The stirring on the mount

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Tall and forbiddingly learned, Lloyd Anderson can — and frequently does, his wife complains — discourse at length on pyroclastic flows, steam explosion pits, laminate stratification and the event horizons of dense gravity fields. If you wish, he could probably do so in ancient Greek or Hebrew, both of which he reads.

Doris Anderson, a retired registered nurse who pursued a second career as a journalist, translates her husband’s perorations for the everyday reader in brochures and booklets that explain, in no-nonsense but engaging prose, how he believes the geologic changes at and around Mount St. Helens — the “7 Wonders” — prove that processes that mainstream scientists insist took millions of years can actually occur in days, or even hours.

James Cheng / MSNBC.com
Doris Anderson, a retired journalist, writes the center's literature and takes visitors on tours of the museum, outlining the ideas her husband has spent years developing.

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The “second wonder,” for example, was the formation of the Step and Loowit canyons. When you look at Mount St. Helens, Step Canyon, 700 feet deep, is the long gouge trailing down from the mouth of the crater. According to the emerging philosophy, the canyons took just five months to form, illustrating, Anderson says, that magnificent formations like the lava-carved Grand Coulee about 300 miles to the east and even the Grand Canyon could have been formed virtually overnight by a catastrophic event.

Anderson says he could marshal any number of scientific arguments to prove that the biblical global flood happened as it is described in Genesis, from inaccuracies in radiocarbon dating to gaps in the fossil record to superfine stratification of sedimentary layers around Mount St. Helens.

Scientists say it just doesn’t work that way
Creation theory has always driven mainstream scientists nuts. But scientific young-Earth creationism is a special case. Geologists insist that it is just as wrongheaded as old-school blind-faith creationism, but they do so with a touch of grudging respect.

“The 7 Wonders Creation Museum is an example of the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ of the young-Earth creationist movement,” Wilfred Elders, an emeritus professor of geology at the University of California-Riverside, said in an e-mail message. “It is good in that it actually reports geological observations. It is bad because it ignores the scientific method in interpreting them.”

Elders, a former chairman of the Education Committee of the Geothermal Resources Council of the U.S.A., said young-Earth creationists make a fundamental error: They start with their conclusion — that God created the Earth in six days — and then look for the proof. Scientists, on the other hand, “observe the natural world and follow those observations wherever they lead.”

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“Constrained as they are by their view of biblical chronology, young-Earth creationists infer that the seven days of creation occurred less than 10,000 years ago, and that the next significant event in the history of the Earth and of life was the flood of Noah. The 7 Wonders museum ignores or rejects anything that disagrees with that view,” Elders wrote to MSNBC.com. “In doing so it rejects modern science.”

(You can find Elders’ detailed technical explanation of the objections to “flood geology” in a posting reprinted by Tufts University.)

To Mike Clynne, a stratigrapher for the U.S. Geological Survey — he maps volcanoes — the young-Earth creationists make another fatal error, in how they think of time and scale.

Austin, Humphreys and their champions latch onto “very special geologic events” and, by extrapolation, misleadingly make them seem equivalent to much longer-term events, said Clynne, who worked at Mount St. Helens for seven years and is scheduled to deliver a presentation on its eruptive history this month at the Geochemical Society’s annual Goldschmidt Conference. “In effect, they are taking things that are correct out of context and applying [them] to the much bigger picture.”

CONTINUED

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