Eutrusca
06-10-2005, 17:31
COMMENTARY: These rafting trips down the Grand Canyon illustrate another "canyon:" the canyon between creationists and evolutionists. It also serves to illustrate the myths and misconceptions which underlie this vast gulf between the two camps.
Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html?th&emc=th)
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: October 6, 2005
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.
Two rafting trips along the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon reached different desitnations in the debate over creationists and evolution. Above, a group sponsored by the National Center for Science Evolution.
Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.
"You see any cracks in that?" he asked. "Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked." The material "had to be soft" to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, "That's just a theory."
"It's all theory, right?" asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. "Except what's in the Good Book."
For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.
[ NOTE: Nowhere in the Bible does it state that God created the earth 6,000 years ago! That is the work of a monk during the Middle Ages, by name of Usher, who added up all the geneologies in the Bible and came up with 6,000 years as the age of the earth! ]
That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations - but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls "biblical glasses." Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.
"Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces," Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. "To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual."
Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues.
Science unequivocally dates the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the canyon's layers at some two billion years. Even the intelligent design movement, which argues that evolution alone cannot explain life's complexity, does not challenge the long history of the earth.
But a core of creationists like Mr. Vail continue to champion a Bible-based theory of the canyon's carving. And polls show many Americans are unconvinced by scientific knowledge.
Though it did not ask specifically about the global flood or six-day creation, a November 2004 Gallup survey found that a third of the public believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally and that 45 percent think God created human beings "pretty much in their present form" within the last 10,000 years. [ OMG! Groan! ]
Gallup found in another poll that 5 percent of scientists, and fewer than 1 percent of earth and life scientists, adopted the "Young Earth" view.
The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people.
When not running the rapids, Mr. Vail's group, which included three pastors, sat in makeshift sanctuaries of sand and stone to offer psalms and prayers of praise for their surroundings.
Some were committed creationists and others were still asking questions. But all began with a literal interpretation of the Bible, seeking examples in the rocks to support its story that God did it all in less than a week.
When they made camp, Dr. Scott's rafters, nearly half with Ph.D.'s in science, had evening discussions of tidal patterns and plateau shifts, as well as tutorials on tactics in the evolution debate. Most of them ardently secular, a few practicing believers, they started with what they see as unchallengeable facts about the Earth's age, and dismissed creationism as unscientific. After each "geology moment," Dr. Scott play-acted the creationists, saying sarcastically of their evidence, "My part of the lesson is always a lot shorter and less detailed."
[ This article is four pages long. To read the rest of the article, go here (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th). ]
Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html?th&emc=th)
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: October 6, 2005
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.
Two rafting trips along the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon reached different desitnations in the debate over creationists and evolution. Above, a group sponsored by the National Center for Science Evolution.
Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.
"You see any cracks in that?" he asked. "Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked." The material "had to be soft" to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, "That's just a theory."
"It's all theory, right?" asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. "Except what's in the Good Book."
For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.
[ NOTE: Nowhere in the Bible does it state that God created the earth 6,000 years ago! That is the work of a monk during the Middle Ages, by name of Usher, who added up all the geneologies in the Bible and came up with 6,000 years as the age of the earth! ]
That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations - but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls "biblical glasses." Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.
"Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces," Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. "To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual."
Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues.
Science unequivocally dates the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the canyon's layers at some two billion years. Even the intelligent design movement, which argues that evolution alone cannot explain life's complexity, does not challenge the long history of the earth.
But a core of creationists like Mr. Vail continue to champion a Bible-based theory of the canyon's carving. And polls show many Americans are unconvinced by scientific knowledge.
Though it did not ask specifically about the global flood or six-day creation, a November 2004 Gallup survey found that a third of the public believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally and that 45 percent think God created human beings "pretty much in their present form" within the last 10,000 years. [ OMG! Groan! ]
Gallup found in another poll that 5 percent of scientists, and fewer than 1 percent of earth and life scientists, adopted the "Young Earth" view.
The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people.
When not running the rapids, Mr. Vail's group, which included three pastors, sat in makeshift sanctuaries of sand and stone to offer psalms and prayers of praise for their surroundings.
Some were committed creationists and others were still asking questions. But all began with a literal interpretation of the Bible, seeking examples in the rocks to support its story that God did it all in less than a week.
When they made camp, Dr. Scott's rafters, nearly half with Ph.D.'s in science, had evening discussions of tidal patterns and plateau shifts, as well as tutorials on tactics in the evolution debate. Most of them ardently secular, a few practicing believers, they started with what they see as unchallengeable facts about the Earth's age, and dismissed creationism as unscientific. After each "geology moment," Dr. Scott play-acted the creationists, saying sarcastically of their evidence, "My part of the lesson is always a lot shorter and less detailed."
[ This article is four pages long. To read the rest of the article, go here (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th). ]