I watched this NOVA episode last night about the Scablands. The Scablands are an area in eastern Washington that contain unusual geographic features, such as sudden huge potholes, rocks dropped onto the ground randomly, steep drop-off cliffs, and unusual enormous scars. It has been a mystery for years as to how that landscape came about, but now geologists believe they have finally figured it out. They say it was a megaflood in Washington that carved this landscape. According to the theory, a glacier flowed down a mountain until it crossed through a valley in Idaho across the path of the Clark Fork river that was previously flowing through that valley. A huge lake (bigger than Lake Erie and Ontario combined) formed on the 2,000 foot high ice dam, and the water eventually broke through the ice barrier to flow down through eastern Washington in a huge flood miles wide, and hundreds of feet tall. This caused the staggering formations we see today.
They go to great lengths to show us the enormous effects of flood water upon a landscape. They perform tests, and conclude that they have previously underestimated the power of huge catastrophes. (Does this sound familiar yet?)
The program went through the history of what scientists have thought about the origin of the Scablands, and told the story of one man, J. Harlen Bretz, who had the same hypothesis as the modern scientists do. In the 1920s he said that a huge flood had carved out the valley, but he didn’t know where the water had come from. Scientists excused his ideas as crazy, saying that it sounded too much like a “biblical flood”. The narrator even said that Bretz’s views were viewed as “heresy” to geology at the time because of the pervasive view of slow and gradual erosion over millions of years that evolution supports.
These geologists today obviously aren’t putting two and two together. They point out the enormous power of water and what it can do to a landscape. But they deny that a much bigger, more forceful worldwide flood could have done basically the same or slightly larger things. The hypocrisy is funny sometimes. More and more evidence is turning up that massive catastrophes have played a major part in shaping our planet, but geologists still hold to the gradualist evolutionary view of earth history. There’s another PBS show on today, and one next week that both talk about catastrophes causing enormous geographic features.
They also won’t admit clearly that science is deeply wrong sometimes, and they never tie previous errors to the fact that science could be deeply wrong today. I noticed that the geologists of the period quickly dismissed Bretz because of his views of a “biblical” sized flood (which everyone obviously knows is completely impossible). The evolutionary community is dismissing creationism today in the same type of way.
The evolutionists need to consider seemingly “far-fetched” ideas again and look at the world around them. Oh wait, that’s actual science.
The program with the transcript.
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