Creation Facts of Life (30 page)

When biblical creationists/Flood geologists offer explanations for the rock layers in the Grand Canyon, they appeal neither to biblical authority (the Bible doesn't mention the Grand Canyon!) nor to mystical or supernatural processes. They appeal, instead, directly to the evidence we can see, touch, and measure. That evidence seems to suggest that
processes we
do
understand,
like turbidity currents, explain what we see — except that the evidence
also
tells us that the scale was regional, continental, or even global, not just local, and it was fast!

Consider this dramatic statement from the secular (evolutionary) textbook by Levine that I have used with my college earth science classes.

Many channels on Mars dwarf our own Grand Canyon in size, and in order to form, would have required torrential floods so spectacular as to be hard to visualize by earth standards.

Note three things: First, it's normal for a scientist to interpret channels like the Grand Canyon in terms of flooding. Second, it's possible for a scientist to accept cataclysmic flooding on a planet that presently has little or no surface water. Third, a scientist can infer from the evidence left behind "torrential" and "spectacular" flooding on a scale far greater than anything ever recorded in scientific journals! Certainly there's nothing unscientific about inferring a colossal flood at the Grand Canyon from the evidence on a planet (Earth) whose surface is drenched in water!

I've mentioned that, because of the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, many evolutionists are now calling themselves neo-catastrophists. They want nothing to do with old-fashioned catastrophism (Noah's flood!), but they agree that most layers of fossil-bearing rock were produced rapidly and broadly by flooding on a catastrophic scale, what Derek Ager compared to "short periods of terror" in the life of a soldier.

It's these short periods of terror, it seems, that caught plants and animals off guard, buried them too deeply and quickly for them to escape or to be obliterated by scavengers, and turned them into fossils. Clams and snails, for example, are not normally knocked dead and fossilized by a few sand grains or even by huge shifts of sand induced by hurricanes, but zillions were buried and fossilized, it seems, in the first overwhelming deposits of "Flood mud."

At the Grand Canyon, as around the world, the "first" or "deepest" layer to contain an abundance of fossil remains is called the Cambrian geologic system. As discussed earlier, these Cambrian "stones cry out" for creation! Instead of a few simple life forms, hard to classify and apparently thrown together by time and chance, as an evolutionist might expect, we find a dazzling variety of complex life forms, apparently well-designed to multiply after kind: clams, snails, lampshells, echinoderms, and the most complex of all invertebrates, the nautiloids ("shelled squids"), with an eye that sees the world as we do, and the trilobites, with their geometrically marvelous compound eyes.

Why should Cambrian deposits contain only (or
almost
only) the remains of sea creatures? A professor debating me in Australia put it this way: "If God created everything in six days, why don't we find mice with trilobites in Cambrian rocks?" My simple reply: "Because mice don't live on the sea floor."
Ecology, not evolution, is the key.
(He
then
said he meant his question only as a joke.)

Many people have the completely mistaken notion that the biblical flood covered the whole earth almost instantly, stirred everything up, and then suddenly dumped it all. Not at all! According to the biblical record, Noah was in the ark for over a year. It was about five months before "all the high mountains under the whole heaven" were covered, and it took several more months for the water to subside as "the mountains rose up and the valleys sank down" at the end of the Flood. As the Flood waters "slowly" rose over the earth, plants and animals were buried in a sort of ecologic series: sea-bottom creatures, near-shore forms, lowland plants and animals, then upland (with sea creatures deposited from bottom to top, as the sea eventually covered everything). Evolutionists and Flood geologists may agree that the fossil-bearing rocks were laid down in "short periods of terror," but Flood geologists see the "long periods of boredom" between layers as
minutes or months, not millions
of years!

Indeed, once the rock layers at the Grand Canyon began to stack up, it seems they "forgot" all about "evolutionary time." In one small step (especially small with a heavy backpack!), a hiker can step right across "150 million years" of "missing evolutionary time"! I'm talking about the contact between the Muav and Redwall Limestones (Figure 34).

