Why? It's just another way in which a large amount of material can exist in a stable orbit around the Sun.
Because ideas have consequences, Clete.
Consequences that I explained in my previous post:
One of the main premises of the HPT was to explain the effects of the flood WITHOUT appealing to ad hoc explanations or miracles not explicitly stated or warranted by the text of the Bible.
"God created it like that" being one example.
The scriptures do not say He did, nor is it warranted by the text. And giant floating rock piles in space, and some of those rocks impacting earth, potentially killing some of his "very good" creation (because people HAVE been killed by such space debris), is itself NOT very good. Death is not "very good."
Such an explanation opens the door for those hostile to Creationists and ultimately to God for them to be able to say, "so God intentionally created rocks that occasionally fall to earth and kill people? Doesn't that make Him responsible for the death of those clearly innocent people since He created those rocks and knew they would eventually land on earth?"
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Why is it any more incredible than having another planet there? Ceres is big enough to be considered a planet and, in fact it is a so called "Dwarf planet". It's 940 kilometers across.
Calling Ceres a dwarf planet does not make it remotely comparable to Earth, nor does it make the asteroid belt some massive planetary-scale problem for HPT.
Ceres is large compared to other asteroids. It's still absolutely tiny compared to the Earth, being about 0.0157% of Earth's mass.
Again, on the grand scale of things, HPT is only trying to account for debris on the order of a few percent of Earth’s original mass, roughly 3%.
The entire asteroid belt is even tinier compared to Earth. Ceres is roughly a third of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. So the fact that Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt does not make the mass-budget objection stronger than it is.
Do you suppose it was out there by itself and all this debris just happened to end up in roughly the same orbit or do you believe that it too is a piece of the Earth that was ejected when Noah's flood started?
I think this frames the issue incorrectly.
The question is not whether Ceres as it exists now left Earth as one finished dwarf planet, already shaped. The question is whether the material now composing Ceres and the asteroid belt (and more) could have originated from Earth under HPT’s catastrophic ejection model.
Those are not the same claim.
Do you have any concept at all of the energy it would take to launch a rock that's almost 600 miles across, even into low Earth orbit, never mind an orbit that's 3 times as far from the Sun as we are?
Again, this assumes Ceres had to be launched as one intact 600-mile rock.
That is not the necessary claim.
HPT does not require a preassembled Ceres to have been shot out of Earth like a cannonball. The claim is that material was ejected catastrophically and then underwent fragmentation, collision, sorting, capture, and stabilization.
You may reject that mechanism, but it needs to be answered as stated, not replaced with a cartoon version of itself.
Perhaps you don't believe that it was sent out in one big mass, perhaps you think that Ceres is gravitationally collecting material from the asteroid belt and has grown to its current size over the last 4000 years. Such an idea borrows from theories about "cosmological evolution" where planetary systems slowly accrete material from vast clouds of gas, dust an debris. The problem with that, as I suspect you know, is that once objects get past a certain size, they don't collide and stick together anymore. They collide and smash each other back into smaller pieces.
This is a false dilemma.
You are giving me two options:
1. Ceres left Earth as one finished intact dwarf planet;
or
2. Ceres slowly accreted by ordinary secular cosmological evolution over thousands or millions of years (and I know you reject the latter of those).
But HPT is not either of those.
There is another possibility: catastrophic ejection, fragmentation, collision, partial aggregation, rubble-pile formation, capture, and stabilization during the event and its aftermath.
Also, the collision objection depends heavily on relative velocity. Yes, high-speed impacts tend to shatter bodies. But ejecta launched from the same event, in the same general direction, and at similar speeds would not necessarily be colliding like unrelated objects coming from opposite directions. A stream of material can be moving extremely fast relative to Earth or the Sun while still having relatively low velocities between neighboring fragments.
Relative velocity matters.
So “collisions smash things apart” does not automatically rule out clustering, loose aggregation, rubble piles, binaries, or later capture.
In either case, you'd have to believe something similar, only on a very much larger scale for the Pluto, which has no similarly accompanying asteroid belt to accrete from. It just has 5 moons, one of which is nearly the same size as Pluto itself, all of which would have had to have left Earth together and principally intact in their current form.
Again, no.
They would not have had to leave Earth together as a finished Pluto-Charon system already arranged in their current form.
That is the same false dilemma again.
And Pluto is not sitting in ordinary empty planetary space. Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object. The Pluto-Charon system is already strange before HPT ever enters the discussion. Pluto and Charon form a binary-like pair, the smaller moons orbit their shared barycenter, and Pluto itself has an eccentric, highly inclined orbit that crosses inside Neptune’s orbital distance.
So describing the system as “Pluto and five stable circular moons” is selective. Yes, the small moons have nearly circular, nearly coplanar orbits. I already granted that. But the system as a whole is a compact circumbinary Kuiper Belt system with unusual dynamics, near-resonant relationships, and chaotic rotation among some of the small moons.
“Nearly circular orbit” does not mean “therefore specially created there.”
Further, if Walt's theory is correct, there is no way that Pluto and the material in the asteroid belt accounts for anywhere near all of the material that would have gotten ejected into space. What exists today would be but a tiny fraction of that material which happen to find itself in a stable orbit.
This was already addressed.
Also, the estimated mass of the major non-planetary debris populations in the solar system is roughly on the order of 3% of Earth’s original pre-Flood mass, according to the Hydroplate Theory. That estimate includes the Pluto-Charon system, the broader TNO/Kuiper Belt and scattered-disk populations, Ceres, the main asteroid belt, known cometary and meteoroid material, and likely captured or non-original satellites such as Triton, Phobos, and Deimos, while excluding primary created moons such as Jupiter’s four Galilean moons and excluding the unobserved Oort cloud (which isn't even necessary to exist if HPT is true, because it's invoked to explain the long-period comet population, which HPT would explain differently).
