Coastal erosion and the age of the earth

Watching TV tonight BBC 'Coast' was looking at north east England, where coastal erosion is a big problem. Archive film was shown of a hotel collapsing into the sea a few decades back. a man with a house threatened by the advancing seas told how he had manhandled between 50 and 100 tons of rock and rubble into a structure he had made with iron. It seemed to be working, but one night a strong tide washed the whole lot away 'like ping pong balls'. We were told 'Nature will always have the last word.'

An item on this week's news mentioned another cliff fall in Dorset, at a place where a rock fall had killed a women a year ago.

 

 

I have seen rock falls like this in many places. The cliffs, like my wretched body, are wearing out relatively quickly, at a rate that can be observed. In various places in England, as elsewhere, the coast is visibly eroding. A road on the Isle of Wight near Freshwater Bay collapsed a few years back. The Bell Tout lighthouse in Sussex has been moved at great effort back from the cliff edge to stop it falling into the sea. Rates of UK coastal erosion are up to a metre a year or more. It is widely accepted that there was a land bridge linking England with France in the past, and given the current rates of coastal erosion probably not that long ago.

 

History programmes show us ancient human habitations which were built some distance inland but are now swallowed by the sea. The rate of erosion has clearly been quite steady and relentless over a number of centuries, as marked by archaeologically measurable human activities.

 

We are constantly told that these cliffs were formed over millions of years. But can see them falling down over thousands of years, year by year. Some disconnect, surely?

 

What does this tell us about the age of the earth? If we assume that the rates of erosion observed during human history were equally operative in pre-history, i.e. much more than 3,000 years or so ago, then if we extrapolate back we would find the lands newly emerged from the sea a matter of a few thousands of years ago. Because new cliffs are most certainly not appearing. Just as with species extinctions, the gradient is downhill all the way.

 

If we use the measured rate of coastal erosion as a clock, we certainly do not get a world millions of years old. If evolutionary geologists riposte that 'obviously rates of erosion must have been slower in the past' why do they assume this, and not that rates of erosion were faster? Supporters of either origins paradigm, theistic or materialistic, will tend to make assumptions that fit their preferred conclusions. But unproveable assumptions apart, we are left with an observable rate of coastal erosion which does not sit well with the earth having been subject to uniformitarian conditions for millions of years.

 

I don't pretend to be a geologist, but I know what I can directly observe. I also know very well that I have been systematically lied to about the biology of Darwinism. I therefore reserve the right to be highly sceptical when the same people who tell me that life came from sparks and a muddy puddle by accident and that mutations create meaningful new information (which they don't) also tell me that the world is billions of years old. The measured rates of coastal erosion are more consistent with a world only thousands of years old.

 

Why won't modern day Christians accept the biblical time scale for the age of the earth? Yes, I do know about the problems of distant starlight, but that's nothing compared to the problems the materialists have with abiogenesis and the origin of information, to name just 2 Darwin-busting issues. Disciples of Jesus should read the letter to the Hebrews 11:3 which states 'By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were made of things that are not visible' and also note the many scriptures about the mockers and scoffers who would come in the last days, denying the flood, denying God, and denying the last judgment. (e.g. 2 Peter 3:5-10)

 

The New Testament writers all quoted Genesis as history, and the vitally significant genealogies of Jesus are only part of what we have to throw out if we accept millions of years. May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It would have been no more difficult for the God whom Christians worship to create a mature earth (*) in six days that it was to raise Jesus from the dead. And much easier to raise the victorious Christ than to see our sins on his shoulders on the Cross.

 

The earth is wearing out. Western civilisation for all its cleverness is morally on its last legs. Entropy is at work, judgment is coming. Get into the Ark while you can.

 

(*) A mature creation, made by the command of a sovereign Deity to be fit for purpose, would inevitably have had the appearance of age, just as the newly created Adam and Eve would inevitably have been mature adults and the trees in Eden would have appeared perhaps hundreds of years old. When Jesus turned water into wine (see John's Gospel chapter 2), the drinkers at the wedding feast were deceived into thinking that the wine was at least a year or so old. This was not because God intended to hoodwink them, but because fit-for-purpose wine would INEVITABLY have appeared old.