What do YECs say about where crude oil comes from (besides “God made it”)?
The flood - In general, YECs argue that the flood is responsible for all fossils, including fossil fuels.
“Young Earth Creationists” is a thing? I mean, they call themselves this?
On this topic, this is an interesting read. Essentially, you can’t be effective in the field of petrochemical geology, if you have a YEC geological view - it just doesn’t work.
Absolutely, yes - to distinguish themselves from other kinds of creationists (who they consider to be in error)
They probably call themselves God-fearing Christians.
But there are many Christians who claim that Genesis is just a metaphor, and accept pretty much every scientific consensus about the Big Bang, evolution, etc., except they add the non-disprovable assertion that God intervened at certain points.
It’s useful to distinguish those mildly irrational people from the batshit crazy people who believe that Genesis should be taken literally (as the vast majority of Christians and Jews believed until at least the 19th century, regardless of famous exceptions), and that the genealogies show that the world was created about 6000 years ago (or, if you’re a liberal YEC, up to 10,000 years ago).
Here’s a site from someone claiming not only that oil comes from the flood, but that the pre-flood civilization was high tech.
I don’t know how many YECs have embraced this, but some believe the theory of “abiotic oil.” It basically says that oil does not come from fossils, but rather from a process deep in the earth’s mantle. It leads to the claim that oil fields are self-replenishing.
There used to be “old Earth creationists” who basically tried to wrap scripture around the geologic facts as opposed to the other way around with YECs. For example, the days of creation were held to represent different eras on the geologic time scale. It’s sort of a compromise between the absolute literalism of YEC and just calling the whole thing a fable, since OECs still believed that Genesis was a literally true account of the Earth’s history that He had merely dressed up with language that His iron-age audience would understand. (Interestingly, this is also the attitude fundamentalist muslims usually take – they agree with most modern science but contend that it was in the Quran all along.)
OEC used to be the dominant paradigm in geology departments at religious schools, but has mostly been forced out by YECs. I’m sure there are still plenty of Christians in geology and other sciences who hold similar beliefs, but they mostly avoid using the term “creationism” at all these days. Of course there’s also not big organizations advocating for old Earth creationism either.
Anyways, that’s why there’s the “young Earth” descriptor there, even if old Earth creationists are pretty thin on the ground these days.
Oh, but as to the OP, there’s nothing about oil per se that would rule out a young Earth. The reason why oil takes millions of years to form is that it takes that long for potential source rocks to get buried deep enough for oil to form. Once they’re there, the actual process of petroleum formation and migration can happen over human lifetimes. If we pretended that those rocks were created in the oil window depths, them being only 6000 years old wouldn’t be a problem.
What is a problem though is that virtually every other facet of petroleum geology requires an ancient earth and it has been extremely effective at predicting where oil will be found. In that great story Mangetout posted, it wasn’t any one particular aspect of petroleum geology that the author found couldn’t be explained by YEC, but the fact that petroleum geology worked so well and YEC geologic contentions added nothing to the process.
I am not very religious and not Christian. I work a lot with petroleum refining and downstream products. I am not a geologist but I believe geology is in its infancy too and the fossil origins of petroleum has a few significant gaps too - like the prevalence of Helium in natural gas and Vanadium in crude. If I understand correctly, we have not even explored 1% of the earth’s depth (radius) of 6400 km.
Could you expand on this? I don’t understand the significance of helium and vanadium.
Seismic geophysicist here.
The process by which helium is found in natural gas is pretty well understood, actually. This isn’t much of a gap in hydrocarbon geology.
Helium is a natural by-product of radioactive decay (a helium atom is basically an alpha particle). And there’s a lot of radioactive decay in the earth’s crust.
But helium is also not very dense, so it usually escapes upwards to the atmosphere (via the ocean in most places). A geologic trap that traps natural gas will often also be effective at trapping helium. It works the other way, too. If cracks in the earth are big enough to let natural gas escape to the atmosphere, they’re also big enough to let helium through.
