Creationism Refuted - What Was Happening In Australia Long Before 'Creation Week'

An ancient Australian landscape shaped by millions of years of slow erosion, Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia.

Maximilian Dröllner

Binocular microscopic images of zircon crystals separated from various studied rocks: (a) gabbro A1: P4, A2: S20; (b) porphyritic granite, B1: S1, B2: L1, B3: S5, B4: S6; (c) fine-grained granite, C1: L3, C2: S12, C3: S7, C4: S12; (d) mylonitic granite, D1: S4, D2: S5, D3: L5, D4: P2; (e) leucocratic granitoid, E1: S3, E2: L5, E3: G1, E4: P2; bars: 100 m.

Shahbazi, Hossein; et al. (2014)

A ‘cosmic clock’ in tiny crystals has revealed the rise and fall of Australia’s ancient landscapes

The Bronze Age creation myths preserved in the Bible assert that Earth is only some 6,000–10,000 years old, depending on how the text is interpreted. The difficulty for those who insist on treating the Bible as literal history is that these claims are casually and repeatedly refuted by real-world evidence. That leaves creationists with few options other than bearing false witness against scientists or asserting that the physical evidence itself must be deceptive—despite their own scripture reassuring them that the god it describes “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).

The problem is compounded by the fact that scientists are continually improving their ability to measure the age of things, including the histories of entire continents. We can now say, with a high degree of confidence and with abundant supporting evidence, that Earth is billions of years old and has undergone profound changes over that vast span of time. These include the movement of tectonic plates, the rise and erosion of mountain ranges, repeated fluctuations in sea level, major climate shifts, and the appearance, spread, and extinction of forests and entire orders of animal and plant life.

That ability has now taken another significant step forward. A team of scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and the University of Cologne in Germany has developed a technique that not only allows rocks to be dated, but also reveals what has happened to them over immense spans of time—recorded in microscopic zircon crystals as they were exposed at Earth’s surface, buried, and later re-exposed. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Three members of the team have also published an open-access article in The Conversation, which I will reproduce below under a Creative Commons licence, formatted for stylistic consistency. Before that, however, here is an explanation of how this remarkable technique works, and why it allows scientists to reconstruct the deep-time history of entire landscapes.

Refuting Creationism - How Plate Tectonics Allowed The Interchange of Species, Including Human Ancestors, Between Africa and Asia

How Activity in Earth’s Mantle Led the Ancient Ancestors of Elephants, Giraffes, and Humans into Asia and Africa | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

An international team of geophysicists has uncovered compelling evidence that tectonic activity approximately 20 million years ago created a land bridge between Eurasia and Africa via the Arabian Peninsula. This geological event facilitated the migration of various animal species, including the ancestors of modern elephants, giraffes, and hominins, from Eurasia into Africa, which had been relatively isolated since the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

The formation of this land bridge resulted from the collision between the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates. This collision led to the uplift of the Arabian Peninsula and the closure of the Tethys Seaway, effectively splitting it into what are now the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas. The closure of the Tethys Seaway had significant climatic and ecological consequences, including alterations in ocean circulation patterns and the aridification of regions such as the Sahara Desert.

The newly formed land connection enabled a significant faunal exchange between Eurasia and Africa, known as the Proboscidean Datum Event. This event is marked by the migration of proboscideans (elephant ancestors) and other species into Africa, as well as the dispersal of African species into Eurasia . This biogeographical interchange had profound implications for the evolutionary trajectories of numerous species, including primates.