Faith + Reason = Truth

A Story About the World, God, And Us

The interior of the earth is extraordinarily hot. Hot enough to melt things. Certainly hot enough to instantaneously transform water into steam.

But how do you get deep enough into the earth to reach that heat, and how do you get vast quantities of water to it – enough to exceed the energy demand of civilization, and then some? Then, say you DID figure out how to accomplish these magnificent feats of engineering and environmental manipulation; wouldn’t the world still feel, or at least remember, the impact of such achievements?

Most importantly, how would you keep from blowing everything up in the process?

Α

In the beginning was the World.

And the World was with God.

And the World was God.

Slight variation on a familiar theme. The earth has been worshiped in one way or another since the dawn of humanity. Not since the dawn of life, but of humanity. Why haven’t any of the other living creatures in the history of history worshiped earth (or anything else, for that matter)? Why is worship a uniquely human trait?

We aren’t trying to answer that question here, so let us get back to the task at hand: earth as something to be worshiped, something to be feared, something so big and complex and incomprehensible and seemingly all-powerful as to be, for all intents and purposes, God-like. The key word in all of this is “power.” A source of energy.

Β

Millions of people throughout history have witnessed first-hand the awesome fury and raw, unharnessed power of the planet. This power is associated with the rotation, the spin, of the earth. Rotating clouds in the form of cyclonic storms; rotating hot core of the earth liquefying the middle layer, the mantle, so that the harder, cool crust floats freely on top of the molten rock beneath, with different broken parts of rock crashing into each other and rubbing against one other as tsunami-causing earthquakes while also relieving itself of unfathomable pressure by sporadically flowing or exploding through the surface of the earth as erupting volcanic splendor.

Unfortunately for many of those tens or hundreds of millions of eyewitnesses, untold numbers did not live through their experiences. But some did.

Γ

The important dynamic here is pressure, caused by rotation. Pressure so great, it causes heat of sufficient intensity to melt metal and rock; pressure and the resultant heat are central to this story.  What happens to water when it gets too hot?  What happens to hot water, steam, when it gets subjected to too much pressure?  Could the catastrophic effects of these causes be categorized as being of "biblical proportions"?

Afar, in East Africa, is considered by many anthropologists to be the cradle of the earliest recognizable relatives of homo sapiens.  I won't say "humanity" because of the connotations that arise from that word, such as civilization, empathy, consciousness, and the like.  But homo sapiens does appear to most scientifically trained personnel in that field to be the current working version of a long line of genetic upgrades that have transpired over millions of years.

Afar is a barren, desolate, parched patch of planet that begs the questions of "how?" and "why?" - as in, "how could anything remotely like a person have survived here?" and "why here, of all places?".  The answer to both of these questions is the same, which is, the land that is now Afar was, at one time long ago, a very different place.  Was it the bottom of an ocean?  Was it the top of a mountain or volcano?  Was it a river bank or a lake shore?  Was it a lush paradise at the foot of great waterfalls, a Garden of Eden?  It could have been any of the above, and geologists have their own guesses.