Fluids of all sorts (oil and gas) seep up from the source layer they’re created in. One way to identify where to find the likely deposits is to identify the source layer deposits (Cretaceous, Jurassic, or what have you) and identify migration pathways the fluids can take to shallower rocks. These migration pathways are often fractures (often called faults) in the earth and the traps take several forms, including structural and geologic traps, like faulting that results in tight seals of sands on shales or “domes” of rock or fractures abutting salt.
A game we often play when training new hires is to have them identify on a seismic section just how oil/gas can migrate upward from source rock and where the likely traps are.
Note that not all natural gas deposits are created equally. The “tighter” ones will have higher concentrations of helium, since there’s less chance of the helium escaping.
A friend told me that when you take all the possible radioactive elements that can generate helium - take their concentration in the first 25 km of earth’s crust and multiply by the volume of the earth’s crust - it gives you the mass today of the radioactive elements. Accounting for the many half lives it took from the oldest known oil formation you can calculate how much of the radioactive elements there were at the start and now you can calculate the amound of helium that could have been generated in all this time. This does not match up with the known helium produced + reserves
Do you have a cite that digs this in deeper ?
The book Omphallos was IIRC roughly contemperaneous with Darwin. Omphallos held that everything was created as though it had a past. Adam was created with a navel (Omphallos means navel) and digested waste in his colon. The earth was created with strata and fossils of a past that never was. Why? It’s ineffable.
Also called Last Thursdayism.
I guess creating a “past” is necessary to keep the machinery of reality consistent.
Which means in-fucking-credible, right?
Poor Gosse (the poor goose!) He thought that the Omphalos hypothesis would be welcomed with rejoicing by both sides of the evolution controversy! It answered everyone’s objections, and so elegantly. He was astonished (his son wrote later) when he was not only not welcomed with open arms, but entirely ignored!
Up until the 16th century, the vast majority of Christians were discouraged from reading the Bible, which was not allowed to be translated into vernacular languages, and not very widely available even in the permitted Latin or (in the East) Greek versions. People believed that the Bible said and meant what their priests told them it said and meant, and it was not Church dogma that Genesis should all be understood literally. (Furthermore, many, perhaps most, parish priests were themselves illiterate, and so, at best, had only secondhand knowledge of the Bible’s contents.) No doubt many of those who were actually aware of the Genesis creation story took it to be literally true, but that was because no more plausible alternative was on offer, from anywhere, not because church dogma demanded it.
In those days, you did not have to be batshit crazy to believe the Genesis creation story, but neither was it mandatory to believe it to be literally true. These days, of course, you do have to be batshit crazy.
I find it interesting that so many people in this thread were there at the creation of the world and saw the formation of oil and gas. The truth is that none of us were there to scientifically observe and record any information ourselves. I am in the oil and gas business and I can say with absolute surety that there are still many, many unknowns about how oil got to where it is and where it came from. We are still guessing on that. What we are getting good at is finding where it is now and how to get it out. But where it came from and how it got to where it is now is purely conjecture and educated guesswork. There are many, many problems with the theory that oil comes from living organisms as the chemical make up of oil rarely equates to the same chemicals found in organic compounds. We have all but given up the idea that oil came from dinosaurs, and now the guess is that it came from algae and is plant based, but even there essential elements are missing or toxic elements are in their place. The Russians have come up with a theory that oil is not biologically formed, which takes care of the chemical problems of non organic composition, but does not explain the migration of oil through multiple layers of rock after being necessarily “burned” by the extreme high temperatures at such great depths. None of the current theories can be scientifically reproduced and as such are just theories, not reaching the level of scientific fact, which involves observation, and repeatable results. Don’t’ be afraid to just say “We don’t know yet.”
And if we honestly don’t know, then I would be careful throwing God under the bus with your limited knowledge of the situation, unless of course you consider yourself God with unlimited knowledge yourself.