Hoodoos

Whenever somebody says there is no evidence for the Flood of Noah, this is my answer: The Flood left a ton of evidence all over the earth. It left all the strata, it left the Grand Canyon and all the formations of the Southwest (It's really kind of amusing to think of the separate layers of which the hoodoos are built as each representing millions of years of time), it left the scablands, it left the traces of the huge lakes such as the Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville, it left the dinosaur beds and the fossils.

The hoodoos are interesting. I'm particularly interested in their stratification. Most of them are carved out of layered sediments just like so many of the dramatic formations in the American Southwest, layers that are usually associated with long periods of time in the prevailing Old Earth understanding. There's just something funny about that idea when you find them in these tall skinny formations.  But it's funny in all the formations anyway, because you have to believe that all those strata were laid down over millions and millions of years before anything cut them or carved them. 

erosion

To demonstrate what happens to land on the surface of the earth to counter the argument that the strata in the Grand Canyon demonstrate surface erosion. They don't. This kind of erosion would be visible across the canyon, not something you'd have to get up close to see, which is the case with the Old Earth assumption.

Grand Canyon East-West Mounded Uplift

 

Sorry about klutzy drawing.  Hope it's clear.  The idea is that the water that carved the Grand Canyon had to cut into the uplift from east to west, but since the uplift slopes north to south it's hard to see how a small river would have done anything but run off the south slope, OR cut something, but north to south rather than east to west.

 

Old Earthers argue that the uplift occurred very very slowly over millions of years, as if that would somehow guide the water in the right direction.  Looks to me like my own theory that the uplift cracked the upper strata which allowed still-standing Flood waters to rush into the cracks and scour out the canyon in a lot less than millions of years is a far more likely story.

Would I really want to win this argument?

I think I just had a small epiphany in relation to the Evolution debate.  Someone at the EvC forum said what is so often said there:

It is not necessary to abandon your faith in order to accept the facts regarding the history of the earth.

People who think you don't have to abandon your faith to embrace the Old Earth and the ToE have no idea what Christian faith is all about. It's about a very specific revelation, given by God Himself, that contradicts those "sciences" that purport to reconstruct the history of the earth. (The "sciences" of the past, that is, since the past can't be tested and all you have is speculations. There's no problem with the sciences that study anything that can be replicated in the present). 

God gives us enough of the history of the earth in His revelation to contradict both the Old Earth and evolution, and those "sciences" reject it. They don't have to. True science should affirm the Biblical revelation, that's why there is such a thing as Creation Science. You definitely have to choose. God or fallible "science." That's your choice as a Biblical Christian. You don't have to argue the issues of course, you can ignore it all, but some of us find them interesting enough to try.

These thoughts led me to something I tend to forget when I'm arguing these things, which is that Christianity really is about a radical choice one makes between Christ and the world. I keep wanting to be able to persuade evolutionists to the Biblical perspective, but what happens instead is that I am met with a solid wall of rejection. Meaning God is forcing me all the time to that radical choice and isn't going to let up.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "Come to Christ and die." As Jesus said in many ways, "You must take up your cross (that is, embrace your own death) to follow Me," you must "die to yourself," you must "hate" everyone who would draw you away from Him.
 
Well, that seems to be played out even on the "scientific" front.  God isn't going to let evolution be defeated because it's a very effective "cross" for us to die on. This debate is a daily "ego death" for a Christian.  Not that we submit nicely to it, we usually fight it, but this is what I mean about how I forget what the Christian life is all about. It's not about winning the argument, it's about dying to self. I hate it, I fight it, but every time I get involved in the debate I'm staring it in the face and it's staring back at me: Die, die die. Maybe I'm finally getting it. There is no way to win this argument, and I would lose something precious if I did.
 
So I should be thankful for the rejection, for the ridicule, for the misrepresentation, for the jeers, for the ego crunching, for being called a liar. The ego rises up all the time and sometimes I can squelch it but sometimes I retaliate, ridicule back and so on. I shouldn't, I should quietly die instead. I kind of sort of know this but apparently I have a tough pride that is hard to break. Well, the evolution debate provides a lot of instruments for breaking it, I guess that's what it's really all about at least on a personal level.

But wouldn't winning the argument lead some people to Christ? That IS the idea behind it all, at least it's the rationalization. Evolution is basically hatred of God too, and the culture is deteriorating daily under the effects of all the ways God is hated these days. Don't we want to be able to be salt and light that keeps such corruption from getting worse?

I think the way to understand this is that we can't defeat any of this with "carnal" weapons, weapons of the flesh ("The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God..."), and the effectiveness of spiritual weapons does require that we personally die.

Come to Christ and DIE. That's how we ALL come to Christ. God engineered Bonhoeffer's many deaths through the Nazis, but He has many ways of doing it for each of us. But our death is imperfect at first and sometimes we resist it to the end and can't really be used as a result.

It's very sad when a Christian capitulates to evolution or any worldly doctrine. It's a refusal to die, it's a refusal to accept the radical division between Christ and the World. You win the world and lose your soul. "He who saves his life will lose it but he who loses his life for My sake will save it for eternity." You get the approval of the worldly wise but you've lost the approval of God.

So at least by staying in there and fighting one is not giving in to the world, but fighting is also a way of refusing to die to self. This Christian life really is a radical challenge to the world and the flesh.

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As a result of that contemplation I feel a sort of peace.  I don't know if I'll have a reason to post more here but my favorite two very simple arguments remain the same: 

1)  All you have to do is look at the strata and know they had to be formed in the Flood and couldn't have been formed over millions of years.  Just look.  Yes, I know, there is looking and there is looking. 

2)  And the second is that the genetic ability to change gets reduced with every change in observable differences in creatures, which means that eventually there is no more ability to change:  End of Evolution. 

The genetic argument is usually argued as a depletion in "information" by creationists but I don't think that's as clear as this way of putting it. 

The strata argument is argued in many different ways by many creationists;  I particularly like that video lecture on the Grand Canyon done by the British creationist Paul Garner.