In the thread "Mt. Ararat Anomaly", SonClad makes a statement with which I disagree.
In one post,
SonClad wrote:
Actually, one's world view comes into play in ascertaining the cause of geological formations such as the Grand Canyon. There is plenty of evidence to suggest a large amount of water caused the majority of the canyon's formation in a relatively short amount of time.
SonClad is clearly implying that it is due to biases against the flood that geologists will not recognize that the Grand Canyon was actually formed during the flood.
The main reason to discount this accusation of bias is that geologists can and do recognize when features are formed due to a great flood of water.
A notable example of this is
Lake Missoula. Lake Missoula was a lake that formed in what is now Idaho and Montana when an ice dam trapped waters during the last ice age. There was a huge amount of water that collected -- the lake was larger than several of the present Great Lakes combined. What is more, several geologic features of the Northwest (like the "channeled scablands") can be explained by a sudden release of the waters of this lake, just like creationists insist formed the Grand Canyon.
Another ancient lake that is recognized is
Lake Agassiz, that covered portions of Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. I am not sure, though, whether any geologic features can be considered to be due to a catastrophic release of these waters.
The point this makes is that, contrary to creationists beliefs, geologists can and do recognize when geologic features are formed from flooding or the catastrophic flow of water. Nor does an unwillingness to consider a feature or set of features as due to a flood result from a bias toward "naturalism"; there are naturalistic causes for floods, and there is no reason to suppose that, even if the Grand Canyon could have been formed due to the action of water, that whatever flood produced the Grand Canyon had a supernatural origin.
The acknowledgement that large ancient lakes existed in the past, as well as that features such as the channeled scablands of Washington were formed by the release of the waters of these lakes shows that geologists can and do recoginize when these features are formed by the action of water. Therefore, geologists do not recognize that the Grand Canyon was formed by the action of a flood
not because they are biased against this sort of explanation. Rather, they do not recognize that the Grand Canyon was formed by the action of a flood because the Grand Canyon does not have the characteristics that are diagnostic of this sort of origiin.
I feel that this should go into the "Geology and the Great Flood" forum, although if the moderators feel that this post should go into an existing thread I will be happy to cut and paste it there.
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