“There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning” (2 Peter 3:3, 4).
The Lake Missoula Washout
I was recently in Washington state and visited the Grand Coulee and the channeled scablands of eastern Washington. I found books of information on the area at Dry Falls near the west end of the coulee. (The word coulee means “dry river.”) This area is the scene of colossal catastrophic erosion from an ancient glacial lake in Montana called Lake Missoula.
Lake Missoula was formed when a lobe of an ice pack from Canada pushed down the Purcell Pass and blocked off the Flat Head River in the panhandle of Idaho. Fast-melting ice sheets at this time, especially in the warming summers, were creating floods in North America and Siberia. When the lake got high enough to float and break up its ice dam (estimated to be 30 miles across and over 2000 feet high) it released about 530 cubic miles of water. It made a horrendous wreck of the area, along with any animals or people in its path. The noise of ice blocks, boulders, trees, and crashing water would have been tremendous, heard one half hour before it arrived. Unique “belt rocks” from the Lake Missoula ice dam area are littered along the path of the washout to the continental shelf in the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River. A huge piece of this rock (moved in ice) is also stranded down in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, 500 miles from its origin.
J. Harlan Bretz was the first scientist to recognize the story told by these geologic features. He presented a paper on his view of their formation by a catastrophic flood to a group of shocked geologists in 1923. The evidence was: huge erratic boulders, some as big as small houses, channels and cliffs eroded into bed rock, dry falls 350 feet high and five times as wide as Niagara Falls, large boulders on the high hills (moved there in ice), and huge gravel bars and silt deposits. There were broad ripple marks 35 feet high and 300 feet from peak to peak on fields where lakes emptied rapidly.
Mr. Bretz was thoroughly castigated and made an outcast in the geologic community. According to one writer, the geologists “based their arguments entirely on the received textbook gospel of slow processes, weak forces, and plenty of time”—uniformitarianism. He further says, “Most scientists go through life believing what they learned in college. They resent challenges to their settled beliefs and dislike those who present them.”
Many scientists today still strongly react to anything that looks like a reversion to the catastrophism of the Biblical creation/flood view believed over 200 years ago. They consider “scientific” geology to have started in 1790. This writer says, “To this day, most geologists consider it nothing less than heresy to invoke a catastrophic explanation for a geologic event.”
Uniformitarianism Is Not New
Educators would like students to believe that slow evolution, over hundreds of millions of years, is the product of the enlightenment of modern science and new evidence. The truth is that spontaneous generation of life in a puddle of water and subsequent evolution is a reversion to beliefs held 2,000 years ago before Christianity swept across Europe.
Neither is this naturalism free from religion. The earliest Sumerian accounts of beginnings can be read on clay tablets. The “Babylonian Genesis,” called the “Enuma Elish” shows three gods representing three kinds of waters: mists, lakes, rivers and streams. It seems to portray the ordered world struggling up (evolving) out of a chaotic universe. Fighting gods kill one god and make the earth from the body, and man from its blood. Today some naturalists venerate the earth again as the body of “Ghia.”
The Bible also shows the base or origin of wickedness to be on the plains of Shinar (Zechariah 5:8-11). It was here that Nimrod likely received the Satanic cosmology (beliefs about the origin of the universe) channeled to him in his tower built to “the hosts of heaven” at Babel (Genesis 14:8-10; 11:1-4).
Naturalistic evolution followed down through the Greek philosophers and Roman gods. The Apostle Paul met these philosophies in the Epicureans and Stoics at Athens (Acts 17:18). The Epicureans were the materialists. They believed everything is just evolving matter. The highest purpose is to enjoy oneself (like many people today). The Stoics of Bible times were like the “New Agers” of today. They believed there was a spirit force in nature. They taught bodily discipline to get the most out of life—the athletic type.
Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher, wrote, “The atoms have been rushing everlastingly throughout all space . . . undergoing myriad changes . . . till they have fallen into the particular pattern by which this world of ours is constituted.” This is a typical expression of the uniformitarian “all things continue as they were” (2 Peter 3:4). His motivation was also a reaction to religion. Lucretius wrote the poem “to free humanity from religious superstition and the fear of death” (World Book Encyclopedia).
