Meditation 403
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison
Clear evidence that the Biblical World-Wide Flood is a myth without merit.
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Last November, I visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in southern Colorado. It is a spectacular canyon and no other canyon in North America combines the narrow opening, sheer walls, and startling depths. At a little over half a mile deep, it is just half the depth of the Grand Canyon, but at 1100 feet wide at its narrowest, it has only one-fiftieth of the Grand Canyon's maximum width.
The Gunnison which carved the Black Canyon at the rate of an inch every century flows west to meet the Colorado River at Grand Junction. And downstream, the Colorado carved the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. Or so the geology tells us.
New earth creationists pretend that the Grand Canyon was carved by the retreating waters of Noah's Flood in a very short period of time rather than over hundreds of thousands of years. One look at the canyon with its twists and turns together with the many towering temples in mid-canyon and the application of common sense should demonstrate to anyone of intelligence the falsity of the creationists' claims. But, if that is not enough, all we have to do is look upstream at the geology of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison to see how much of a lie new earth creationism is.
Geology tells us why the Black Canyon exists. Given that there is much softer rock north and south of the present day canyon, logically the river should have carved a different path. But, initially, the river carved a path through upper layers of soft volcanic and sedimentary rocks. Having made a path directly over the Gunnison Uplift, the river had no option but to start slowly cutting through solid granite, wearing away rock about the thickness of a human hair every year over a period of a two million years.
Suppose instead the creationists were right and there had been a massive worldwide flood a few thousand years ago. The retreating waters would have washed away a wide swath of the softer volcanic and sedimentary layers,. Then it would have taken the path of least resistance and cut a path through the relatively soft rock to the north or to the south, but certainly not through the hard granite of the Gunnison uplift. The water would have flowed on one side or the other or both, but definitely not over the granite uplift. The Black Canyon would not and could not exist today if there had been a biblical flood.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is an arrow right though the heart of the biblical flood myth. It kills it absolutely.