This was reported a few months ago, and I've been meaning to blog on it, but for various reasons I have not... Until now. You see, analyses of some very old minerals, 4.2 billion years old, to be exact, show that on this very early earth there was an ocean and that earth may have even been frozen over during this time. This is a huge change from our original understanding, which was that the earth was a fiery hell up until around 3.9 billion years ago. Of course, the new research has a few skeptics (This is a new and different picture of the early earth, after all), But, this research ought to stick in the craw of creationists for several reasons:
1. It provides evidence that there was a primordial soup. For some reason creationists like Lee Strobel and Michael Denton think this a major point. It has now vanished. There is, at very minimum, some evidence for the primordial ocean.
2. It allows hundreds of millions of years more than previously thought for the origin of life to occur. This means that the origin of life is allowed to be even more improbable, since we now have good reason to think that it had much more time to happen.
3. If the earth was frozen over, as this research suggests, it provides even more opportunity for life to originate in ice, which is what many scientists have begun to suspect.
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