Another Reason Flood Geology Doesn't Make Sense

I've had this post percolating in the back of my mind for a while. I don't know why I got to thinking about it recently, but it's been a while since I've posted on creationism, so here it is.

According to young-earth creationists (YECs), the Grand Canyon was formed by water run-off from Noah's flood, perhaps in as little time as days (the Flood having deposited the sediment in the first place). It's a position they are forced into given the premise that the earth is only about 6,000 years old. How else do you form the Grand Canyon in so short a time?

Two years ago my family and I visited Arches National Park in Utah. Before heading home for the day we stopped at Dead Horse Point, which is near the park and overlooks the Colorado River. (See Utah Geology Show and Tell.) It isn't the Grand Canyon but it is impressive, and if creationists are right it must surely have been formed at the same time as the Grand Canyon. However, something struck me as strange. Have a look at this picture and see if you notice what I did.



If you noticed the U-turn in the river, you are a winner. Here is what it looks like from above, via Google Maps.



Moving water can be extremely powerful. So how is it that water powerful enough to purportedly carve out such large and deep canyons in a short amount of time was forced to make this loop? This isn't an isolated occurrence; use Google Maps to explore the Colorado River and its tributaries and you'll find many other examples of these kinds of meanders. My favorite one is Horseshoe Bend, which is just southwest of Page, AZ.



Again, this is the Colorado River--just about 100 miles upstream of the Grand Canyon. And again, why would such powerful water be forced to take this circuitous route, especially if the sediment was soft--having just recently been deposited? (For more fun, go look up Gooseneck State Park.)

I'm not any kind of authority on geology or hydrodynamics, but I figured I couldn't be the first one to notice this problem. I was right; it's one of a number of problems with the YEC view of the formation of the Grand Canyon listed at talk.origins. The mainstream view on the formation of the Grand Canyon is covered in this Wikipedia entry. It's actually kind of complicated. But lest you think that geologists don't believe in catastrophic floods, read about the scablands of Washington State, where there were possibly as many as 100 catastrophic floods that originated from a lake in Montana.

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Climate Legal Alchemy?

The Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, is launching an extensive investigation into the career of climatologist Michael Mann. Although currently at Penn State, Mann was at the University of Virginia from 1999 to 2005. Cuccinelli has ordered the university to turn over just about every piece of paper, electronic document, or computer code that Mann ever touched while at UVA, and is acting under a Virginia law that allows the state to recover money fraudulently obtained from it. His theory seems to be that Mann's climate work is fraudulent, and therefore Mann should have to return the 500,000 dollars in state grants that he received.

The disturbing thing about this is that there doesn't seem to be any real basis for thinking Mann defrauded Virginia. The hacked emails of 'Climategate' seem to be the sole justification for this intrusive investigation. However, investigations of those emails by Penn State and the British government have not found any evidence of fraud, and none of Mann's publications have been retracted. Cuccinelli is suing the federal government over regulation of greenhouse gases, and it seems likely that this investigation is a fishing expedition undertaken in the hope that some kind of damning evidence can be found to bolster that suit.

Some have suggested that if Mann has done nothing wrong then he should have nothing to worry about, and that his work will gain credibility by being exonerated. But this misses the mark for several reasons. First is the principle of the matter--an AG launching an intrusive investigation into someone with no real basis to suspect fraud. Second, as we've seen with the frenzy that occurred over the Climategate emails, truth can take a backseat to misinformed impressions. At the least, you have to worry that the AG will not understand scientific culture and seek to punish ordinary scientific behavior. (Imagine being privy to legal correspondence where attorneys talk of trying to influence a jury, or trying to get their case before a more favorable judge or moved to a more favorable location. Within certain limits that is normal legal maneuvering, but it sure could sound sinister.)

More worrisome is the potential for the motivated AG to turn a scientific dispute into a legal issue, and the chilling effect that could have on scientific research that is politically unpopular or controversial. The answers to big questions usually come in bits and pieces, and subjective decisions must be made along the way. Further, hypotheses are not often falsified with one experiment. Just as we test and re-test ideas that seem to have merit in order to be sure that they stand up, sometimes we test and re-test ideas that seem to fail in order to be sure they deserve to be buried. In my opinion, passing legal judgment on such efforts and trying to claw back the research money involved is not a precedent we want to set.

Below is a list of some of the people and organizations who oppose Cuccinelli's actions.

