Does a receding moon equal a young Earth?

 

CLAIM: Tidal friction causes the moon to recede from the Earth at 4cm per year. It would have been greater in the past when the Moon and Earth were closer together. The Moon and the Earth would have been in catastrophic proximity (Roche limit) at less than a quarter of their supposed age. (Answers in Genesis, n.d.) (Batten, 2019) (Baugh, 1989, p.10-11) (Ferrel, 2006, p.135) (Ham, 2008, p. 98-99) (Ham, 2010, p.189-190) (Hovind, 2003, 1:13:49) (Miller, 2019) (Petersen, 2012, p.58)

RESPONSE: One of the more popular claims in young-Earth creationist literature is that the Moon's recession from the Earth imposes a strict limit on how long it could have been orbiting our planet. This argument hinges on the Moon gradually receding from the Earth at a semi-steady rate of about 4cm per year due to tidal interactions caused by the Earth's oceans. As the argument goes, if this rate is extrapolated backwards, the Moon would have been in contact with the Earth's surface only 1.2 to 1.3 billion years ago, meaning that neither the Earth nor the Moon could be any older.

At first glance, this claim seems straightforward. However, it rests on the critical assumption that the Moon's recession rate has remained constant over time - which it has not. The rate at which the Moon recedes depends on a complex interplay of factors, including the arrangement of continents, the depth and composition of the oceans, tidal dissipation, Earth's rotational speed, and the gravitational interactions between the Earth and the Moon. These factors were different in the distant past - Earth rotated more rapidly, resulting in shorter days, and the Moon was closer to the Earth, producing stronger tidal forces, meaning the rate of recession would have been significantly faster in earlier epochs but slower over time as the gravitational interaction weakened with increasing distance. (Isaak, 2004) This can be easily accommodated by the established age of the Earth-Moon system and does not support a radically younger age as the young-Earth position suggests. (Isaak, 2004; Thompson, 1999)

THE ROCHE LIMIT AND THE MOON'S SURVIVAL
A central pillar of the young-Earth argument from lunar recession is that if the Moon had ever been within the Roche limit of the Earth, it would have been torn apart by tidal forces. The Roche limit defines the minimum distance at which a celestial body held together by gravity can orbit another body without being disrupted. While this principle applies to bodies like comets or asteroids, it does not apply in the same way to solid, internally cohesive objects like the Moon. As early as 1947, it was demonstrated that the Moon's internal cohesion would have allowed it to survive within the Roche limit without disintegrating. (Jeffreys, 1947; Perez, 2023)

ATTEMPTS TO REVIVE THE ARGUMENT
Despite the substantial responses to the lunar recession argument, some young-Earth proponents have attempted to hold it together. Malcom Bowden's The Moon is Still Young (2000), Jonathan Henry's The Moon's Recession and Age (2006) and David Wright's Lunar Recession: Does it Support a Young Universe? (2006) all aim to defend the argument but fall short of addressing its flaws.

Bowden's article, published on the TrueOrigin Archive, oversimplifies its criticisms of the standard scientific model and is negatively impacted by its age and outdated arguments, such as Louis Slichter's 1963 observations regarding unresolved issues in tidal torque models. These challenges have been addressed in recent years - for example, a 2022 paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics (Farhat et al.) demonstrated how tidal resonances in Earth's ancient oceans could have significantly altered angular momentum transfer, resolving earlier uncertainties about the tidal torque and supporting a 4.5-billion-year timeline. Henry and Wright's articles fail to account for the complexity of tidal dynamics, assuming the constant recession rate while ignoring how factors like Earth's changing rotation speed, oceanic depth, and tidal dissipation affect the process. Moreover, they misapply the Roche limit by neglecting the Moon's internal cohesion, a critical oversight leftover from previous versions of the argument. (Isaak, 2004; Hadfield, 2012; Ross, 2014)

All these young-Earth arguments share a common flaw: they disregard empirical geological evidence that supports an ancient Earth-Moon system. Data from tidal rhythmites, coral skeletons, mollusk shells, and stromatolite growth patterns reveal gradual, consistent changes in the Earth-Moon distance over hundreds of millions of years and would need to be explained or accommodated by a young-Earth model that wanted to incorporate the lunar recession argument as a limiting factor on the Earth's age. (Isaak, 2004) While the lunar recession argument seems compelling on the surface, closer examination reveals serious flaws that have yet to be overcome by creation astronomy models due to a failure to fully engage with the complexity involved in salvaging the argument.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Bowden, M. (2000) The Moon is Still Young. TrueOrigin Archive.

Farhat, M., Auclair-Desrotour, P., Boue, G., Laskar, J. (2022) The resonant tidal evolution of the Earth-Moon distance. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 665, L1.


Henry, J. (2006) The moon's recession and age. Journal of Creatino, 20(2), 65-70.

Hore, M. (2014, July 7) Creation Science Issues: Lunar Recession. Old Earth Ministries.

Isaak, M. (2004, September 7) CE110: Moon Receding. Index to Creationist Claims.

Jeffreys, H. (1947) The Relation of Cohesion to Roche's Limit. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 107(3), 260-262.



Perez, J. (2023, January 1) Roche Limit. In M. Gargaud et al. (Eds.) Encyclopeda of Astrobiology (3rd ed., pp. 2687-2688). Springer.

RationalWiki (2024, April 22) Recession of the Moon.

Reed, T. [Tony Reed] (2014, December 5) How Creationism Taught Me Real Science 06 The Moon's Recession [Video]. YouTube.

Ross, H. (2014, June 5) Q&A: IS the Moon's Recession Evidence for a Young Earth? Reasons to Believe.

Thompson, T. (1999, December) The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System. TalkOrigins.

Wright, D. (2006, August 11) Lunar Recession: Does It Support a Young Universe? Answers in Genesis.

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