Tentpegs

The Parable of the Potatoes I used in the last example has real world application. I live a few hours away from Niagara Falls. Before it was somewhat stabilized by a vast engineering project, the Falls eroded the escarpment as they wore away the rock at a rate of 4 or 5 feet a year. Eventually, the Falls would meet Lake Erie if they hadn’t been stabilized.

The Falls are seven miles (37,000 feet) from Lake Ontario. So…. how long have the Falls been eroding that cliff? Simple math would put it at 9000 years but, as we saw in the last column, that requires making several assumptions about the unobserved past. Was the rate of erosion constant? Was the amount of water constant? Did the erosion start at the end of the gorge or did the land tilt somewhere in the middle causing the water to speed up before it got to the edge? What if there was more water at one time… or less? If there had been a global Flood of Noah, there would have been a LOT more water at one time. And how long ago had the bedrock been laid down? If millions of years, then the rock would be hard (or as hard as it was likely to get). If it was recently laid down — say within a couple thousand years — it would be softer and, therefore, erode more quickly.

When the father of modern geology, Charles Lyell, visited the Falls in 1841, he asked the Native Nations there how fast the Falls were eroding. They insisted that it was retreating at the rate of at least 3 feet a year. When he did the math, he didn’t like what came up so he discarded their observations and summarily declared that the Falls were eroding at the rate of only one foot a year. He then wrote that that made the Falls 35,000 years old and, therefore, the Bible was wrong. The dishonesty he showed was breathtaking. By the way, modern geologists say he was wrong… and date the Falls much older. They ignore the observed evidence whether it comes from Natives or from those who came here from Europe and watched the Falls erode for generations. Why do they ignore them? because their observations do not match the theory of evolution. Observed history is tossed aside and unobserved “history” is treated as fact. I have a problem with that.

This is easy to check out. There are many documents out there on how radiometric dating was used on recent lava flows on Hawaii and at Mount St. Helens. Each time, the dates given for the rocks were in the millions or billions of years… even though they had just been formed or laid down in the last century.

Or how about that whole geologic column thing? You’ve seen it in books… and that is the only place it exists. No place on earth has more than half of the sections you find in every geologic chart… and the ones we observe are not in the same order as the ones in the books. This is true regardless of where you dig anywhere in the world. Some graduate level geology text books admit this and say that less than 1% of the history of the earth is found in the rocks and it is shuffled into random order… but they go on to say that through “imaginative reconstruction” of those layers, they can reveal the wonderful tapestry of the world’s creation. Sure.

Everything told you about how many eons it takes to carve a canyon, restore a living environment after a catastrophe, etc. has been disproved by Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, and other living laboratories. It doesn’t take millions of years to make or fill a canyon or to wipe out a rich environment of flora or fauna or to see it return back, more vibrant than ever.

People like me who just like looking at evidence and thinking about it aren’t trapped by all those presumptions. Whatever is… is. However, the modern evolutionist is like a man who is given the use of a cabin in the woods. He is told that no one has used that cabin for five years. When he unlocks the door, he sees a cigar smoking in an ashtray on a table. Instead of assuming someone has used that room recently, he must figure out a way to make that cigar be the kind of cigar that can burn unattended for five years. He is trapped. I am not.

I will go where the evidence leads. So far, I see nothing in nature or science that makes me want to toss Genesis aside.