UVA Faculty Senate
Nature
The Union of Concerned Scientists
The American Association of University Professors, joining the ACLU
The Washington Post
Even Michael Mann's persistent thorn-in-the-side, Steve McIntyre, opposes it.

Although it doesn't specifically address this situation, a recent letter signed by 255 National Academy of Sciences members, including 11 Nobel laureates, certainly applies. To wit:

We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.

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Son of a Neandertal

I've been slow to mention this, but I want to briefly comment on the publication of the draft of the Neandertal genome. The question that has received most of the attention is this: Did humans (i.e. Homo sapiens) interbreed with Neandertals?

Until recently the only evidence on which to base an answer was the morphology of the skeletal remains combined with dating indicating co-existence in Europe and the Middle-East. Initial genetic evidence based on mitochondrial DNA seemed to indicate that there was not any interbreeding, although certain human genes--it could be argued--hinted at the opposite conclusion.

Now that we have a draft of the Neandertal genome--a composite from three individuals--it appears that ancient Neandertals and humans did indeed engage in some limited interbreeding. To understand how the scientists arrived at this conclusion, we need to back up for a moment.

Several lines of evidence indicate that all living humans can trace their genetic roots to Africa. Basically, Africans have the most genetic diversity of all groups of humans. And whether you look at mitochondrial DNA, the Y chromosome, or other genetic markers, when you group them according to relatedness, all non-Africans are essentially a subset of what is found in Africa.

Africa was the birthplace of both Neandertals and modern humans. However, Neandertals had already left Africa by the time humans began spreading throughout the world. They co-existed in some parts of the world for thousands of years, and then around 30,000 years ago Neandertals went extinct.

With that in mind, the scientists compared the Neandertal genome with the genomes of several people from around the world. They found that for a small portion of the genome, the persons from France, China, and Papua New Guinea are more closely related to Neandertals than either are to Africans. The picture will be refined as more genomes are used for comparison, but we now have a broad outline. To put it crudely, at this portion of the genome, Africans have the original 'modern human' version, but Europeans and Asians have the Neandertal version. This suggests that at some point along the way--probably fairly early in the human expansion from Africa--there was some interbreeding.

Since I'm of European descent, I wouldn't be surprised to find that I share the Neandertal version. I guess it's time for an identity crisis.

For more knowledgeable commentary than mine, see Carl Zimmer and John Hawks (an actual anthropologist).

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BioLogos and the ANE Context of Genesis

Among the features of BioLogos are a collection of "Scholarly Essays." Two that I want to highlight here, and that I think should be read together, are: "The Biblical Creation in its Ancient Near Eastern Context" by Joseph Lam, and "Biblical Creation and Storytelling: Cosmogony, Combat and Covenant" by Brian Godawa (see link above). These essays are similar to resources I highlighted in my earlier post, Taking Joseph and Brigham's Advice with Genesis.

Both essays address the themes, motifs, and purposes of the creation account in Genesis 1, particularly in relationship to the Ancient Near East (ANE). I am not going to re-hash them; go read them. But I do want to comment on something from the Godawa essay.

First I should say that it makes sense to me that Moses and the Israelites were not prepared to hear about many of the scientific facts and ideas that we take for granted. They weren't dumb, they simply lived in another world. A crash course in physics, geology, and biology probably would not have been that helpful. But even if we accept this, why would God make up the particular story we have in Genesis and the Book of Moses? I think Godawa may have hit on part of the answer.

One of the functions of ancient creation narratives is to literarily encode the religious and political overthrow of one culture by another. When a king or kingdom would rise to power in the ancient world, they would often displace the vassal culture’s creation stories with their own stories of how their deities triumphed over others to create the world in which they now lived....

God was preparing Israel to displace the pagan Canaanites and their gods both physically and literarily, so He inspired this authorship of the creation account to express that ancient Near Eastern motif of justifying transcendent authority and land ownership with a creation story.

I think this is a significant idea for understanding why God would give a less-than scientific/historical account of the creation. It wasn't just that the people would not understand much of what we take for granted, although that was probably part it. God's people needed a creation story that would help to give them a sense of identity and explain why the God of their small nation was superior to the gods of the surrounding empires, and worthy of worship. It was also going to have to compete with the stories of the gods of those surrounding empires. Since they lived in the ANE, it makes sense that God would use the surrounding themes and motifs and re-formulate them into a new creation story with its own theology. A creation account involving millions of years and impersonal, poorly understood laws of nature just wouldn't cut it--and given the culture, it might sound plain crazy.

Obviously I don't know whether this is actually correct, but it seems plausible to me.

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