Where did Earth's Iron core come from and how did the mantle become molten?

Who said anything about "disbelieving"? The post you responded to was talking about accepting a non-literal interpretation ("poetic", symbolic, allegorical, metaphorical, approximate, inexact, non-specific, etc), as opposed to a literal one (7 days of 24 hours each, with no gaps in the account that might allow for any part of creation to be more than 7000 years old).Are you asserting that if you don't accept a strict, literal interpretation of the Genesis creation story, then your belief in God must crumble? Is your faith really so flimsy that you can't sustain it AND accept the observable physical evidence that things have actually been in existence far longer than 7000 years?Understand this, Arphy: Anything and everything expressed in human language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, English, and every other language, written and spoken) is subject to ambiguity, lack of clarity, reinterpretation, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding. This is as true for any religious text as it is for any web forum post. Translating from a language spoken thousands of years ago into a language spoken today can only exacerbate the problems.This is why science uses numbers and mathematics to express its observations and predictions, because numeric relations are not ambiguous. Quantitative measures are not without error, but the degree of possible error is routinely measurable and clearly understood. It is on the basis of mathematical relationships among various physical processes and objects (tree growth and tree rings, rates of radioactive decay and amounts of various isotopes, etc), that our conclusion of a very old earth and an older universe becomes inescapable. The lack of ambiguity in the math pretty well eliminates any "reinterpretation" that would assign an age less than a billion years, let alone 7000.Meanwhile, the vast lack of detail in the Genesis creation story should make it pretty easy for anyone to say "well, we could interpret that to mean... (something allegorical, metaphorical, inexact, etc)" -- and still be able to find divine truth in it (if that is what the person intends to do).If you choose an interpretation of the Genesis creation story that forces you to deny the regular mathematical relations that exist among objects and processes in the real world, well, that's a strange choice to make, and seems to me like a short-sighted view of both God and the world. Over the centuries there have been a lot of odd things that counted as "poetry" -- who's to say what sort of aesthetic pleasures were evoked among the ancient Hebrews in reciting those things? In any case, there's no need to argue about whether the genealogies and census counts should be considered metaphorical/allegorical/etc. Given the variety of persons involved in the writing, the range of topics discussed, and differences in the relative times of occurrence vs. recording, it would make sense that some portions of scripture would be considered more in the nature of "reporting details that have been kept track of", while other portions would be less so -- or not really reports at all, but rather just ways of answering questions that (at the time) couldn't be answered from direct knowledge. Well, that has to be your bottom-line answer, doesn't it? In essence, that's what people of religious faith have always done, effectively ever since writing was invented, whenever they didn't agree with the existing text. Often, the process is referred to simply as "a new translation" or "an alternate exegesis"; rather less frequently, it's a matter of adding new chapters of scripture and even a whole new book. Sure, that works for lots of folks -- they just choose which version of text and interpretation suits them personally (if they live in a society that permits them to make such a choice).In a sense, it works for scientists too, but with a crucial difference: the scientist must distinguish between stuff that is objective, observed fact (data), vs. stuff that is interpretation derived from facts (theory), and must treat these differently. The data cannot be just ignored, and cannot be revised or replaced unless there are newer methods of observation that make our knowledge of the facts more accurate and reliable. The theory has to be discarded or revised whenever its predictions are at odds with the data. It's never a matter of making a personal choice about believing or not believing -- the facts are what we know so far, and a theory fits or doesn't fit.Edited by Otto Tellick, : stylistic edit in last paragraphEdited by Otto Tellick, : tried to clarify closing sentenceEdited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.