The Fossil Record 69The Grand Canyon Through the Looking Glass
The main reason for insisting on the universal Flood as a fact of history and as the
primary vehicle for geological interpretation is that God’s Word plainly teaches it! No
geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the
clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture.
—Henry Morris, Biblical Cosmology and Modern ScienceIn Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass, Alice steps through a mirror into a world in
which all the rules are backward or reversed, and everything is the opposite of reality. A
practicing geologist gets the same sensation when he or she reads about flood geology: the
photographs of rocks are the same, and some of the same words are used, but the thinking is
entirely alien to this planet. Nowhere is this more apparent than the creationist attempts to
explain the geology of the Grand Canyon as a product of a single Noah’s flood.
The reasons for the creationists’ laser-like focus on the Grand Canyon (and almost no
other geologic feature or national park) are obvious. People all over the world have seen
pictures of and often visit this legendary place for its spectacular scenery; they cannot help
but be impressed by the evidence it presents for millions of years of geologic history. The
creationists are trying to show their followers that they can explain all of geology with the
Noah’s flood myth, so naturally they spend their energies on the most spectacular national
park that best shows that earth has a long history. They’ve even managed to get one of
their books (edited by a river guide who had a religious conversion experience, not a real
geologist) offered for sale at the visitors’ centers on the rim of the Grand Canyon. This
has remained true for years now, despite the fact that the rangers and geologists at Grand
Canyon National Park have repeatedly protested the sale of the book. The fact that this tract
pushing the view of a specific religious minority is sold by a federal facility seems to be a
violation of the separation of church and state and is probably unconstitutional.
Creationist flood geologists have made up their minds that the ancient flood myths of
a sheep-herding culture must be literal truth. Then they bend and twist and special plead
the entire history of the Grand Canyon into their preconceived notions that somehow this
immense and magnificent pile of rocks must have been produced by one supernatural flood.
If flood geologists were real scientists, they would look at real flood deposits and ask what
they should look like. Because they never bother to do this, let’s do it for them.
Geologists who study sedimentary rocks (known as sedimentologists) have become
very sophisticated forensic detectives, looking at the clues found in sandstone or limestone
and discovering amazing evidence of the source of the sediments, how the sediments were
transported, what environment they were formed in, how they were deposited, and then
how they were turned into rock. Sedimentology is also the principal skill required to find
nearly all the oil, natural gas, coal, groundwater, uranium, and many other economically
important natural resources, so we ignore their expertise at our own peril (for a basic back-
ground in the subject, see Prothero and Schwab 2013). These same sedimentologists who
have found all the oil and coal and groundwater we require also have studied actual flood
deposits and know exactly what they should look like. If the Noah’s flood story were actu-
ally true, we would expect to find that the geology around the world (not just in the Grand
Canyon) would begin with coarse-grained poorly sorted deposits of sand and gravel and
boulders from the fast-water stage of a flood. Once a flood recedes, it can leave only one kind