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HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY — Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology


Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”


"How did the Ark stay afloat?!"

...In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

Park officials have defended the decision to approve the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, claiming that park bookstores are like libraries, where the broadest range of views are displayed. In fact, however, both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are supposed to closely support approved interpretive themes. Moreover, unlike a library the approval process is very selective. Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.

...“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan,” Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book. “We sincerely hope that the new Director of the Park Service now has the autonomy to do her job.”

The fundies' ability to believe uncounted numbers of impossible things before breakfast would be funny if they didn't have the power to do things like keep the National Park Service from using the grandest schools in the world (national parks, monuments, etc) to teach facts. How big do these nimrods think the ark could possibly have been? Have they visited a good zoo in their lives? How do they compute putting as many animals as exist onto a single vessel, especially a hand-made vessel - and feeding them, not on each other - for over 2 months?

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote: How big do these nimrods think the ark could possibly have been?

DAR
The Bible tells us, as long as 450 feet, depending on the length of cubit you use. But wooden boats can't be made that large even if you use iron strapping to secure them (which Noah wouldn't have had). Wood isn't nearly strong or stiff enough. We've tried it.

Noah's Ark is a perfect slap in the face of the intelligence of any thinking rational human being. And yet about 1/3 of the American population believe it anyway. Thanks to idiotic "documentaries" on TV, I have met non-fundies, non-christians who think Noah's Ark has been found.

D.

Oh there have been numerous major floods in the world and the Middle Eastern ones are rare and spectacular enough to generate myths in any culture you care to name. I'm perfectly sure some folks managed to get their domestic breeding stock on board a boat of some kind and survived. Not flashfloods, which are like tsunamis and carry/smash everything in their path, but multiple rivers overflowing their banks types of things. If it occurs in a high plains type area, you could even find such a family/stock boat parked on a hill in a mountainous area (especially if it later got covered in volcanic ash or something). The family probably lived in it until the waters receded and the land dried out a bit. If the flood dumped a couple of feet of good topsoil in the area where the boat came to rest, the folks probably stayed there - figuring such a flood wouldn't come again for their lifetimes.

However, THE ark/noah/animals two by two (& five by five for the "unclean" ones) is totally impossible - I don't care who tells it. Modern Americans are just too disconnected from Nature/Reality - too many cartoons without parents re-enforcing the "make believe" nature of said cartoon - too much "magic" thinking - to ever connect the dots of - how many animals of x mass and volume loaded onto a boat of y mass and volume carrying capacity - much less how'd you feed 'em.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:Oh there have been numerous major floods in the world and the Middle Eastern ones are rare and spectacular enough to generate myths in any culture you care to name. I'm perfectly sure some folks managed to get their domestic breeding stock on board a boat of some kind and survived.

DOUG
I would be surprised today if anyone were able to do that, even with satellite photos and radar available online. And with boat trailers hooked up to pickup trucks. In ancient times, with little or no warning, I would find it even more unlikely. No, it didn't happen, Barbara. Someone just made it up. Why is that so hard for some people to admit?

Doug, you're forgetting that many riverine-culture people LIVE on boats, with their livestock (chickens and goats if nothing else). A flood that wasn't of the tsunami/dam-breaking type would lift the boat and its contents and push it out as far as the water went during the flood, then leave it somewhere as the flood waters receded. With a massive (500-year) flood the boat would have been pushed several days walking distance from "home" and the boat would have been too heavy to move back once it came to rest - especially if it lodged on a minor crag and got stuck. The folks either stayed and changed their way of life, or hiked back to the river and built another boat. Non-river culture people - especially if the river had changed course and was much farther away - finding remnants of boat (with possible recognizable animal feces still in odd corners) would have been puzzled as to how it got there, why it had obvious living quarters and animal traces in it, etc. The Noah story (god said build a boat, I'm gonna drown the planet) is made up, but possibly no more made up than the dragon stories based on dinosaur bones - attempts to explain what are to that time and culture unexplainable facts. The problem is with people who refuse to admit the myth is myth when faced with facts (like it's not possible to put breeding pairs of the entire even currently existant species on one boat, even if it were something as big as a modern supertanker or aircraft carrier, which Noah's boat most certainly wasn't).

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote: Doug, you're forgetting that many riverine-culture people LIVE on boats, with their livestock (chickens and goats if nothing else).

DOUG
OK. In the desert?