The Muav is Cambrian (supposedly, "evolution stage 1"), while the Redwall is Mississippian or lower Carboniferous ("evolution stage 5"). If the Grand Canyon is assumed to represent stages in evolution laid out for all to see, where are evolutionary stages 2, 3, and 4 (Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian)? Evolutionists recognize that's a serious question. Grandparents can't have grandchildren without first having children, and plants and animals can't evolve directly from stage 1 to stage 5 without evolving through stages 2, 3, and 4 first. Everyone agrees that in any "chain of life," you can't skip generations!

Evolutionists recognize the problem of rock layers ("150 million years' worth") missing from the Grand Canyon —
but
they also have a ready solution to the problem: erosion. Stage 2, 3, and 4 rocks really were deposited, they suggest, but they were uplifted and eroded away; then stage 5 rock (Mississippian Redwall) was laid down directly on top of stage 1 rock (Cambrian Muav). It's as if erosion tore out three chapters from the story of evolution.

That evolutionary argument is certainly logical and potentially correct. We see erosion erasing rock layers today, and we can infer that erosion also did so in the past. So evolutionists went looking for evidence of erosion, but they were honest enough to admit that they did not find it, at least not on a sufficient scale.

When a rock layer is eroded slowly and gradually by streams and rivers, as discussed earlier, an irregular surface is produced. When sediment later accumulates on this surface and hardens, the wavy contact line produced is called a
disconformity,
and often old stream beds may be identified along its surface. That's
not
what we find at the Redwall/Muav (Mississippian/Cambrian) contact. Over hundreds of miles of exposure in and out of various side canyons, the two rock layers are in smooth, horizontal contact. There are occasional small erosional dips called Temple Butte Devonian, but the regional picture is clear: it looks like one rock layer was deposited directly on top of the other with very little time break. According to the evidence, those "150 million years" never existed at all!
¹³¹

If there were strong evidence for 150 million years of erosion, geologists would call the contact a
disconformity.
Because the evidence suggests, instead, smooth, continuous deposition with little time break, the contact
should
be called a
conformity.
Admitting a 150-million-year "hole" in evolutionary theory would be far too difficult for most evolutionists, so they use the contact term we discussed earlier:
paraconformity.
Flood geologists just accept the evidence as it stands:
no
150 million years. Evolution requires 150 million years at that point, hence, the term "paraconformity" is offered,
not
as a solution to the problem of all that missing time, but as a label for a problem to be solved by future research.

Evolutionists
believe
that
other evidence
for evolution is so strong that paraconformities can be regarded as just minor glitches in an otherwise convincing story. That's exactly how
I
dealt with "minor mysteries" when
I
believed and taught evolution. There's certainly nothing wrong with that approach, but note that it's an act of
faith,
not science. Flood geologists can simply
accept
the directly observable evidence for rapid, continuous deposition, the more scientific choice at this point.

Another scientific triumph for creationists/Flood geologists lies just above the missing "150 million years." In another research breakthrough that earned him further grudging respect from evolutionary antagonists, Dr. Steve Austin documented the rapid, catastrophic death of perhaps four billion nautiloids and other sea creatures preserved in a six-foot (2 m) bed near the base of the Redwall Limestone. In one dramatic pulse, a colossal sandy debris flow buried fossils along a path at least 135 miles (217 km) long and 30 miles (50 km) wide, stretching from the east end of the Grand Canyon westward past Las Vegas. As of this writing, multiple research papers are being prepared, as well as proposals for permits to do further research in the canyon.
¹³²

There's further evidence to encourage Flood geologists to think that they have made the correct scientific choice. If individual sediment layers were hardened, uplifted, eroded, then covered again with water, it's likely that the lower hardened layers would crack in a pattern different from cracks formed in layers above them, and produced and moved millions of years later. In other words, there should be "buried faults," cracks through one layer not continuing into the layer above, but there are virtually
no buried faults
above the Precambrian in the Grand Canyon. There are faults, all right, but they cut continuously through the
whole sequence
of Paleozoic layers present (Cambrian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian),
not just part of it.
That evidence suggests the whole "layer cake" was formed rapidly and continuously, without a major break in time — just as you would expect from understanding the Grand Canyon in terms of what the Bible says about Noah's flood.

