Evolutionary Geologists Imagine Mythical Histories

With no way to check,
geological timelines become
playgrounds for storytellers

 

Geology storytellers have learned the same methods as Darwinian storytellers: weave a story in the form, ‘How the [something] got its [something].’ This is the classic Kipling Just-So Story form, and it works just as well for telling stories about earth history as it does about how the camel got its hump, or how the elephant got its trunk.

How Rivers Carved the Canyons of the Central Colorado Plateau (Eos, 25 Feb 2025). Rebecca Owen, author of this article, gets off on the wrong foot immediately in her headline. She assumes the river carved Grand Canyon and other canyons in the Colorado Plateau slowly over millions of years. One should not assume that. Rivers are only one cause of erosion. They may account for some canyons, but not all of them. There are examples of major canyons that were carved quickly by mudflows or floods, leaving only a relic of a small stream or river at the bottom. For instance, read these earlier cases we reported:

• How Secular Geology Forces Observations into an Old-Earth Narrative (19 May 2020)
• A Niagara-Class Waterfall in Days (11 Feb 2015)
• Geologists Warming Up to Catastrophic Floods (19 December 2013)
• Secular Geology Admits to Rapid Canyon Formation by Megafloods (20 June 2010)
• Mt. St. Helens Recalls Overturned Paradigms (18 May 2010)

As these articles show, geologists are aware of the power of catastrophic floods. It’s the scale of the canyons on the Colorado Plateau that give them pause. The sediments and canyons exposed to view there would call for flooding on a phenomenal scale— maybe global in extent. They don’t want to go there, so they stretch out the timeline and postulate an unknown number of smaller events.

Millions of years are the toys of secular moyboys, allowing them to shove any inconvenient data out of sight. Notice how Owen and her secular geologist experts, when encountering a difficulty, weave imaginary histories into vast periods of time that can never be verified without a time machine. Notice also the cognitive dissonance between confidence and ignorance.

Dramatic gorges such as these are created when a river incises into the rock below over millions of years. The rate of river incision in the Colorado Plateau has varied over time and is not well understood.

Rebecca’s selected experts did get out and look. Isn’t that good observational science? They took measurements at two locations. But how definitive can any conclusions be for such a small amount of data from only two sites on the vast Colorado plateau?

How Divination Builds Stories

To make a fairy story sound scientifically credible, it’s helpful to add some props that look like evidence. One useful prop for such occasions is a divination device, also known as a dating method. Here’s one that glows—luminescence dating—promising oohs and aahs from the readers. Another tried-and-true method is radiometric dating. This can be relied on to generate the desired millions of years which, by definition, are impossible to verify with empirical observation. (Every dating method requires assumptions: see 17 July 2023.)

To constrain the ages of the river terraces, they used luminescence dating, which measures a mineral’s release of photons to determine the last time it was exposed to sunlight or intense heat, and isochron dating, a form of radioactive dating that, in this case, measured the changing relative abundance of beryllium and aluminum isotopes.

But how can they measure the changing relative abundance of these isotopes without knowing the starting abundances? This is circular reasoning: assuming what needs to be proved. Nobody has watched radioactive isotopes for millions of years. We only can observe their conditions in the present.

Cranking the divination devices achieved the desired result: a mythical history. But inquiring readers want to know if this mythical history sounds reasonable: long pauses for millions of years, followed by rapid erosion for hundreds of thousands of years? How does this satisfy Lyell’s uniformitarian assumption that the present is the key to the past? How is this not special pleading to attribute effects in one region to different causes than those in another region? Something seems contrived in this story.

The researchers found that in the Moab region of the central Colorado Plateau, river incision paused from 1.8 million years ago to about 350,000 years ago. This pause was followed by a period of rapid incision lasting to the present, during which the river systems carved 200 meters deeper into the plateau. These shifts can be linked to baselevel changes as the Colorado River established its path, eventually contributing to the shape and iconic chasm of the Grand Canyon and its tributaries.