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote: The Noah story (god said build a boat, I'm gonna drown the planet) is made up, but possibly no more made up than the dragon stories based on dinosaur bones - attempts to explain what are to that time and culture unexplainable facts. The problem is with people who refuse to admit the myth is myth when faced with facts (like it's not possible to put breeding pairs of the entire even currently existant species on one boat, even if it were something as big as a modern supertanker or aircraft carrier, which Noah's boat most certainly wasn't).

DOUG
Why not just admit that the Noah story is BEST explained as a fiction from beginning to end? Why should anyone suppose that there is ANY basis in fact for this? Who would bother to elaborate on a story of a guy who LIVED on a boat?

And why would anyone want to suppose that the Chinese made up dragon stories because of dinosaur bones? Dragon stories appear to have been around for milennia before dinosaur bones were widely known, or perhaps known at all.

In a series of recent decisions, the National Park Service has approved the display of religious symbols and Bible verses, as well as the sale of creationist books giving a biblical explanation for the Grand Canyon and other natural wonders. Also, under pressure from conservative groups, the Park Service has agreed to edit the videotape that has been shown at the Lincoln Memorial since 1995 to remove any image of gay and abortion rights demonstrations that occurred at the Memorial.

These moves all emanate from top Park Service political appointees, in many cases over the objections of park superintendents, agency lawyers and career staff. A number of fundamentalist Christian and socially conservative groups are claiming credit for these actions and touting their new direct and personal access to Bush Administration officials.

Rewriting History at the Lincoln Memorial
This past October Park Service employees contacted PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) to warn us that the video display at the Lincoln Memorial would be removed and revised under pressure from conservative and religious groups. This eight-minute video contains still photos and footage of demonstrations and other events that took place at the Lincoln Memorial, including the Marian Anderson concert and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream” speech.

These groups asked to cut out footage of gay rights, pro-choice and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations because it implies that “Lincoln would have supported homosexual and abortion ‘rights’ as well as feminism.” Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, for example, calls the video “a first-class perversion of Abraham Lincoln.”

Under pressure from these groups and a conservative Kansas congressman, Todd Tiahrt who sits on the Appropriations Committee, the Park Service promised to develop a “more balanced” version of the video. Park Service spokespeople indicated that they were considering inserting footage from the Christian group Promise Keepers rally and pro-Gulf War demonstrators even though these events did not take place at the Memorial...

Bible Verses
In mid-July, NPS Deputy Director Donald Murphy ordered the Grand Canyon National Park to return three bronze plaques bearing Bible verses to public viewing areas on the Canyon’s South Rim. Murphy overruled the park superintendent who had directed the plaques’ removal based on legal advice from the Interior Department that the religious displays violated the First Amendment.

In a letter to the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, the group sponsoring the plaques, Murphy apologized for “any intrusion resulting from” the temporary removal of the plaques bearing Psalms 68:4, 66:4 and 104:24. Murphy pledged “further legal analysis and policy review” before further action is taken. No such analysis, however, is yet underway.

The Park Service is also engaged in an extended legal battle to continue displaying an eight-foot-tall cross, planted atop a 30-foot-high rock outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve in California. PEER Board Member and former-Park Service manager Frank Buono filed suit to force removal of the cross. That suit is now pending before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (see PEEReview, Spring ‘01).

...On these issues, the current Park Service leadership now appears to cater exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups. As a result, the Bush Administration is sponsoring a program that can fairly be called “Faith-Based Parks.”

See here.

As Bartcop puts it:

"Bush has gagged Park Rangers at the Grand Canyon. Under orders from the Little Dictator they are not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Fundie crackpots who think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."

As to the science gag rule, maybe the new congress can do something about that. I know the prez appointed the fundies doing this, but they have to have backing on some of them - which they got from the previous congresses.

Doug, myths start with something. Dinosaur bones weren't identified AS dinorsaur bones until relatively recently, but they've been around - and obviously are bones of something - since long before people existed. There would be no myths about thunderbolt hurlers if there were no thunderbolts. As to riverine cultures in the desert, I'm not saying there are or were. In fact, it is much more likely that a desert-dwelling people finding remains of a boat with living quarters and animal scat - which could last hundreds of years in a dry climate - would come up with a myth that grew in "mythic" proportions. It is possible for a 500-year or 1000-year flood to carry a boat from a river or bay inlet some tens, if not hundreds, of miles away and then drop it there. It is possible for that same massive flood to change the course of the river moving it even further away from the said dropped boat. You find a boat wedged into a crevice on a hill, in a time of no pickup trucks with boat trailers, you wonder how it got there and why. It's a simple step from wondering to coming up with a story - and stories grow if not anchored to facts.

