Grand Canyon

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God's wonder itself

The Grand Canyon is in Arizona.

Okay, see, billlyuns and billlyuns of years ago, geologic blah blah paleozoic strata blah blah evolution blah blah uplift blah erosion blah In 3000 B.C. (before Christ), God caused a global flood over all the earth. Noah did take anywhere between two and seven of every creature onto Noah's Ark and had himself a floating zoo swamp for a few months. The Bible says the waters did then dissipate. This is probably what created the Grand Canyon. All that water runoff had to go somewhere so it ran down this big ditch into the Pacific Ocean at five times the speed of sound. Noah parked his ark temporarily at the Grand Canyon to offload a few offsprings and some of the species God had told him to offload at that place, such as Abert's Squirrel, juniper and pinyon bushes, and assorted gnats, flies, and no-see-ums, before sailing on to Australia to offload a pair of kangaroos (plus a special side-trip just for the Tasmanian Devil). This makes Noah the first person to navigate around the globe, more than 3000 years before Ferdinand Magellan did run the Grand Canyon in a boat. Eat your heart out John Wesley Powell!

The National Park Service and the public school system are involved in a conspiracy to cover up this truth about the Grand Canyon.

Signed,

Ben Stein

Contents

[edit] The Grand Canyon and Young Earth Creationism

The Grand Canyon is quite easy to explain by scientifically accepted geological principles, and horribly difficult to explain otherwise, except by Goddidit.

If these strata are the result of Noah's flood and the canyon carved soon afterward, the canyon stands as a might [sic] testament to God's power, judgment, and grace. Even if not, what a wonderful world our Lord has sculpted for us to inhabit. His love is bigger than I can grasp, bigger--infinitely bigger--than even the Grand Canyon!
—Ray Bohlin, 1997-98 and 2000 Research Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture[1]

The above revealed text[2] puts all the bad arguments together in a string.

In 2003, the National Park Service "created" a small controversy by approving the sale of a tabletop hardcover book promoting the YEC opinion, Grand Canyon: A Different View in park bookstores. The author, Tom Vail, had been a river guide who believed the Canyon "was formed over the evolutionary time scale of millions of years. Then I met the Lord. Now, I have a different view of the Canyon, which according to a biblical time scale, can't possibly be more than a few thousand years old."[3] The NPS at least moved the book from the natural sciences section to the "inspirational" section due to the controversy, but park superintendent Joe Alston had attempted to block the book entirely and was overruled by superiors in D.C.[4] This book promoting an anti-science mythology about the origins of the Canyon remained on sale at park bookstores as late as 2007.[5]

The volume of the Grand Canyon is given as 4.17 trillion cubic meters,[6] which would need to be shifted at a rate of more than a hundred thousand cubic meters per second to be fully excavated within so much as a year.[7] In order to explain how this could be weathered, let alone eroded,[8] creationists have evoked processes such as cavitation[wp].[9] Nevertheless, given that their best example —the cavitation damage to a spillway of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1983—happened in an elbow of a tunnel leading from a hydroelectric dam,[10] whether this process is applicable to the claimed excavation of the Grand Canyon is doubtable.

The Grand Canyon is winding,[11] exactly like a normal river but deep into the bedrock, something which seems under-appreciated in creationist writings. Creationists would like you to believe that the great deluge simply stopped and made a gentle turn at all the winds in the canyon. The flood doesn't account for any of the geological unconformities [12] we see.

[edit] Environmental controversies

As unlikely as it seems today, during the 1960s the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was planning on building two dams which were at the time outside the park boundaries but would have flooded portions of the Grand Canyon. The Sierra Club under the leadership of David Brower got involved in successfully stopping the dams, which played a pivotal role in the Sierra Club's transformation from a hiking club into the environmentalist activist group it is today. The park's boundaries have since been expanded, although Glen Canyon Dam upstream from the Canyon was built and changed the ecosystem within the Canyon, eliminating the seasonal floods which once were part of the ecosystem.

[edit] See also

  • NCSE - they do a regular expedition to the Grand Canyon
  • Step Canyon - a canyon used by creationists to "prove" that the Grand Canyon could have been formed in a catastrophic event, rather than over an extended period.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. The Grand Canyon and the Age of the Earth, from the Wayback Machine
  2. Reconstructed using the principles of psychic journalism so popular and useful in the present day.
  3. The Grand Canyon-Creationist Book Controversy
  4. "How Old Is The Grand Canyon? Park Service Won't Say" from the Wayback Machine
  5. "Evolving Grand Canyon Position Leaves Unanswered Questions" from the Wayback Machine
  6. Park Statistics.
  7. As calculated by WolframAlpha.
  8. Think of weathering is the breaking up of the rock, while erosion is its transportation.
  9. Beware the bubble’s burst, CMI.
  10. Lake Powell Answers – Glen Canyon Dam and the 1983 Floods
  11. Durango Bill's Grand Canyon 3-D Tour
  12. Geological Unconformities.
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