Drifting Continents

by Gene Shelburne

Remember Levi? He’s the five-year-old spelling whiz I told you about a year or so ago.

Today I got a letter from Levi.

“Dear Mr. Gene,” he wrote, “I’ve just had my seventh birthday! I also have a question. Do you think continental drift happened? I mean, if Noah was in Africa, how would he have gotten the animals in North America over there? Please tell me as soon as you can. Love, Levi.”

Want to hear my answer? O.K. If you insist.

“You asked me some good questions, Levi. I’m not an expert on geology, so I might not know what I’m talking about on the subject of continental drift. I suppose it could have happened. Pictures of earth taken from the satellites way up yonder sure make the continents look like jigsaw puzzle pieces that once fit together, so it’s possible that they drifted apart over millions of years.

“But there are some other possibilities, aren’t there?

“One option is that God made it just like it is now. I lean toward this explanation. The fact that the continents look like they used to fit together shouldn’t surprise us.

“If God poofed the world into being instantaneously, as many folks believe, he still made everything look like it fits with everything else. He made oil look like it came from fossils under pressure for eons. He made trees with rings, just like they had been standing there for forty years when they’d really been there only forty seconds. He made the Grand Canyon look like it had been eroding for a jillion years, although it showed up only moments before.

“Levi, I suspect that Adam even had a belly button so he would look like all the other humans who came along later. So maybe God made our continents (that do shift just a tiny bit every year) look like they had been doing it for many centuries . . . .

“I see another possibility, though, Levi. The Bible says that when God made the earth, it was ‘formless.’ Then on the third day, God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’

“Levi, I don’t know how God made that happen. It sounds like it happened instantly. But the Bible doesn’t say so. Maybe God decided to take a few million years to dry out that ground. If so, this would allow plenty of time for it to crack and break and drift to where it is today.”

Levi’s second question about the animals is harder. I’ll share my answer to that one in the next essay.