CreatorWorship

Science is a great tool for exploring the world. It saddens me that it has so much been commandeered for purposes contrary to the truth of God’s Word. Many of the processes discovered and described by scientists accurately align with observable reality, but particularly on the subject of time scales, their tomes do not ring true to what is verifiably true from Scripture or nature. I choose to believe what the Bible says over the faith system based on time, chance, matter, and energy. I think that it takes greater faith to worship these inanimate gods. So, I like to discuss weathering, for instance, but I reject uniformitarian time scales based on my faith and the field ‘evidence’ tendered (see 4th paragraph of “Four Singularities”; 3rd paragraph of “Amazing, Credible, Scientific Point of View”; “Many Grand Canyons”).

While teaching Earth Science, we discuss weathering at length. As with any study, teachers and students categorize subject matter. This frequently separates ideas that would naturally be together if organized in another way. For instance, is weathering a subject to be initiated and discussed in geology, hydrology, meteorology, or oceanography? It should be discussed in all of these areas of study, including astronomy (evidence of erosion on Mars, for example) and ecology (interaction biotic and abiotic factors in soil formation and fertility, for example). Where it is initiated is a bit harder. Do you begin during discussion of the rock cycle, or when you explain formation of soils, or when the main agent, water, is acting upon rock? I have chosen to mention it during oceanography, hydrology, and minerals and rocks units, but devote a separate unit to weathering and erosion by fleshing out the details of “WETS”: weathering, erosion, transportation, and sedimentation, and also soil formation. I repeat these concepts many times during the day and from semester to semester. Along with the hazards of plate movements, I guess the ocean part of change got to me, resulting in the following poetic outworking:

Wave upon wave upon the coast breaks
Battering and bludgeoning the shore
Each grain of sand that it takes
Builds a beach or a bar or seafloor

Longshore currents carry sediments
Outsourced from the rivers and headlands
Man-made wall impediments
To the flow of the nourishing sands

In deltas and mangrove swamps land grows
Protected from tidal surge and wind
Barrier isles resist flows
From storm surges and tsunamis that rend

Estuaries were once rivers
Where now the brackish waters are mixed
Fjords formed where one shivers
By ice scouring hard rock once fixed

Island arcs form in convergent zones
Some are explosive in the extreme
Subducting ocean plate groans
Hydrothermal vents with strange life team

From hot spots and boundaries they grow
Deep under water, volcanic mounts
Up from the mantle below
Convective cells produce magma founts

Some seamounts are flat on top
Belying once shallower sea wave
Blue hole a flooded cave drop
Once air filled, now a watery grave

Mid-ocean ridges build ocean crust
Plates transform by seismic shear stress
Others earthquake megathrust
Oh, so much crustal strain and duress

So much building up and tearing down
Reveal beautiful changing landforms
Hard to see, so much is drown
But wear, change, and movement are the norms