The Recent Creation: Earth moves fast
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One of the most iconic movie scenes I can remember is in "Men in Black." Agent Kay, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is trying to recruit Will Smith's character into a secret agency that monitors extraterrestrial life on earth. He says, "Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
I'm not about to make an argument for aliens, but I would like you to reconsider what you think you know. Are you prepared to consider evidence objectively and make a rational conclusion based on that evidence, even if that evidence contradicts what you thought you knew? Christians are so often accused of refusing to hear evidence. I beg you not to be the same way.
It seems everyone knows that geological processes require thousands and millions of years. For instance, the National Park Services' website says the geological features of Grand Canyon National Park date back 1.8 billion years. Geologists estimate the total age of our planet to be about 4.5 billion years, and the age of our universe to be 13.8 billion years.
These estimates clearly conflict with the apparent age of the universe and earth as represented in the Bible. In the Bible, the gap between the first ray of light in the cosmos and man's first breath was not billions of years. It wasn't even a single year. It was five days. The generations and externally corroborated events recorded in the Bible strongly suggests that everything we see has only existed for less than 10,000 years.
Scientists and mainstream thought rejects this timeline for numerous reasons. One is the assumption that geological processes take too long for our world to be that young. All of the earth's highest, lowest and most spectacular geological features, the reasoning goes, would take millions of years to develop. Common thought points out how the position of the continents themselves are too far away from their apparent original positions on the primordial supercontinent of Pangaea. Glaciers require thousands of years to form and move. Canyons take millions of years to be slowly carved out by a meandering river.
The problem is that the evidence simply does not support these assumptions.
Consider how the earth can move and change fast. The last hundred years is full of evidence of how quickly the face of the earth can change. On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted. In a single cataclysmic event, one half cubic mile of rock and ice just slid down the side of the mountain. Between the first eruption and subsequent smaller eruptions, a 100-foot-deep canyon was formed in a nearby river over the span of two years. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Just two.
Similarly, a simple rainstorm in Brazil the night of June 8, 1974, carved a small canyon 16 feet deep, 50 feet wide and 1,600 feet long. That's more than 44,000 cubic feet of earth eroded over a single night.
In the 35 years since the original eruption at Mount St. Helens, crater glacier has formed at the same scale as other older glaciers and even moved at an extraordinarily fast speed. Apparently, glaciers really don't take that long to form.
The West Coast, along the San Andreas fault line, is littered with fences that have been offset by up to 20 feet in the course of a single earthquake. Their owners are kind enough to leave them as monuments to the earth's ability to move significant distances in short amounts of time.
In the last century alone, scientists have observed the formation of 19 entirely new land masses in the middle of the earth's various oceans. Notably, Surtsey off the coast of Iceland rose out of more than 400 feet of water and reached about 1 square mile in area and more than 500 feet above sea level over the course of five years. Apparently, things can move quickly.
Imagine what kind of erosion and continental drift could happen if God himself tore the earth open to force every drop of subterranean water to the surface and flooded the entire face of the earth. Imagine how fast the face of the planet could change. Creationist scientists estimate that during the flood that only Noah and his family survived, continental drift measured in feet per day was possible and lasted for at little more than a year.
Next, if the face of the planet can change that quickly, imagine how fast your own life can change. I see it all the time in ministry. One minute, life is going well. Then, something happens. There's an accident, or a spouse decides not to keep his promise, or dark secrets come out. The next moment, you're so hopeless you can't even imagine another good day.
In the face of change, where will you put your trust? The earth can move quickly enough to make some of the Bible's claims about the age of our planet reliable. When you own life moves and changes quickly, the Bible's claims about God's faithfulness and are for your life can also be proved reliable.