Violence in the Valley
Guests: Doug Sharp, Rich Geer
Description: The geology of much of the southern Arizona landscape around Phoenix and Tucson reminds you of a flat ocean of sand with icebergs of mountains poking their 1/7 of their mass into the air with the flatlands below. It is worth looking at the geologic maps of the area and trying to interpret what you see through Biblical glasses. Since we cannot reverse time and conduct experiments to simulate what happened, we must look at the geologic evidence we find in the present and from that construct a model of what happened in the past. Uniformitarians believe that you can understand what happened in the past by studying present geologic processes. But it is your starting assumptions that help determine the story of how these mountains were built. They have a story of continents on the move, but at a slow rate over millions of years.
Creationist geologists have built a model of the formation of mountain ranges based upon catastrophic plate tectonics. They would view that a global flood of the proportions described in the Bible would cause a total resurfacing of the earth’s crust, and that continents would move rapidly apart from the mid-Atlantic ridge. There are some features of the mountains surrounding Phoenix that are difficult to explain in the traditional geologic model but fit well into the catastrophic plate tectonics explanation.