Conflicting Worldviews
When Christianity spread across Europe, replacing paganism’s long ages, and the Reformation broke the hold of religious orthodoxy, there also came advances in science. Newton, Louis Pasteur, Boyle, and others were believers in God who established natural law and order in the universe. In America, the Christian worldview of a creation and flood catastrophe were the principles in earth science believed by the founders of Harvard and Yale.
However, Charles Lylle wrote his principles of geology in the 1930’s. “He convinced many of how inconceivably long earth history has been” (World Book Encyclopedia). Public educators began to turn back to naturalism. With the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, evolution got another boost. Teachers began to say again that all the diversity of plant and animal life in our ecosystem could self-organize from inorganic minerals. This is despite the knowledge today of more than five billion bits of information on a genome, which must be right for a normal human body. God’s Word calls this foolish and willful ignorance (Psalm14:1; 2 Peter 3:3-6) and “science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20). It is philosophy (interpretation, not facts).
Harlan Bretz was invited to present his catastrophic explanation of the channeled scabland of eastern Washington state to the geologic society of Washington, D.C., in 1927. The prominent geologists at the meeting castigated Mr. Bretz to the point of insult. Some described it as an ambush or a lynching. A young geologist, Joseph T. Pardee, was at the meeting but, out of expedience, did not speak up. However, he told a colleague, “I know where the flood came from.” It would take over forty years until a majority of new geologists would accept Mr. Bretz’s view.
More Evidence—the Water Source
Joseph Pardee studied evidence of a great lake in Montana in 1909. Shorelines indicated that its surface covered nearly 2,900 square miles. He followed the shorelines to the panhandle of Idaho where they disappeared. He figured the ice dam must have been in this region. The lake was nearly 2,000 feet deep at its ice dam. He described it in a paper in 1910 and went on to other projects.
At the end of his career, Pardee returned and studied Lake Missoula again. He published an excellent paper in 1942 of a catastrophic emptying of the lake in about 48 hours. Water would have gone over Dry Falls 200 feet deep at 60 miles an hour. The lake may have been dammed and released a few times until the ice sheets retreated north to stay. Aerial photographs show lake bottom ripple marks so big they were hard to recognize from the hills on the ground. Mr. Pardee did not mention the channeled scablands, but the lationship was so glaringly obvious it could not be missed. Harlan Bretz had his water source!
It took about forty years, until 1962, when a group of leading geologists toured Lake Missoula, Grand Coulee, and scabland areas. Afterward, they sent Harlan Bretz a message, “We are all catastrophists now.” But his harsh critics kept up their opposition into the 1970s.
Pride Destroys Objectivity
Once such a firm position is taken, it is a major blow to pride to acknowledge having erred. Bretz’s critics went to their graves insisting that weak forces and slow processes over long ages produced the Grand Coulee and channeled scab-lands. This was their textbook uniformitarian gospel from Charles Lylle, “The present is the key to the past” in understanding geologic processes. Mr. Bretz, however, outlived his detractors, nearly reaching 99 years old.
The likely reason Bretz’s explanation finally received wide acceptance is that they are still rejecting the young earth chronology of the Bible. Secular scientists hold to millions of years of geology for the average two-mile deep sedimentary layers around the earth. These also have evidence of live burial of fossils and catastrophic deposition. The standard geologic column is still accepted with its hundreds of millions of years. They still see many “ice ages” and dozens of Lake Missoula washouts over 15,000 years ago.
God, who was there, still describes the only way the oceans could unload onto the continents for an “ice age” in His record to us—the Bible. Many evidences support this sudden world climate change described in the Bible. We find evidences for rain-fed lakes and well-watered deserts in the African Sahara and American west. Evidence shows that the Arctic and Antarctic were also warm grasslands where large mammals flourished.
Resources:
“Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods” – by David Alt
“Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe” – by Steve Austin
“The Troubled Waters of Evolution” – by Henry Morris
Elvin Stauffer