The NYTimes has been running a really nice series of articles about Evolution and Creationism/ID over the last month or so. Today’s is another fine entry in the series. It profiles the two week voyages down the canyon taken by two opposing groups in the debate. Along the way the reporter talks to the people leading the voyage, and those who are along for the ride. The article seems fair and even-handed, and does not present the ideas of the creationists as science, but it gives those ideas respect as well (after all, those ideas come from the Bible).
The crux of the article is that creationists point to the Grand Canyon and argue that it shows evidence of having been deposited in a catastrophic flood. Folds in the rock layers are evidence to the (non-scientist) leader of the Creation expedition that the rocks must not have been solidified before they were folded. After all, how can solid rock bend and not break? “Just a theory” he says of the idea that rocks actually become somewhat plastic under enormous stresses and elevated temperatures. The basement metamorphic shows features that supposedly had to have been formed under catastrophic flood conditions, and the buried fossils in the sandstone show the same thing. The trouble with all of these theories is that they are purely theories. No experiments have been run to test them. No evidence gathered in their defense or refutation. They are merely ideas that one man has come up with to try and justify what he sees in terms of The Book he’s been reading.
This is much akin to a somewhat deranged man I met at the AGU conference in New Orleans back in May of this year. He felt that the Grand Canyon was evidence that the Earth is actually growing by accumulating cosmic dust. Eventually, he says, the Earth will become the size or Uranus, just as Uranus will grow to be a little Jupiter, and the Jupiter will grow enough that it ignites like the sun. Where’s his evidence? Why, the fact that the Grand Canyon has all of those layers, and that they are higher than the source of the Colorado, so how could the Colorado have carved them? When I mentioned upthrust of the Kaibab plateau do to orogenic (mountain-building) stresses, he says plate tectonics is just a theory.
That may be true, but it’s certainly a theory backed up by evidence, observation and data. We know that the rocks in the Grand Canyon are 350 million years old because we have dated them with techniques that other science has told us are extremely reputable (if not precise, the age is often known to +/- 10 million years). We understand the forces, to some degree, that have raised the Kaibab above the surrounding high plains. The rate of uplift (and thus erosion of the canyon) over the last two million years or so is perfectly reasonable in terms of what we’ve observed elsewhere. So, these two interesting theories that seek to challenge the geologic understanding of the Grand Canyon must do only one thing to displace this venerable and well-decorated theory: they must find one, solid, irrefutable piece of evidence that shows the existing theory is wrong, then explain how that evidence is predicted by their theory.
Until they can do that, they are not doing science. They are telling stories, making new myths, based on some other understanding of the universe. I should mention that Intelligent Design people over at the Discovery Institute do not assert that the Earth is young, as do strict creationists. However, as ID is an outgrowth of Creationism in so many other ways, its unsupported assertions and claims fall under the same criticisms I’ve brought against the Growing Earth and Noah’s Flood hypotheses here. There is no problem, scientifically, with the idea that the Grand Canyon is a few thousand years old, except that there is absolutely no strong evidence for their hypotheses. Evidence, data, and observations are the bedrock of science, and its mere “theories.” Assertion, allusion, and off-hand dismissal are the fingerprint of myth and pseudoscience.