Barbara, I agree with you so I'm not arguing, but there are some biblical myths that are apparently made up out of nowhere - like Adam and Eve and the talking serpent, Jonah living in the belly of a whale for forty days, the parting of the Red Sea. It's amazing that otherwise intelligent educated people can believe such nonsense; it makes no more sense than believing in thunderbolt throwers.

Speaking of myths, it seems the original report was quite exaggerated. While I have no doubt that certain individuals are trying to pull strings to prevent any discussion of more than 6000 years of history, the website still describes features as millions of years old, and Dr. Joe Meert -- a geologist from the U of Florida -- has passed on word that tour guides have no problem explaining that while the canyon itself is relatively young (5-6 million years old), certain layers date from tens or hundreds of millions of (or in once case, two billion) years ago.

I'm glad the original report was exaggerated, I'm just sorry it had even a grain of truth in it.

Betsy, stories start somewhere. People had to come from somewhere and they sure look different from everything else. (Dogs, wolves, foxes all have stuff in common, so do cats, lynxes and cheetahs - but people! The closest you come is chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, and superficially, that's not close.) God is the "obvious" answer for anything you can't understand. Whether god made man and woman from clay to tend a Middle Eastern garden or from rows of cornstalks to guard a North American one - it's all myth. As for Jonah - my bet is the name of the ship he came over on was something that translated to the Ninevahns as "whale" or at least "big fish". (I saw a show once that explained it was actually a giant grouper, since whale throats aren't big enough to allow a grapefruit through, much less a man. Of course, they didn't explain why he wasn't digested - fish eat everything alive and raw and their tums do a very good job of turning it into nutrient soup.) Or possibly the type of boat rather than the name. I had a friend who drove a "cat" for a living. Take that into another culture and they might have trouble relating "cat" to "earth mover". As to talking animals - we're still inventing those. Even if they didn't abound in TV and movies, ask any kid. Heck, if she was still alive, ask my mother. She used to come in from work and jump on us for forgetting to feed and water the dogs. When we asked how she knew, she said "Lassie told me". And Lassie did always go out to meet her when she came in and "talk" to her. I don't know what it was, tone of bark or something, but Momma always knew. Myth/religion or any other story has to have a source.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:Doug, myths start with something.

DOUG
Yes, there are boats. There are floods. There are animals.

But that isn't the point. The gist of the Noah story is undoubtedly pure crap. The gist of the story is not that there are animals, boats, and floods, but that someone could save a bunch of animals from a flood by building a boat for that purpose beforehand.

Doug - and to a desert culture, finding the remants of a boat with living space and evidence of animals on it where there was no water for miles around, why else would it have been built? You are thinking from what YOU know. Don't do that when you are trying to figure out how a myth got started. Think about the culture that started it, what they see as "normal" and then use as close as you can come to that logic base to posit their reactions to something totally outside their culture.

We agree the Noah story is a myth. We agree that modern, supposedly educated people are misguided at best (and we won't go into "at worst")when they insist the myth is fact. But myths start somewhere and that somewhere is a "fact" that is outside the realm of "normal" for whoever makes up the myth to explain that "fact".

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:Doug - and to a desert culture, finding the remants of a boat with living space and evidence of animals on it where there was no water for miles around, why else would it have been built?

Not IN CASE of a flood. Do you ever hear of desert people building large barges in the desert "just in case"?

And by the time a flood had started, it is too late to start to build one.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote: You are thinking from what YOU know. Don't do that when you are trying to figure out how a myth got started. Think about the culture that started it, what they see as "normal" and then use as close as you can come to that logic base to posit their reactions to something totally outside their culture.

Yes, it is not normal to built large barges in the desert IN CASE it floods.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote: We agree the Noah story is a myth. We agree that modern, supposedly educated people are misguided at best (and we won't go into "at worst")when they insist the myth is fact. But myths start somewhere and that somewhere is a "fact" that is outside the realm of "normal" for whoever makes up the myth to explain that "fact".

What fact? There is no known fact of a guy who built a boat and rescued his animals (and family).

The BEST explanation is that someone just made up the Noah story. There are floods in the Nile region and elsewhere. Someone who lost animals and/or family may have made up the story as a sort of wishful thinking--like the story that there is a heaven.

