An epic lack of epochs

Those who insist the earth is billions of years old usually point to interpretations of geologic data. The Grand Canyon, for instance, must have taken millions of years to carve, they say, after millions of years of the original sediment forming.

If one assumes the current etching rate of the Colorado River back into the past, it's easy to see how that timeline works. But is that the right approach? History, like rivers, doesn't always flow smoothly. Sometimes it's flooded with change:

Geologic time has a different meaning when it comes to Canyon Lake Gorge. You could say it dates to around the end of the Enron era.

A torrent of water from an overflowing lake sliced open the earth in 2002, exposing rock formations, fossils and even dinosaur footprints in just three days. The mile-and-a-half-long gorge, up to 80 feet deep, was dug out from what had been a nondescript valley covered in mesquite and oak trees.

"It exposed these rocks so quickly and it dug so deeply, there wasn't a blade of grass or a layer of algae," said Bill Ward, a retired geology professor from the University of New Orleans who started cataloging the gorge almost immediately after the flood.

The sudden exposure of such canyons is rare but not unprecedented. Flooding in Iowa in 1993 opened a limestone gorge behind a spillway at Corvalville Lake north of Iowa City, but that chasm, Devonian Fossil Gorge, is narrower and shallower than Canyon Lake Gorge.

Now, lest you get the idea something like this might have been responsible for the Grand Canyon, the reporter feels obligated to remind you of the orthodox view:

Neither compares to the world's most famous canyon. It took water around 5 million to 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon, which plunges 6,000 feet at its deepest point and stretches 15 miles at its widest.

Why the staunch defense--insistence--of an ancient age for the earth? Because without it, macroevolutionary theory falls apart, and with it the materialist worldview it supports. But remember, the next time someone insists the geography we see REQUIRES millions of years, there's a few canyons... and a volcano... that would beg to differ.