They are asking us to believe that river incision paused for five times as long as it became rapid. Does that make sense given their uniformitarian assumptions? What happened 350,000 years ago to turn that dial radically up? They don’t know. They weren’t there.

Polishing the Tale

They call this “unsteady incision rates.” Analogous to Darwinian just-so stories, geology is fast except when it is slow. Darwinians can tweak “evolutionary rates” to force the data into the mythical history, a dubious insertion of relativistic time dilation into biology and geology.

Two million years seems like an awful long time for a pause. Was there no rain on earth for all that time? Were there no major tectonic movements or floods?

Then, all of a sudden (in moyboy thinking), everything got rapid and crazy for 350,000 years until now, when we can finally observe rivers at work. The story works better when the storytellers raise the perhapsimaybecouldness index and apply a dollop of MoY, or spray with MoY fogger to shroud the audience in fogma.

Did this imaginary history really solve the puzzles in the Colorado Plateau? You decide:

However, this particular period of rapid erosion represents only about a quarter of total exhumation that took place in the central Colorado Plateau over a much longer time period, suggesting that yet-unknown events occurring millions of years earlier may have also shaped the landscape.

They thought that adding more millions of years would come to the rescue. They thought that a “much longer time period” would give them room to hide “yet-unknown events” that “may have” also shaped the landscape. And they call this science?

The Mystery of Baselevel Controls in the Incision History of the Central Colorado Plateau (Tanski et al., AGU Advances, 19 Feb 2025). This is the moyboys’ journal paper. Here are their main findings. Which of these has any confidence? Which of these helped explain the observations?

• Colorado River incision of the central Colorado Plateau during the Pleistocene has been unsteady and transient.
• Mid-Late Pleistocene rapid incision of ∼200 m across the region likely results from baselevel fall due to Pliocene river integration.
• The Early-Middle Pleistocene across the region is marked by much slower erosion, and major exhumation before that time remains unexplained.

Science is supposed to follow the evidence where it leads. Their minds were made up about the mythical history before they went out and took measurements. The measurements and dating methods were mere props to support a prior conclusion. No amount of data would convince these moyboys that the Grand Canyon, Canyonlands and other parts of the Colorado Plateau could have formed rapidly and catastrophically. When the data don’t fit, they can always speculate about “much longer time periods” and “yet-unknown events” that shaped the visible evidence to fit the mental picture they dogmatically believed a priori. And when problems arise with the explanation, they can issue a promissory note that futureware will solve it. The paper’s conclusion contains the promissory note:

Future work must continue to address the older Pleistocene and Neogene drainage history, which has been a persistent mystery, to fully comprehend the Colorado Plateau’s landscape evolution. It also highlights more broadly the spatial and temporal complexity of fluvial incision and landscape evolution in tectonically quiescent landscapes.

“No comprendo,” they admit. We reported 20 years ago that the Grand Canyon was a mystery (16 Sept 2005). The reading public has the right to ask if secular geologists are making progress with their mythical histories or are just playing games with their moyboy toys.

One problem the mythical history did solve exceptionally well. It gave Rebecca and her secular geology friends job security. Like Darwinists, the moyboy geologists can always revise their stories. Nobody in the secular media is likely to notice, because this is how reporters get their job security, too.

Suggested reading:

1. 1. Book review by Tas Walker of The Dating Game by Cherry Lewis. See how decisions are made in geological science to preserve deep time for Darwin. Note especially the discussion about dating methods.
   2. The Great Turning Point by Dr Terry Mortenson. Learn about the history of geology, and how skeptics of Genesis in the late 1700s and early 1800s tried to “rid geology of Moses” and elbow Flood Geologists out of the science. This was a necessary foundation to give Charles Darwin the time he desired for his imaginary history of life.
   3. See our 2017 article by Bill Hoesch, “Ten Evidences at Grand Canyon for a Global Flood.”