Then we come to the Coconino Sandstone. Above the Redwall are several other major layers (Supai Group, Hermit Shale, Coconino Sandstone, Toroweap Formation, and Kaibab Limestone, as shown in Figure 34). All these were obviously laid down as water-borne sediment (i.e., flood deposits) — except the Coconino. The Coconino is a cross-bedded sandstone usually interpreted as a huge desert dune deposit.

Why did I have to bring that up? I've been trying to encourage you to think about the horizontal bands of the Grand Canyon rock as a "layer cake" formed by global flooding. How could 400–600 feet (125–185 m) of desert dune get sandwiched between two layers of sediment deposited during the year of Noah's flood?

The first time someone asked me that question, I didn't know what to say. Admitting the problem, I sputtered something about how the Bible talks about a great wind that blew over the earth as the Flood subsided, but then I also admitted that the layers above the Coconino suggested the Flood was still depositing.

Then somebody reminded me of what I should have known already: dunes also form underwater. Ripple marks in sand at the beach are just "mini-dunes," and my students and I have actually watched much bigger dunes form and travel underwater while on scuba dives (in rough seas) to the Florida Keys. The weight of evidence now favors the formation of the Coconino as an
underwater dune deposit.
Most telling is the work by Dr. Leonard Brand on the abundant animal trackways for which the Coconino is famous.
¹³³

In this case, my confidence in Flood geology was confirmed by further research. It remains to be seen whether the evolutionist's confidence will
ever
be encouraged by further study of paraconformities. There are surely many other questions to be researched, but the weight of evidence we have available now (and that's as far as science can go) seems to suggest strongly that the horizontal rock layers at the Grand Canyon were formed rapidly,
not
by a lot of time, but by a
lot of water instead!

If the rock layers got stacked up under water, we have another problem. The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is now over 8,000 feet (over 2,500 m) above sea level. How did that happen? How did the rock layers end up far above sea level, and where did that big gash, the canyon itself that cuts through all those layers, come from?

The Bible tells us that at the end of the Flood "the mountains rose up and the valleys sank down." An evolutionist friend of mine once told me that the best evidence he knew for the creation/corruption/catastrophe model was that
any land existed at all on the earth.
If our planet had spun down from a gas cloud, he said, the outer layers would consist of basaltic ocean crust (density 3.5g/cm
³
), covered by a concentric layer of granite (3.0 g/cm
³
), the whole thing covered by over 2 miles (3 km) of water (density 1.0 g/cm
³
)! He said it looked as if "someone with big hands" (the closest he could come to saying "God") took the granite and shoved it up into a pile to form the dry land. Then he added that the "guy with big hands" was also smart enough to thin the basalt under the granite piles to maintain the earth in gravitational balance (isostasy) so that it wouldn't fracture as it rotated.

Perhaps God did use supernatural means to raise the land after the Flood as He did on the third day of the creation week. Or perhaps He used secondary means not yet discovered. A biblical creationist/Flood geologist would never want to rule out God's direct supernatural intervention (our salvation and resurrection depend on it!), but neither would he or she appeal to supernatural processes unless logic or the evidence clearly pointed in that direction. Actually, neither creationist nor evolutionist is satisfied with present models for "upwarp" and "downwarp," moving big chunks of land above and below sea level.

However the land was raised, the next question is this: Where did the canyon itself come from? The Flood may have
stacked
the rock like a giant layer cake, but what
cut
the cake?

One thing is for sure: the Colorado River did
not
do it. The Colorado River starts about 12,000 feet (ca. 3,500 m) up in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. By the time it gets to the Grand Canyon area, it's at about 5,000 feet (1,500 m). That's the problem. The Grand Canyon is definitely
not
a lowland valley. The North Rim of the canyon is over 8,000 feet (2,500 m) high! For the Colorado River to carve the canyon, it would first have to hack its way half a mile (over 700 m) uphill! Water just doesn't do that, especially when there's the opportunity to flow downhill in a different direction. For this and several other reasons, even evolutionary geologists
no longer believe
that the river
slowly
cut the canyon over 60 million years.