In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.

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[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > The Origin of the Grand Canyon > Details Relating to Powell’s Proposal ]

Details Relating to Powell’s Proposal

18. Red Circle Image Layering, Limestone, Why Here? Yellow Circle Image Why So “Recently”? Marble Canyon, Distant Cavern Connection, Perpendicular Faults, Arching, Inner Gorge, Missing Talus, Colorado Plateau, Unusual Erosion, Nankoweap Canyon, California’s Imperial Sand Dunes. This proposal does not address the obvious questions associated with these aspects of the Grand Canyon and nearby regions. [See "Evidence Requiring an Explanation" beginning on page 220.]

19. Yellow Circle Image Side Canyons, Red Circle Image Barbed Canyons, Slot Canyons. Some believe that sudden storms can produce flash floods that carve new canyons. While flash floods produce considerable erosion in stream channels and existing canyons, flash floods would not produce steep and narrow canyons, especially canyons that drain in an opposite direction to the river they feed, as we see in the gigantic barbed canyons. Slot canyons also have many characteristics that are inconsistent with this explanation. [See Figure 141 on page 235.]

One proposal for the barbed canyons is that the Colorado River flowed north when those canyons w487ere carved. However, this raises other troubling questions: What would tip the Colorado Plateau so the river flows in the opposite direction today? Why would the barbed canyons always “hook in” and enter the Colorado River at almost exactly right angles?

20. Red Circle Image Forces, Energy, and Mechanisms. Powell and most geologists between the mid-1800s and 1960 were misled by a theory proposed by James Dwight Dana in 1847. Dana, a Yale geology professor, said that the earth contracted as it cooled from its molten state, much like the wrinkled skin of a dried-up apple. Powell thought this accounted for the uplift of the Colorado Plateau and the Kaibab Plateau. A simple calculation would have shown that the thermal contraction of rock is too small to produce mountains or plateaus. ["Molten Earth?" on page 30 and "Forming the Core" on page 164 each explain why the earth was never molten.]

21. Red Circle Image Missing River, Missing Dirt. Since 1934, discoveries have shown that the western Grand Canyon and beyond were not cut by the Colorado River.⁸^–¹¹Nor does the Colorado River delta contain even 1% of the dirt excavated from the Grand Canyon.

22. Red Circle Image Missing Mesozoic Rock. Millions of years of rainfall and meandering rivers would not sweep 99% of the Mesozoic sediments (at least 1,000 feet thick) off the flat Kaibab Limestone. Besides, why would at least 2,000 cubic miles of Mesozoic rock, spread over 10,000 square miles, be missing around the Grand Canyon—including on top of the high Kaibab Plateau—and yet generally remain elsewhere?

23. Red Circle Image Fossils. This proposal for the Grand Canyon is linked with the bankrupt theory of evolution. Both require hundreds of millions of years. The Great Unconformity is said to mark the time when life began. Fossils are not found below that plane, supposedly because life had not yet evolved. Pages 7–27 and 197–214 give many reasons why this theory is untenable.

Notice that the theory of evolution relies upon many other theories, each proposed in an attempt to solve a large class of problems: how space and matter came into being (such as the big bang theory), how chemical elements formed, how stars, galaxies, earth, and life began, how macroevolution (not microevolution) happened, why transitional fossils are missing, why vital organs and DNA exist, what produced irreducible complexity, and why, directly above the Great Unconformity, fossils of all animal and plant phyla are suddenly found (the Cambrian explosion). Consequently, each evolutionary link in this assumed chain of origins—from protons to planets to people—must be established before one can conclude that animals and plants evolved after the Great Unconformity somehow formed. Most proposed explanations for the Grand Canyon accept the evolutionary explanation for fossils and are dependent upon the correctness of all those evolutionary “subtheories.” Part I of this book shows why each is incorrect.

All of this should be contrasted with the hydroplate theory—a single, broad, self-consistent theory that explains the origin of the Grand Canyon and thousands of other pieces of evidence, including layered fossils.

24. Red Circle Image Tipped Layers below the Great Unconformity. The uplift of the Colorado Plateau would not tip the thick layers below the Great Unconformity while leaving the layers above horizontal.

An old, now discredited, explanation for the tipped layers was proposed in 1889 by William Morris Davis, head of the geology department at Harvard. Davis said that even mountainous regions eventually erode down to what he called a peneplain (meaning “almost a plain”). The Great Unconformity, according to Davis, was such a plain, formed over a vast time period, and the tipped layers below the Great Unconformity were portions of mountains that were not completely eroded. Later, the horizontal layers were deposited, mostly below sea level, and then the Colorado River carved the canyon.

One reason geologists now reject the peneplain concept is that none are seen forming today.⁷⁷ Mountainous regions do not lie below eroding surfaces that are almost plains. Another problem is that the metamorphic rock below the Great Unconformity formed under great pressure. The topic “Metamorphic Rock” on page 118 explains why reasonable depths of overlying rock would not provide the pressure required. As explained on page 131, the compression event accounts for the pressure required.

25. Yellow Circle Image Time or Intensity? Time: If the Colorado River, flowing for millions of years carved the Grand Canyon, the river should have produced a gigantic river delta where it enters the Gulf of California. It has not. Nor would surface erosion for millions of years produce the erosion patterns shown in Figure 120 on page 219 and Figure 123 on page 221. Intense subsurface drainage would. Many other rivers have higher velocities and volume flow rates. Why haven’t they carved other Grand Canyons?

Despite being checked and rechecked, the radiometric dating techniques that date the Colorado River, and supposedly justify that much time, give contradictory results.

[Upstream from the Grand Canyon] the river shows evidence of being somewhere between 20 and 10 million years. How can a river be 20 million years in one location but no more than 6 million years downstream?⁷⁸

Did the Colorado River follow a different path? For the last 70 years, geologists have been looking for other paths the river could have taken. None have been found.

Radiometric dating of lava flows in the western half of the Grand Canyon also gives inconsistent dates. The potassium-argon method gives drastically different ages from those of the argon-argon method,⁷⁹ and both methods give different ages from those of cosmogenic dating. Statistical errors cannot explain these differences; so, the assumptions behind at least some of these methods must be in error. [See “Radiometric Dating” on page 37 for a brief description of these assumptions, and "The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity" on pages 387–441.]