Doug, that's my point. Nobody in the desert would build a boat for themselves and their animals "just in case" there was a flood. What I am suggesting is that some desert people came across the preserved remnents (remember, the desert dry preserves things for centuries, if not millenia) of some massive flood (your basic 500-year or so type) and invented a story to go with it. ("God" must have told them to do it.) River people, who do live on boats with their animals, would have no need to come up with a myth to explain a boat with living space for people and animals - it's normal for them.

DAR
I am usually loathe to go along with (usually farfetched) hypothesis that try to give a scientific basis for biblical miracles. But people usually live near water and floods do happen so I am open to the idea that there might be a kernal of truth to the Gilgamesh story (far older than the Noah version) which was later copied by the Jews and recycled in the Bible story (and others).

This book might be of interest:

***
"Noah's Flood : The New Scientific Discoveries About The Event That Changed History," by William Ryan & Walter Pitman.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... infidelsA/

From the above page comes a review by Scientific American:

"The tale of a massive, devastating flood appears not only in the Bibe but also in other ancient writings, often in similar terms, suggesting that it records a real and singularly memorable event. Ryan and Pitman, who are senior scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, think the event might have been a huge and prolonged cascade of water from the Mediterranean that broke through a natural dam in the Bosporus Strait and plunged into what was then a freshwater lake and is now the Black Sea. They present both geologic and archaeological evidence for the flood, dating it at about 5600 B.C. 'The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days,' they write. The cascade inundated 60,000 square miles of land, forcing the people living in the region to disperse. The book explores the question of who those people were and where they went; it also examines the tradition of oral storytelling that could have passed the flood story from generation to generation."

***
And another review:

***
The Amazon review is:
"The Deluge of Noah has long been one of the points of tension between geology and Christianity. Scientific diluvianism--the theory that the earth's history was shaped by a universal flood--collapsed in the early 19th century, well before Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. Since that time, scientists and historians have assumed that the flood story derived from local events in Mesopotamia.

"In 1997, geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan proposed the first truly novel interpretation of the flood in over 150 years. Their studies of sediments in the Black Sea convinced them that the body had been a freshwater lake until about 5600 B.C. When the rising waters of the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus, 'ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls.'

"With great intellectual daring, Pitman and Ryan have moved outside of their academic niche to suggest that this event had enormous consequences for human history. They marshal evidence from archeology, mythology, linguistics, and agriculture to describe a flood-driven diaspora of early farmers. Subsets of these people became (variously) proto-Indo-Europeans, Sumerians, Beaker People, Vincas, Tocharians--the founders of the early cultures of Europe and western Asia. --Mary Ellen Curtin "
***

DAR
All bets are off if these guys are fundies, but I don't think they are. They aren't arguing for a very literal interpretion of the Noah flood.

D.

That's all it needs to start a series of myths - a kernal of truth. A massive flood (still relatively local, from the North American point of view) that carried somebody's floating house to a place normally high and dry. Dry is the operative word, since once the flood waters receded, the dry climate would keep that boat relatively intact for enough years that a desert tribe wandering by generations later might find it - and make up a "divine" story about it. Even more probable if the ancestors of that desert tribe already had a story about escaping a mighty flood where no flood should be. For one thing, desert tribes are not likely to have even the vaguest idea of how many different types of animals there are in the world to "save" from the mighty flood. The fact there are actually two versions of the myth in the bible alone indicates more than one desert tribe came across it, as would be expected under the circumstances I've proposed.

Skeptic magazine has issued a non-retraction retraction:

Fact Checking 101
How Skeptic magazine was Duped
by an Environmental Activist Group

by Michael Shermer

In last week’s eSkeptic , we published highlights from a press release issued by PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), a Washington D.C.-based environmental watchdog group. That press release, dated December 28, 2006, was headlined:

HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY
Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology

The first sentence of the release reads:

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life (as if we actually needed more), we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) to check it. As a testimony to the quality of our readers, however, dozens immediately phoned both NPS and GCNP, only to discover that the claim is absolutely false. Callers were told that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, that no one is being pressured from Bush administration appointees — or by anyone else — to withhold scientific information, and all were referred to a statement by David Barna, Chief of Public Affairs, National Park Service as to the park’s official position. “Therefore, our interpretive talks, way-side exhibits, visitor center films, etc. use the following explanation for the age of the geologic features at Grand Canyon,” the document explains.

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