This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
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Details Relating to Powell’s Proposal
17. 
Layering, Limestone, Why Here? 
Why So “Recently”? Marble Canyon, Distant Cavern Connection, Perpendicular Faults, Arching, Inner Gorge, Missing Talus, Unusual Erosion, Nankoweap Canyon. This proposal does not address the obvious questions associated with these aspects of the Grand Canyon. [See “Evidence Requiring an Explanation” beginning on page 188.]
18. Side Canyons, Barbed Canyons, Slot Canyons. Some believe that erosion rates in side canyons must have been greater in the past. Others say that sudden storms above dry side canyons can produce flash floods. The intensity of flow then produces considerable erosion, all the way down to the Colorado River. While such events do happen, one would not expect the drainage to flow counter to the Colorado River as happens with gigantic barbed canyons, and slot canyons have many characteristics that are inconsistent with this explanation. [See Figure 123 on page 202.]
One proposal for the barbed canyons is that the Colorado River flowed to the north when those canyons were carved. However, this raises other troubling questions: What would tip the Colorado Plateau so the river flowed in precisely the opposite direction today? Why would the barbed canyons always “hook in” and enter the Colorado River at almost exactly right angles?
These questions and others can be neatly resolved. As thousands of cubic miles of rock were removed from the Grand Canyon area, the land below it rose. That lifting tipped the land around Marble Canyon, so subsurface water drained in a northward direction (although the Colorado River’s flow has always been southward through Marble Canyon). Those subsurface flows then joined the subsurface flow already spilling out of the newly opened walls of Marble Canyon. Naturally, the east wall’s water was spilling to the west, and the west wall’s water was spilling to the east. Therefore, the generally northward path of the subsurface flow hooks in and enters Marble Canyon at right angles. With so much material removed by this subsurface flow, the land above those flows sank, becoming sink valleys, which then captured most of the water spilling out of the walls of Echo and Vermilion Cliffs.
19. Forces, Energy, and Mechanisms. Powell and most geologists between the mid-1800s and 1960 were misled by a theory proposed by James Dwight Dana in 1847. Dana, a Yale geology professor, said that the earth contracted as it cooled from its molten state, much like the wrinkled skin of a dried-up apple. Powell thought this accounted for the uplift of the Colorado Plateau and the Kaibab Plateau. (Had a simple calculation been made, the theory would have been immediately rejected.) A cooling earth would not contract enough to produce mountains or lift plateaus. [Page 27 (“Molten Earth?”) and page 111 explain why the earth was never molten.]
20. Missing River, Missing Dirt. Since 1934, discoveries have shown that the western Grand Canyon and beyond were not cut by the Colorado River.7–10 Nor does the Colorado River delta contain even 1% of the dirt excavated from the Grand Canyon.
21. Missing Mesozoic Rock. Millions of years of rainfall and meandering rivers would not sweep 99% of the Mesozoic sediments (at least 1,000 feet thick) off the fairly flat Kaibab Limestone. Besides, why would at least 2,000 cubic miles of Mesozoic rock, spread over 10,000 square miles, be missing around and to the east of the Grand Canyon and yet generally remain elsewhere?
22. Fossils. This proposal for the Grand Canyon is linked with the bankrupt theory of evolution. Both require hundreds of millions of years of time. The Great Unconformity is said to mark the time when life began. Supposedly, fossils are not found below that plane, because life had not yet evolved. Pages 6–21 and 170–181 give many reasons why this theory is untenable.
Notice that the theory of evolution consists of many other theories, each proposed in an attempt to solve a large class of problems: how space and matter came into being (such as the big bang theory), how chemical elements formed, how stars, galaxies, earth, and life began, how macroevolution (not microevolution) might happen, why transitional fossils are missing, why vital organs and DNA exist, what produced irreducible complexity, and why, immediately above the Great Unconformity, all animal and plant phyla are suddenly found (the Cambrian explosion). Consequently, each evolutionary link in this assumed chain of origins—from protons to planets to people—must be established before one can conclude that animals and plants evolved after the Great Unconformity somehow formed. This proposal for the Grand Canyon accepts the evolutionary explanation for fossils and is dependent upon the correctness of all those evolutionary “subtheories.” (Part I of this book shows why each is incorrect.)
All of this should be contrasted with the hydroplate theory—a single, broad, self-consistent theory that explains the origin of the Grand Canyon and thousands of other pieces of evidence, including layered fossils.
23. Tipped Layers below Unconformity. The uplift of the Colorado Plateau would not tip the thick layers below the Great Unconformity while leaving the layers above horizontal.
An old, discredited explanation for the tipped layers was proposed in 1889 by William Morris Davis, head of the geology department at Harvard. Davis said that even mountainous regions eventually erode down to what he called a peneplain (meaning “almost a plain”). The Great Unconformity, according to Davis, was such a plain, formed over a vast time period. Later, the horizontal layers were deposited, mostly below sea level, and then the Colorado River carved the canyon. He proposed that the tipped layers below the Great Unconformity were portions of mountains that were not completely eroded.
One reason geologists now reject the peneplain concept is that none are seen forming today.71 Mountainous regions do not lie below eroding surfaces that are almost plains. Another problem is that the metamorphic rock below the Great Unconformity formed under great pressure. The topic “Metamorphic Rock” on page 111 explains why reasonable depths of overlying rock would not provide the pressure required. As explained on page 122, the compression event accounts for the pressure required.
24. Time or Intensity? Time: If the Colorado River, flowing for almost 6,000,000 years (or, by other estimates, 1,800,000 years10) carved the Grand Canyon, the river should have produced a gigantic river delta where it enters the Gulf of California. It has not. Nor would surface erosion for 6,000,000 years produce the erosion patterns shown in Figure 106 on page 187. Intense subsurface drainage would. Why have other large, equally high and fast rivers not carved other Grand Canyons during that same time?
Despite being checked and rechecked, the radiometric dating techniques that date the Colorado River, and supposedly justify that much time, give contradictory results.
[Upstream from the Grand Canyon] the river shows evidence of being somewhere between 20 and 10 million years. How can a river be 20 million years in one location but no more than 6 million years downstream?72
Did the Colorado River follow a different path? For the last 70 years, geologists have been looking for other paths the river could have taken. None has been found.
Radiometric dating of lava flows in the western half of the Grand Canyon also gives inconsistent dates. The potassium-argon method gives drastically different ages from those of the argon-argon method,73 and both methods give different ages from those of cosmogenic dating. Statistical errors cannot explain any of these differences; consequently, the assumptions behind at least some of these methods must be in error. [See “Radiometric Dating: Contradictions and Key Assumption” on page 35 for a brief description of these assumptions.]