When and How the Earth Was Formed – Part I

One of the issues theorists have with south America being the Land of Promise, is that Carbon-14 dating shows continued settlements and occupation in South America dating back long before the Tower and before the Flood, to near the time of the last Ice Age.

The wide, flat expanse of the tropical ecosystem of the Amazon Rain Forest

On that basis, the Amazon could not have been underwater until the time of the crucifixion when the “the whole face of the land was changed” (3 Nephi 8:12).
    Much of the work done in claiming that the Amazon basin was occupied is found in the research of American archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Anna C. Roosevelt, who is the great-granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and considered one of the leading American archeologists studying Paleoindians in the Amazon basin.
    She also claims that archaeological evidence from an excavation at Caverna da Pedra Pintada, an archaeological site in northern Brazil in the Amazonian Basin, human inhabitants first settled in the region at least 11,200 years ago (Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, et al., "Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas," Science, vol.272, Is.5260, April 1996, pp373–384).
    Formerly, researchers believed that Amazonian settlements arose later than those in the Andes, and were developed by migrants from the highlands. However, this has not been borne out by the cave dwellings found at Pedra Pintada. The site has cave paintings where hundreds of drops of paint and lumps of pigment have been found that date the cave's wall paintings, the results making them the earliest ones in South America and the earliest known cave paintings in the Americas. Images include a stick figure of a woman giving birth, geometric designs, and hand stencils in browns, reds, and yellows (Jessica E. Saraceni and Adriana Franco da Sá, “People of South America,” Archaeology, vol.49, No.4, July/August 1996).

Serranópolis is a municipality in the southeast Goiás state of Brazil, and is one of the most sparsely inhabited

In addition, Altair Sales Barbosa of the Catholic University of Goiás has discovered two fossilized skeletons in a cave at Serranopolis in central Brazil, tentatively dated to 11,000 years ago. The well-preserved remains of a 25- to 30-year-old man were found in a fetal position with one hand pressed against his forehead. A child's skeleton in poor condition was also recovered, along with necklaces made of human teeth and mother of pearl.
    Barbosa determined the age of the skeletons by carbon dating plant and animal remains found in the same strata; samples of the bones themselves have been sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for carbon dating. Archaeologists await Barbosa's published results. "Unless directly dated, it is still possible that these burials were deposited in a Paleoindian site at a later time," suggested Roosevelt.
    Now here we find distinct evidence of the claim of scientists that the remains and settlement in Brazil predates the Bible’s dating of the Flood by over 9,200 years, and the time of Adam by over 7,500 years. Obviously, in this case, science and the Bible do not support one another. More accurately, here we see how scientific findings do not support the carbon-14 dating evidence. Just as obviously, one or the other is inaccurate.
    Of course, scientists who have been forcefully schooled in a 4.55-billion-year-old Earth, clearly will claim that the Bible is wrong. Also of course, while they claim the Bible cannot be proven and is only a believability issue, they do not realize that their claim to factual knowledge is what they have been taught, which history is but a series of beliefs, assumptions, and theories masquerading as facts.
    According to Richard Harter (Changing Views of the History of the Earth, 1998), there was a time (1600 AD) when the Earth was believed to be 6000 years old, by the 1700s, it had become 75,000 years old; in the 1800s the age was believed to be somewhere between 20 (Kelvin) to 55 million (Wolcott) years, and by 1899, it was 90-100 million years old (Joly). By 1911, Arthur Holmes claimed a dating from 340 million (Carboniferous sample) to 1640 million (Precambrian sample) years old. By 1920, the lower figure had grown to 570 million years; but in 1921, that age was upped to 3.4 billion years old; then 3 to 4 billion, and 4.6 billion by 1929, according to Henry Russell. In 1941, those earlier estimates were changed to only 3.2  billion years by E. Gerling; then to 3.3 billion in 1946 by Arthur Holmes; then in 1953, F.G. Houtermans computed an age at 4.5 ± 0.3 billion years old; and in 1956, the age was thought to be 4.55 ± 0.07 billion years; and in 1998, the figure was adjusted to 4.55 ± 0.02 billion years, which is where it has remained since; however, Harter also claims that the current figure “is almost certain to encompass future changes as well.”
    Whether this will be changed at some point in the future cannot be said, nor can it, based on experience, be claimed that this last figure is the final figure that will be proposed. Science, after all, has never had the last word on almost any matter.
    While science continually changes as additional and more accurate information is obtained, discovered, and improved, none of this is meant to ridicule science or its efforts. Many great and important knowledge has come through the sciences. All that is being suggested here is that at any period in history, the then current knowledge was altered as time passed and more knowledge was achieved.
    Consider as an example, regarding the Age of the Earth—if science was not governed by pre-determined, mostly agnostic to atheist people, other avenues to search might be taken—one such example is the concept that the Earth was not created ex nihilo, meaning “out of nothing,” but was organized by a Supreme Being ex materia, meaning “out of existing, eternal matter.”

Origin of worlds ex materia, that is, organization from unorganized matter (often called chaos)

In Ancient Middle East religions, such as Judaism, as well as Ancient Near Eastern mythology, it was envisioned that the creation took place ex materia, created by God, or the gods, out of already-existing eternal or primeval matter, known as chaos, which was then seen as a complete disorder and confusion. As an example, an early 50 AD conflation of Greek philosophy with the narratives in the Hebrew Bible came from Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, writing in the context of Hellenistic Judaism. A Jewish philosopher trying to develop speculative and philosophical justification for Judaism in terms of Greek philosophy, he equated the Hebrew creator-deity Yahweh with Aristotle’s primum movens (First Cause), in an attempt to prove that the Jews had held monotheistic views even before the Greeks. However, this was still within the context of creation from pre-existing materials, that is, "moving" or "changing" a material substratum.
    Should science ever come to the conclusion that study on the creation of the Earth affirms God's purpose and role, while recognizing creation as organization of preexisting materials, and not created from nothing, such as a “big bang,” a future understanding of the Earth’s age would be drastically curtailed. However, it is extremely doubtful that science would ever consider such an intellectual pursuit, let alone base any credibility on what evidence exists to support such a matter.
    Despite the fact that there are Flood legends in almost every country of the world, all dating to antiquity or pre-history, and almost all having common ingredients in each, by 1836, the idea of a Noachian flood as a source of major geological change was abandoned by scientists in favor of postulated numerous antediluvian catastrophes.
(See the next post, “How the Earth Was Formed and When – Part II,” for more information on the rejection of the Biblical development of the earth and the Flood, and also regarding the Time Clock and its incorrect setting by which almost all archaeology is today dated)