That's a lot of material, to be sure, but in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that much. Heck, Ceres is much smaller than Pluto (which is about 2.5 times larger than Ceres), and it's the biggest object in the Asteroid Belt.
And that's not obviously outside the scale HPT is trying to explain.
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The Earth itself would have been showered for years and years with debris falling back to earth
Some fallback debris would not surprise HPT. The theory already involves a global catastrophe and ejecta returning to Earth. But that does not refute the model by itself.
The question would be what amount, what timing, what velocities, what composition, and what evidence should remain. Simply saying “debris would fall back to Earth” does not settle the argument.
and it would have had a ring system for some lengthy period of time until all of that material was either ejected out of the solar system, or collected gravitationally by both the Earth and the moon, which there is precisely ZERO evidence for.
“Precisely zero evidence” is doing too much work.
What would count as evidence depends on the model being tested. HPT appeals to cratering, asteroids, comets, TNOs, meteoroids, and captured bodies as part of the evidence set. You can dispute that interpretation, but calling it “zero evidence” just assumes the conclusion.
Such evidence, by the way, would present itself as a bulge around the equator of the Moon and a large number of <4000 year old impact craters on Earth.
Why? Your “bulge around the equator of the Moon” objection assumes the debris would have settled into a neat ring aligned with the Moon’s present equator. But that does not follow from HPT. HPT has the fountains rupturing around the Earth “like the seam on a baseball,” launching material in many directions, speeds, and inclinations over the course of the event. It also has the Moon’s orientation changing afterward as impact mass was added unevenly. So why should the expected evidence be a simple equatorial bulge around the Moon’s present equator?
If HPT is correct, the Moon’s present near-side/far-side orientation and libration are themselves part of the post-Flood dynamical aftermath, not a fixed reference frame by which we can assume all debris should have been distributed.
And the Moon does have a battered, pulverized surface. The issue is not whether that proves HPT by itself; it does not. The issue is that your “zero evidence” claim is too narrow. HPT would point to impact scarring, regolith, ejecta, and lunar surface disturbance as part of the evidence set. You may reject that interpretation, but you cannot demand only an equatorial bulge and then say there is no evidence when that one feature is absent.
That's like looking for evidence for the exodus in the wrong century, then when no evidence for it is found in that century, declaring, "See, the Exodus never happened!"
OR you can believe that God created Ceres, the asteroid belt and Pluto the way they exist.
That is exactly the false dilemma.
Either HPT’s debris model is correct, or God specially created Ceres, the asteroid belt, Pluto, Charon, the smaller moons, comets, meteoroids, and other debris fields in their present dangerous condition.
But those are not morally or textually equivalent options.
Scripture says God created the heavens and the earth. It does not say He specially created giant debris fields as dangerous debris fields. Nor does it say He created rocks in space that would later fall to Earth and kill living creatures as part of the original “very good” creation.
That is the problem I already raised.
Saying it doesn't make it so!
Pluto and its five moons would have had to leave the Earth together, in close proximity with each other and in just such a way as to end up in almost perfectly circular and very very stable orbits.
Again, this assumes the very thing you need to prove.
HPT does not require the finished Pluto system to have left Earth already assembled in its present form. It requires the material to have originated from Earth and later undergone catastrophic sorting, collision, capture, and stabilization.
The three-body problem demonstrates how entirely impossible such an idea is.
No, it does not.
The three-body problem demonstrates mathematical complexity. It does not demonstrate impossibility.
It does not mean that three or more bodies cannot form or persist in stable or quasi-stable arrangements. It does not mean circularized or resonant systems require special creation. And it certainly does not mean that every complex orbital system must have been directly created in its present configuration.
Complexity is not impossibility.
It flat out did not happen that way, and it is precisely the three-body problem that proves it.
Saying it doesn't make it so.
The three-body problem does not prove what you are claiming. It shows that the system is dynamically complex, which I already granted.
The alternative is to believe that Plato and it's moons accreted their mass from a large collection of widely dispersed material (i.e. a ring) similar to the asteroid belt, and it all eventually settled into these neat orbits. That's a nice idea, but, even if it were possible, which it isn't, there wouldn't have been nearly enough time for it to happen. Pluto has orbited the Sun less that 17 times since Noah's flood occurred.
That is still the same false dilemma.
"Either the system left Earth fully assembled, or it slowly accreted from a widely dispersed ring over thousands of years."
But those are not the only options. A catastrophic event can produce related ejecta streams, collisions, fragments, clusters, captures, and temporary unstable arrangements that later resolve into more stable ones.
And again, material traveling in the same general direction at similar speeds is not the same as a random cloud of unrelated objects colliding from every direction. Relative velocity matters.
There is no third alternative other than that God created it the way it is, which you have no more reason to doubt than you have for doubting that God created the moons of Jupiter or the whole planet Mercury for that matter (which is a mere 5.5% of mass of Earth).
There is a third alternative.
Catastrophic ejection, fragmentation, collision, capture, and later dynamical stabilization.
You may reject that alternative, but you cannot simply declare that it does not exist.
And I do have reason to distinguish between primary planets or primary moons and debris fields, captured objects, irregular bodies, comets, meteoroids, and dwarf-planet systems in the Kuiper Belt. They are not all the same category.
Mercury is a planet. Jupiter’s Galilean moons are regular/primary moons. The asteroid belt, comet populations, meteoroid material, captured moons, and the Pluto-Charon Kuiper Belt system are not the same kind of thing.
So no, I am not obligated to treat “God created Mercury” and “God created lethal debris fields exactly as debris fields” as equally warranted claims.
A floating rock pile is not a planet, and a debris field is not morally or textually equivalent to Mercury.
