With all the focus on fossil fuels and the price of gasoline, it lead me to wonder how exactly do “Young Earth” fundie Christians explain the formation of crude oil?
Virtually every accredited scientist / geologist on Earth agrees that crude oil was formed by the decomposition of organic materials, plants and animals, in an airless environment of 60 to 120 degrees C, under enormous pressure, for between 10 and 300 million years.
There are reams of scientific evidence for this process. There is another not widely held hypothesis called abiogenic petroleum origin, which doesn’t require organic materials/ fossils to create oil, but even that is predicated on an Earth that is billions of years old.
So what do the Young Earthers say? The Great Flood did it!! It buried trees and animals under sediment (in 40 days!!). The speed with which this occurred created enormous pressure and heat which created oil. Unfortunately, this simplistic and short cycle oil “creationism” can’t be supported by laboratory testing, scientific principles, or layered fossil evidence, nor can they offer any substantiation that demonstrates its efficacy in any scientifically sound way..
What Young Earthers DO offer is religious babble, because creationist ideas do not have to be scientifically sound or supportable, they only need be sound within the realm of creationist dogma. I.e. “God can make the Earth look like it was 100’s of millions of years old.” Well, that’s that! When someone invokes intentional deception by a supreme being or magic as the answer to anything, it pretty much puts the kibosh on any reasonable discourse with them. They are worshiping a God that needs to test his creations’ faith by making Earth look older than it really is. As Coral Yoshi said, “That’s a God with some serious self esteem issues.”
You won’t find any creationists with geology degrees working for oil companies, but more than one are employed by the Creation Museum, and probably Burger King.
Virtually every accredited scientist / geologist on Earth agrees that crude oil was formed by the decomposition of organic materials, plants and animals, in an airless environment of 60 to 120 degrees C, under enormous pressure, for between 10 and 300 million years.
There are reams of scientific evidence for this process. There is another not widely held hypothesis called abiogenic petroleum origin, which doesn’t require organic materials/ fossils to create oil, but even that is predicated on an Earth that is billions of years old.
So what do the Young Earthers say? The Great Flood did it!! It buried trees and animals under sediment (in 40 days!!). The speed with which this occurred created enormous pressure and heat which created oil. Unfortunately, this simplistic and short cycle oil “creationism” can’t be supported by laboratory testing, scientific principles, or layered fossil evidence, nor can they offer any substantiation that demonstrates its efficacy in any scientifically sound way..
What Young Earthers DO offer is religious babble, because creationist ideas do not have to be scientifically sound or supportable, they only need be sound within the realm of creationist dogma. I.e. “God can make the Earth look like it was 100’s of millions of years old.” Well, that’s that! When someone invokes intentional deception by a supreme being or magic as the answer to anything, it pretty much puts the kibosh on any reasonable discourse with them. They are worshiping a God that needs to test his creations’ faith by making Earth look older than it really is. As Coral Yoshi said, “That’s a God with some serious self esteem issues.”
You won’t find any creationists with geology degrees working for oil companies, but more than one are employed by the Creation Museum, and probably Burger King.
Well, actually, crude oil probably comes from compressed methane.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is that crude has no C-14, supporting the theory.
http://www.rolf-martens.com/UNITE!%20Infos/webstyle1/thomas_gold/04_origin_of_methane_and_oil_1993.htm
yeah... methane derives from organic materials.
ReplyDeleteI'll go with this explanation of "formation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
whats yer point about c-14? obviousloy c-14 dating has no bearing on something that's much older than 50k yrs old .