I would like to touch on the elect before tackling the controversy between young earth Christians and old earth Christians. I think the elect refers specifically to the Judahites, as Paul says in Romans 11:7, "What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded..." Who is "Israel" in this context? We go back to verse 1 of this chapter to figure who Paul meant by "Israel": "For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. 2God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew." The tribe of Benjamin was part of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Thus the Judahites (or Sephardic Jews) were of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.
The elect is not those whom God predestinated to become saved, before time began; and the rest being those who were damned to the outer darkness for all eternity (or whatever kind of damnation Calvinists believe in). This paradigm is completely false.
Now, it could be that time, in terms of geology, has not passed by at a very slow rate in the past (with great epochs lasting up to a million years or more). Maybe the Pleistocene epoch (era of the ice ages) didn't start about 1.6 million years ago but rather much sooner. The ice ages, along with their respective interglacial periods, may have passed in much quicker succession than we've been led to believe. Maybe the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM--the height of the last ice age) didn't occur about 25,000 BC but rather about 10,000 BC. Which would be around the time of the sinking of Atlantis (9,600 BC). When it comes to the date of the Atlantis flood, I'm going to go with Plato on this one: he has more credibility than the majority of scientists today.
It's gradualism (the view of the mainstream geologists) versus catastrophism (the view of some Christians and alternative thinkers). Of course there's the extreme version of catastrophism, which says that all the layers of sediment we see were laid down by a world-wide flood (Noah's). This extreme catastrophism I'm inclined reject outright. Yet I think there can be a place of reconciliation between the gradualists and the catastrophists.
But then maybe there was one ice age (around 4,800 BC) that came on very quickly--following a worldwide flood. We have evidence that this (the quick freeze) happened: frozen mammoths have been found, perfectly preserved. They were found with food in their stomachs. That's how fast the temperature dropped: the mammoths were eating when the instantaneous freeze killed them where they stood. According to bibliotecaplyades.com Jupiter was a foreign object that came into this solar system and collided with Tiamat, the planet that orbited where the asteroid belt now is. The latter was exploded and the former took up the orbit that it now has. Now a large chunk of Tiamat--Venus, carrying much frozen water--was sent hurling into the inner solar system. It passed by the earth and orbited Terra for a while--until its own inertia sent off to where it now orbits. While Venus was revolving around the earth, ice from the former was magnetized and drawn to the polar regions of the latter--where the magnetic poles were (are). Billions of tons of ice cascaded down on both the North and South Poles, extinguishing all the animals and plants living in those areas faster than you can "Say what?!"
It could be that the death of the dinosaurs occurred much later than 65 million years ago--perhaps 5 million years ago or sooner even? And the rebellion of Lucifer (on the earth) may have been as recently--in contrast to vast epochs of geology and natural history--as 180,000 years ago (as Miguel Goitizolo says--at miguelgoitizolo.com). 180,000 BC may have actually been the beginning of the Pleistocene in general and not merely the beginning of the previous interglacial period (supposed to have spanned 180,000 BC to 150,000 BC). Another interesting point about this date is that the light from certain mysterious, far away objects--that emit tremendous amounts of light--took 180,000 years to reach us. These objects are evenly spaced throughout the night sky--from the vantage point of the earth. Apparently the earth is a special planet. This is according to a blog, which I can't find right now. Anyway, hmmm. Couldn't be a coincidence.
One last thing about Noah's flood. It may have been worldwide. I've read in "Underworld" (by Graham Hancock) that a number of superfloods took place since the ice began to melt in earnest about 18,000 BC (or actually sometime after 10,000 BC, as catastrophism would have it). Most likely the idea of Noah's flood being one gigantic worldwide flood was actually a regional super-flood that covered the area of Sumeria only.
