Q. 87: What is your view regarding the origin of comets?

CPT Q. #87 – 101 Q&A on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics

Question: 87. What is your view regarding the origin of comets?

Response: If one takes the account of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth provided in Genesis as genuine narrative history, as I believe the text itself indicates it should be taken, then it is plain that God worked in a miraculous way not only to create all living things including plants, animals and humans, but also the earth itself as well as the sun, moon, stars, and other celestial bodies. Just as I am persuaded we can never on our own discover what processes God may have used to make a bacterium, similarly, it is my conviction that, on our own, we can never discover how God made the earth, the moon, the sun, the stars, the asteroids, and, likewise, the comets. The Genesis text indicates that the material earth in its basic structure as we observe it today, apart for the destruction that took place during the Flood, was fashioned by God within the first three days of Creation Week. As we study the earth’s rocks, we seem to detect that a vast amount of processing occurred as God undertook this creation. It appears that much if not most of the mantle may have been molten at some point in the process; that what is now the continental crust may have been chemically extracted from this molten mantle rock; that these huge volumes of rock cooled and crystallized; and that all this elapsed within a few tens of hours. When one takes this sort of perspective on how the earth must have formed and realizes that God must have used similar wonderful processes to fashion the remainder of the bodies in the solar system, the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, and indeed the rest of the cosmos, to me it ought to cause us to have some humility as we consider these questions.

About all I can observe is that from the bodies in our solar system for which we have been able to determine the chemical composition, whether meteorites that have reached the earth’s surface, rocks we retrieved from the moon, particles we scavenged from the Wild-2 comet, spectra of elements we detect in the sun’s corona, or rocks we can analyze from the earth itself, the chemical composition from all these bodies seems astonishingly similar. It is as if these bodies were all made from the same basic batch of elements and isotopes. Although this may say a little bit about the larger process God may have used, to me the details are so complex and obscure that these issues are in the category of the “secret things” that “belong to the LORD our God.” (Deut. 29:29) To claim understanding of these matters, when our ignorance is so vast, seems to me at this point to be very foolish. So my answer to this question is, I have nothing coherent to offer on how comets came to be other than that God made them.