How do JW's explain the shifting continants?

by highdose 17 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • sizemik
    sizemik

    The Biblical description of a world-wide flood would undoubtedly unleash massive currents of water (flowing from valleys etc) that would result in extremely high seas, without the need for any tectonic movement to be involved. For hundreds of years following such an event the level of seismic activity would nevertheless be extremely high and destructive. There is no way a world wide flood could be survived in a little wooden boat. And there is no parallel description, either in cultural histories, or in the geological record, of the results of such an event.

    Volcanic eruptions are an essential feature of the carbon cycle. Without them, the conditions required for the evolution of carbon-based life would simply not exist. Volcanoes are essential for life on Earth.

    The current position of continents and their connection to a former super-continent (Gondwana) is well established through fauna and flaura fossil records. Like most features of the Earth, this is currently believed to be a natural cyclic function. Super continents form and break up on a cyclic basis, with as many as four cycles of super-continent formation and breakup having ocurred throughout the Earth's 4.5B year history.

  • jwfacts
    jwfacts

    it has been established that all the continants used to be joined together and indeed are still moving.

    Nothing is ever "established" in the mind of a believer that does not want to accept the evidence. A person can dismiss any information that they do not like with a simple "the scientists are wrong, we trust the bible."

  • sizemik
    sizemik
    A person can dismiss any information that they do not like with a simple "the scientists are wrong, we trust the bible."

    So true jwfacts . . . kind of like an intellectual stamping of the foot.

    Reminds me of trying to convince my children when they were about five years old . . . that it was a good idea for me to wipe the snot off their nose.

  • sir82
    sir82
    How do JW's explain the shifting continants?

    The same way they "explain" anything else that contradicts their theology:

    Either (a) "It's a machination of the devil!" or (b) "Jehovah must have done something marvelous, we just have to wait on Jehovah and in his due time we'll know the answer!"

  • Leolaia
    Leolaia

    The Society hasn't been consistent on this subject. The 1969 book Is the Bible Really the World of God, in an apologetic attempt to explain how the Flood waters covered the entire earth, argued that mountains like the Himalayas and the deep ocean basins did not exist until after the Flood (pp. 36-39), with the major geological changes occurring in the year that the Flood waters "receded". But then the 22 June 1977 Awake! had an article that summarized the major evidences and ideas of plate tectonics and presented it as a feasible, though not proven, theory. Yet the old catastrophic explanation of how the Flood could have covered the earth was still commonly used (Insight, 1988, Volume 1, p. 610), and the presence of marine fossils at the top of Himalayan peaks is also used as evidence of the Flood rather than plate tectonics lifting the seafloor upward (Did Life Get Here By Evolution of Creation, 1985, p. 203). More recently, Ciro Aulicino in his talk "You Will Be With Me in Paradise" made explicit mention of continental drift occurring catastrophically during the Flood:

    "Jehovah God can direct the cataclysmic forces at Armageddon to rejoin — now notice my word, I'm not saying join — to rejoin all the land masses as they once were before the Flood. And scientists tell us that is the study of Pangaea, which is at one time the earth was one complete connected land mass. It was in the Awake! magazine too. If you want to look it up on your new CD-ROMs, brothers, just press the button and you'll find it there. Connecting the Americas to Asia through the Aleutian chain, linking Europe through Britain to Canada, Australia to Asia via the Indonesian archipelago, and raising land corriders to island groups in the Pacific and the Carribean. Now why we cannot be dogmatic about all this, one thing is certain, friends. The topography of our earth will be changed, as it did under the heavy floodwaters of Noah's day. Remember, it was all connected and then it was all broken up. In fact friends, did you know that Jehovah used the Deluge's water to form the continents as we know them today?" (audio)

    The notion of "hyper plate tectonics" is purely motivated by religious beliefs, not by anything one could actually learn from science. It would seem that in reality, the JWs are "young earth creationists" after all. The planet is admitted as billions of years old but any actual geological history is strictly located within the very recent past, or else how would the Flood waters cover the tallest mountains? The uplifting of mountains and the subduction of plates down trenches is placed within a year's time, as these are necessary for the waters to cover land globally at the beginning of the year and for the waters to drain off land at the end of the year.

    To put things into perspective, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was the third most powerful quake ever recorded, 9.1. It produced the most devastating tsunami in recorded history. The plate shifted about 20 meters in this event. That's it. How long does it take a person to walk 20 meters? "Hyper plate tectonics" on the other hand would require plates moving thousands of miles very quickly; the northward movement of the Indian Plate, for instance, closed up part of the Tethys Sea and uplifted the seafloor. This would have, say, the Indian subcontinent move countless times faster than the spreading seafloor could be laid down at the central and southeast Indian mid-ocean ridges. That seafloor in general was laid gradually, of course, can be observed in the record of magnetic field directions in the oxides in the rock, the long string of seamounts, atolls, and islands formed by the mid-Pacific hotspot which show a long-term geologic cycle, the seasonal weathering of uplifted rock (such as the Alps which are worn down as quickly as they are lifted up, largely through spring meltwater from the snowpack), the geologic record of rivers changing courses many times, etc. The rate of uplift of the Himalayas would have to be much higher than is apparent at first glance since one would need to factor in erosion. According to surveys of the Himalayan plateau, a total of 5-9 km of rock was eroded from the Tibetan Himalayas and about 12-25 km from the Higher Himalayas, which produced the many foothills and smaller ranges to the south. Compare these figures with the height of Mount Everest, which is only 8.8 km in height. So the height equivalent of one or two Mount Everests have been eroded away throughout the whole plateau as the Himalayas were pushed up. And considering that under normal monsoonal conditions 2.9 mm is eroded away per year, it would take millions of years of weathering to accomplish this feat.

  • JustHuman14
    JustHuman14

    Well is the same reaction when you point out to them Dinosaurus that lived million years ago, and we had Flesh eating and grass eating dinos. They cannot explain the fact, that a "loving God" created this kind of wild beasts.

    In fact this shifting creating different kind of species on Earth showing that their "flood story" was just a local event.

    Not to mention all the fossils we find from Humanoids that lived hundred of thousands of years ago.

    It is all part of Devils efford to turn you way from the "truth".

  • highdose
    highdose

    the mind boggles when you think of the little jw boys who love to play with dinosauers and are fasinated by them.... yet their parents cannot explain where they came from.

  • sizemik
    sizemik

    How could anyone explain shifting continents . . . when they're scientifically incontinent

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