76 Evolution and the Fossil Record
Mesa Sandstone, which forms the spectacular cliffs and spires of Monument Valley. This
unit also interfingers in a complex non–layer cake way with several red shales known as
the Organ Rock and Halgaito Formations, which are full of ancient mudcracks indicating
repeated drying events. These are the soft units that erode away quickly and have caused the
sandstone cliffs and spires of Monument Valley to keep collapsing over the centuries. If you
follow those rocks to the northeast, you find that the Cedar Mesa Sandstone has been largely
replaced by thick deposits of salt and gypsum. Today, we can find only one place where such
deposits form: in dry lakes and salty lagoons where the high rate of evaporation removes
the water and concentrates the salts into a brine that eventually dries up completely. There’s
absolutely no way you can deposit hundreds of feet of salt and gypsum in a single flood
event (especially since the same unit becomes mostly sandstones to the west). If a creationist
tried to argue that it was formed as the flood finally dried up, then what about the hundreds
of feet of sandstone, shale, and other rocks that lie above the salt and gypsum?
The final clincher comes even farther to the northeast, into southwestern Colorado.
The sandstones and shales of Monument Valley and the salt and gypsum deposits of the
Four Corners change laterally into coarse pebbly sediments known as the Cutler Arkose.
Today these materials are only found in thick alluvial deposits eroding out of mountains.
They are clear-cut evidence that during the Permian there was a range of mountains in
the area known to modern geologists as the Ancestral Rockies. But they look nothing like
a flood deposit nor does their lateral transformation into salt and gypsum deposits to the
south, or dune sands and mudcracked shales to the west, make any sense in the world of
“layer cake” flood geology.
Creationists have always focused on the Grand Canyon because it seems to fit their
“layer cake” notions of how sediments would settle out after Noah’s flood. But the Grand
Canyon is also practically the only place in the world that looks this simple and undeformed.
A more typical situation is the outcrops in the Basin and Range province of Nevada and Utah,
just to the northwest of the Grand Canyon (fig. 3.9). There you do not have any horizontally
layered rocks that might be called “Noah’s flood deposits.” Instead, you find ancient layers
of fossiliferous Paleozoic rocks, cut up by faults, then buried by more layers of Mesozoic
rocks, which are then cut by more faults. Which layers were deposited in Noah’s flood?
Clearly the faulted Mesozoic layers are different in age from the Paleozoic ones that they cut
across on fault planes. Where in the Bible is this complex sequence of older faults and folds
cut by younger faults and still younger faults mentioned? Finally, the youngest deposits fill
the basins in between the fault block ranges—and they are full of fossils of extinct mammals
and plants from the Miocene and older beds. Where do they fit in the flood geology model?
This is the kind of geology that is typical in most parts of the world and that real geologists
deal with all the time. It is no surprise that real geologists don’t even bother to explain any
of this with a simplistic flood model.
We could go on and on with this point, but this should be sufficient for anyone with
an open mind and common sense not blinded by religious dogmatism. In the 1600s and
1700s, long before Darwin, religious scientists like Thomas Burnet, Abraham Gottlob
Werner, William Buckland, and others tried to explain the world’s rocks with the Noah’s
flood story. In the 1830s, also before Darwin’s book was published, they gave it up com-
pletely, as the complexity of the real geologic record became apparent. The Noah’s flood
model predicts a simple layer cake worldwide sequence of coarse flood gravels and sands,
overlain by a worldwide mudstone deposit. By contrast, the real geologic record is highly