the fossils, God has put evidence of Pangea in the earth, to either confound man or test his faith.
Please state which option most closely characterizes your beliefs about Pangea. I will be happy to entertain wholly different options as well.
Seeing as Dinosaurs were apparently real and lived peacefully in the garden of eden, those teeth were just for show, I suspect they will reply that pangea fell apart and seperated continents as part of god's wrath for the apple fiasco.
Originally posted by DoctorScribbles This is the third installment in my "A Serious Question" series. The first two have been a success, marked by reasonable, on-topic discussion directly addressing the question at hand. Hopefully we may continue in that vein.
This week's question: Do creationists believe in Pangea - the idea that all of earth's continents used to be interlock ...[text shortened]... rizes your beliefs about Pangea. I will be happy to entertain wholly different options as well.
I would support (3).
Just FYI, my favourite proponent of Catastrophic plate tectonics is Dr John Baumgardner, working at the Los Alamos National Laboratories (New Mexico, USA), who has used supercomputers to model processes in the earth’s mantle to show that tectonic plate movement could have occurred very rapidly, and ‘spontaneously’.
Originally posted by kingdanwa Do the non-creationists have a unified front? or do they fall into different categories on the issue of Pangea?
What about us non Christian theists? Why oh why are we (am I?) always left out of the mix? We're the only ones who are right after all and therefore should be allowed a voice.
Originally posted by kingdanwa Do the non-creationists have a unified front? or do they fall into different categories on the issue of Pangea?
I don't suppose there is such a unified front.
I suspect that creationists don't have such a unified front either, hence the four supposed answers I expected to get from various respondents, any one of which is compatible with creationism. I singled out creationists as a class because this is the Spirituality forum and because creationism places several prima facie constraints on believing in Pangea that non-creationists are not faced with. I expect that various creationists conform to these constraints in a variety of ways, reflected in the four given options.
I will rephrase the question if that will lead to more participation, and to the discovery of the answer to your question regarding a unified non-creationist front.
Does anybody believe in Pangea, and is anybody a member of an associated unified front?
Originally posted by Bosse de Nage Where do you stand on continental drift?
Based on my reading on the subject years ago in a children's encyclopedia, I would have to guess (1). But Omnislash's option - (5) - is not entirely incompatible with (1) and so, while I confess to not having more than a cursory knowledge of Pangea and would like to know more, it's not exactly top of my priority list of things I'd research into.
Originally posted by DoctorScribbles This is the third installment in my "A Serious Question" series. The first two have been a success, marked by reasonable, on-topic discussion directly addressing the question at hand. Hopefully we may continue in that vein.
This week's question: Do creationists believe in Pangea - the idea that all of earth's continents used to be interlock ...[text shortened]... rizes your beliefs about Pangea. I will be happy to entertain wholly different options as well.
A Serious Question: Pangea
13 Oct '05 16:021 edit
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