Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past (cont.)
By David Warner Mathisen

If, on the other hand, a theory demonstrates that the Grand Canyon could have been carved in a few weeks or months, and what’s more demonstrates that such an explanation appears to fit the available evidence much more convincingly than does the theory of an ordinary river acting gradually for millions of years, then this sucks the wind out of the sails of an awful lot of other theories.

First of all, the possibility that the Grand Canyon could be carved in months means that, for all we know, the Grand Canyon could have been carved just a few months ago! Of course, since we have human record of its existence before that, we know that it wasn’t carved just a few months ago, but prior to human record of its existence, all bets are off. In fact, as Dr. Brown has pointed out, we have Native American oral tradition which asserts that it was carved during human memory, and so while we can say that the Grand Canyon may be several thousands of years old, we don’t have any real evidence leading to the conclusion that it is really millions of years old (the main reason for that conclusion is the assumption that it would take that long to carve it). If features on earth were carved only several thousands of years ago, then a major foundational support for Darwinian evolution is dramatically undermined. If canyons and mountain ranges were thrust up relatively recently, then that undermines the argument that bighorn sheep or mountain goats “adapted” to such environments (evolved the structures that enable them to hop around on cliff walls or mountain precipices) via natural selection over millions of years.

Such a theory of catastrophism also undermines the long ages of proposed primitive development for early humans. If there was a global flood within the past several thousand years, and if we have evidence demonstrating extremely advanced human knowledge and understanding several thousand years ago (evidence such as pyramids corresponding proportionally to the size of the spherical earth, or stone circles which increase by a factor of phi from one circle to the next), then we might conclude that, whatever the timeline looked like before the flood, those who lived almost immediately following the flood were already extremely advanced. In fact, they were so advanced that it is only possible to describe the civilizations that came after them as woefully ignorant. There is evidence that we may only now be reaching some of the same levels of technical skill in some areas, and in some areas of human knowledge we may still be ignorant of subjects which were well understood by those ancients. This timeline is dramatically different (and far less comforting) than the myth of constant progress (with “modern space-age man” at the pinnacle).

In fact, if the true history of mankind is anything close to the alternative view that these glimpses suggest, then it raises an extremely urgent question, and one which should concern everyone who cares about human civilization:

WHAT HAPPENED?