December 28, 2006
As a fundamentalist in my youth, I became more and more uneasy about the huge discrepancy between modern geology and the Genesis account of a global flood. I read the literal Young-Earth (YE) view by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (”The Genesis Flood”), but it raised more questions than it answered. Frankly, it made me even more suspicious that I was being sold a bill of goods. I decided it was time to compare Morris’s claims directly with evidence from the rock record and went to college as a geology major. It didn’t take long to see how I’d been duped; Morris and other YE creationists were outright lying about rocks! Why would they do this? Why would they lie to support a religion that forbids lying? Perhaps a private quote from Martin Luther can shed some light here:
“What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”
I’m sure not all believers would subscribe to this version of end-justified means, but many fundamentalists do seem to believe their theological views are above any kind of empirical fact checking. I was not one of these. A deity that must be defended by a lie, whether literal or virtual, is not worth believing in. To do so is classic delusion and is all-too prevalent in today’s world. To their credit, many “Old Earth” creationists have rejected Morris’s geology for this very reason.
Russ Miller again confirmed his role as a disciple of Henry Morris by claiming in his Cline Library lecture that Earth’s crustal rocks originated literally in a global flood that wafted Noah’s ark. He left out details, but some are available in his online seminar about the Grand Canyon. Here he claims the entire Paleozoic sequence - from Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone to Permian Kaibab Limestone (consistently misspelled as “Kiabab” in his slides) - was laid down in the Genesis flood. Further, he claims that washing away of the overlying Moenkopi and Chinle formations constitutes “absolute proof” for a global flood (huh?). No notice is made of the preservation of these formations to the north, together with 1,000’s more feet of Mesozoic and Cenozoic rock in Zion, Bryce, and Grand Staircase National Parks (see below).
The Genesis-flood “theory” of Earth’s crustal rocks is refuted countless times by the rock record in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere (not to mention the problems of mythic preservation of a global biosphere on a single boat). Grand Canyon Paleozoic rocks represent a relatively small period of Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, from about 525 to 260 million years ago. They bracket the appearance of trilobites, for example, but predate the arrival of dinosaurs and large mammals. By studying the size, sorting, shape, chemical composition, and arrangement of grains in sedimentary rocks, sedimentologists can get a pretty good idea of the environment of deposition at the time these rocks were formed. Fossils help confirm the nature of the paleo-environment. Were sediments deposited in deep ocean, coastal waters, streams, flood plains, or desert dunes, etc.? Sedimentary geologists can give you the answer. The overall picture for earth history comprises a complex assortment of diverse and evolving environments, but there is evidence for a great deal of dry land somewhere during all eras of the geological time column!
A cursory look at regional geology for the Grand Staircase shows that a global flood is not a viable explanation for any of the Grand Canyon formations, much less all of them. For example, the Coconino Sandstone is the remnant of a wind-blown Sahara-like desert that somehow managed to exist right in the middle of Miller’s global flood. Grand Staircase Paleozoic rocks and fossils generally match a wide range of marine, coastal, and even desert dune environments associated with the shifting coastline of a Paleo-North America that remained high and dry (largely to the current NE - see NAU/Professor Blakey’s Paleogeographic Maps for the Paleozoic). Miller’s (and Morris’s) claim that all these rocks were laid down in a global flood implies either abject ignorance of the relevant geology or downright deceit (or both?). I’m not entirely sure which is the case for Miller, but the level of scholarship exhibited in his slides suggests the former.
In AST184L (”Life in the Universe” Lab), we study the above rocks in the field. NAU students are welcome to sign up and see the evidence for themselves!
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