I had an odd upbringing. I grew up in the National Park Service. My father has a BS in geology, and spent his career as a Park Ranger. Any car trip, anywhere throughout the southwest United States, became, for at least part of the journey, a geologic travelogue.
His moving lectures covered erosion processes, faults and earthquakes, volcanism, deposition, and even the evidence of life throught the colours of the rocks. I learned quickly that, despite the seeming permanence of geologic features, when one looked beyond a human life span, the rocks, mountains, canyons, and arches are impermanent. And his explanations about uniformitarianism — the idea that the same processes at work today have been at work since the planet was formed — set my imagination free. I pictured dinosaurs walking through the mudstones. I saw crocodylians roaming the land. I saw the past.
Growing up in desert areas, I was fascinated by water (still am (my favourite roads are ones which parallel rivers and creeks)). I looked forward to the monsoon season of Northern Arizona. I watched the skies for the thunderheads and tried to calculate the chances of a cloud providing rain and, more important, doing it over me. I loved the gully-washers and flash floods. I would imagine a miniature me in a kayak or raft, riding the muddy waves.
I could also watch, on a small scale, how much one storm could change the landscape. Small rocks moved. Oxbows formed, or were cut off. Steep areas moved upstream. Slow areas became wider as sediment accumulated.
Through my father’s teaching (which never seemed like teaching to me), I was able to make the cognitive adjustment from microgeology to macrogeology. I could look at the Grand Canyon, or Walnut Canyon, or Titus Canyon, or Canyon de Chelly and see exactly the same processes, just in a larger scale. And the idea that what I was seeing was billions of years in the making awoke a love for nature which my study of human history never extinguished.
Of course, to a creationist (young-earth variety), those previous paragraphs just prove how deluded and secular I am. After all, god(s) created the earth and all the heavens in six days, 6,000 years ago. The earth is designed for us, his greatest creation. The agricultural belts of China, Europe, and North and South America were created to feed us. The mountains to give us adventure and wonder. The seas to feed us. The arches, buttes, and canyons of the American Southwest to provide beauty. The Earth exists today as it has always been, as it always will be (of course, there was the great flood, which BLs and YECs use to explain ALL geology (not to mention palaeontology)).
To a YEC, the very idea of Uniformitarianism is anathema. The idea that the soils in which we grow wheat are a product of the glaciations of the last 10,000 to 100,000 years is heresy. The thought that mountains are still growing (and the continents are moving) denies the permanence of the deity’s creation. The idea that god(s) handiwork is impermanent would call into question the Biblical story of creation.
The Biblical literalists, the Young Earth Creationists, fail to see what is happening every day, in every corner of our world. They deny reality. Reality does not agree with their faith, so they deny reality. At Arches National Park in Utah, reality happened on the night of August 4th, 2008.
Arches National Park consists of mesas, buttes and canyons carved into late Triassic (early Jurassic?) sandstones. The dry, high desert means that erosion happens slower and faster — slower because there is so little rain, faster because, when it does rain, it creates flash floods. Little vegetation grows, there is little soil, so the rocks are visible. The action of freezing and thawing, the flash floods, and the wind has created over 2,000 arches (which explains the name of the park, neh?).
Arches is now one arch short. Wall Arch, along one of the more popular trails, collapsed (gravity sucks, right?). To a comitted theist, a Biblical Literalist who believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old, this must be an example of man’s destructiveness, man’s imperfection, as a result of Eve’s decision to listen to a snake and eat an apple. To a naturalist, one who is willing to comprehend what the evidence shows, is willing to open the mind to reality, the collapse of the arch is a striking example of the reality of geologic processes.
The reality of Uniformitarianism stares us in the face daily. Every landform that we see will disappear. Just because it does not happen in our lifetime, does not mean it won’t happen. The Old Man of the Mountain has already collapsed. The Grand Canyon will disappear. Yosemite Valley will fill in as the mountains around it erode. The geysers of Yellowstone will have a short life. The Great Lakes are filling in as you read this.
Every landform (other than the continents), including mountains, plains, seas, oceans, lakes, hills, canyons, and waterfalls, will destroyed by the same processes which created them. And new landforms, just as wonderful, just as original, will be created. Not through the capricious idiocy of a bronze-age deity, but through the wonders of reality.
Biblical literalists and Young Earth Creationists, may reason find you and may you accept the reality of the world. Meanwhile, I will continue to watch the world change before my very eyes. Naturally.
(((Billy))) The Atheist 
