CreationStudies Institute
[Originally published as Mountain Building and God’s Word]
Mountains are fascinating geological formations that majestically reach tremendous heights and dominate large expanses of the earth. They represent grandeur and power, reaching as high as Mountain Everest at 29,032 feet in the Himalayas, the tallest peak in the world. The Word of God addresses these rugged and awesome towers of the land in Psalm 65:6, “the one who by his strength established the mountains, being girded with might.”
Mountain Ranges
Mountain chains mark a noteworthy part of the earth’s crust. All the world’s seven continents are adorned with mountain ranges. The Himalayas are just the most extravagant example of the many mountain ranges spanning the globe. While those mountains are densely packs, others stretch as far as the 5,500 miles of the South American Andes, a fantastic chain of mountains that begins at the Colombia and Venezuela boundary and ends at the end of the continent near the Antarctic.
The American Cordillera mountains along the western coasts of both American continents include far more than the vast Andes; they continue north, passing through central America, into Mexico, and extending across all of North America, including both the Rocky Mountains of the US and Canada. It finally ends on the north coast of Alaska, at a distance of over 10,000 miles from the southern tip. All along its course, these mountains mark the divide between river systems flowing into the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
These mountain chains form the eastern section of the Ring of Fire, encircling the Pacific with notable volcanic and seismic activity. This ring results from the interaction of the Pacific tectonic plate with neighboring plates, hosting 70% of earth’s volcanoes. Notable recent examples include Mount St. Helens (1980) in Washington State and Mount Pinatubo (1991) in the Philippines.
Mountain Building
The earth’s crust and part of its upper mantle are called the lithosphere, which is a thin layer of rock covering its surface and subject to tremendous forces produced underneath. These forces are witnessed when volcanoes explode and earthquakes shake the earth, and in the silent testimony of deep ocean trenches and mountains both measured in the thousands of feet. The lithosphere is where earth’s giant tectonic plates are interconnected over the entire surface of the planet.
The largest mountain ranges are formed when two continental plates collide with one, overriding each other. The Himalayan range is an example of this plate interaction, where the highest mountain ranges are formed. One of the features of mountain building is that the rock layers are folded or bent. This can be easily seen when traveling on highways as the road cuts into mountain terrain. I have witnessed rock layers folded in a “Z” shape at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
How did these hard rocks fold in and out like a licorice stick?
Contrasting Two Worldviews
In geology and scientific academia, there is a prevalent worldview that truth can only be found in nature. They exclude their Creator and arrogantly defy Him by ignoring His Word and inventing their god, the power of time. In their view, given enough time, the earth will cool down and inevitably evolve life.
While it is commonly estimated that the earth first coalesced 4.6 billion years old, there is no consensus on where the earth came from, how the crust formed, or how life originated. Secular geologists believe the rocks are being continuously formed and recycled over hundreds of millions of years with the same processes we see today. These include erosion, weathering, flooding, glacier interaction, rock material being deposited, and the list goes on in the many geological actions on and beneath the surface of the earth.
Modern geologists believe that over millions of years, rock layers were slowly formed under high pressure and temperature, gradually bending as mountains were shaped. Simultaneously, tectonic plates took time to break up, contributing to the creation of the mountains and valleys we observe today.
The problem is that this assumption cannot be tested because the conditions geologists propose are impossible to reproduce, and they assume they happened far too slowly to replicate, even if they were reproducible.
Could a worldwide catastrophic flood be produced by tremendous force beneath the tectonic plates that separated them and caused them to collide, creating the mountain ranges seen today? The statement in Genesis 7:11, “all the fountains of the great deep would burst forth,” indicates that a force could have been generated by the water erupting from underneath the crust of the earth, which would cause the earth’s surface to change profoundly.
As these plates collided, they formed the mountains, causing the rock layers laid down by the flood, still not fully hardened, to bend, making the folds observed today. These folds are distinctive because the rock layers dip down in a stair-step pattern called monoclines, caused by the uplifting of the earth’s crust.
One of the world’s natural wonders is the Grand Canyon, which extends 277 miles in length and, at the deepest section, goes down about a mile, exposing a geological phenomenon with its beautiful array of rock layers for all can see.
The canyon’s north rim is 8,250 feet above sea level on the Kaibab Plateau. It has distinctive monoclines demonstrating these mountains were uplifted by tectonic plates and then settled as the rock layers straightened out, as observed in the Grand Canyon. These rock layers can be traced in the Grand Canyon because they are exposed to the erosion that formed this massive hole in the crust.
Suppose the rock layers were soft, as creationists theorize, before they were uplifted during the mountain-building process. Could the Grand Canyon, with its numerous rock layers, be a place to answer this question?
This was the challenge creationist and experienced geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling would boldly face as he probed the Tapeats Sandstone at the bottom of the canyon. With the aid of a petrographic microscope, he could examine tiny rock samples from the monocline, where these vast layers would bend, and compare them to those microscopic crystals from the same rock layer deposited in a straight line 5 miles away.
The crystals would have changed if they were hard and subject to high pressure and temperatures, as believed by modern evolutionary geologists. Snelling, who has studied the canyon for 27 years, reported with his in-depth research that at the bottom layer of rocks in the canyon, there was no evident change in the crystalline structure, concluding that it had to be soft before the mountain was formed and would harden maybe a year after the flood.
This conclusion changes the well-known foundational evolutionary idea of a slow change over millions of years of mountain building. Instead, Snelling’s research affirms the Genesis Flood described in the Bible.
There are many more evolutionary geologists than there are young-earth creationists doing research because of the evolutionary brainwashing in our schools on all levels. The field of geology began with Bible-believing Christians who took God’s Word seriously, but unfortunately, many compromised His Word and supported long ages.
Holding such beliefs allowed naturalism to take over our higher learning institutions. It spread across all educational systems, holding on to the power of time to displace God. Our ministry is dedicated to holding up the light of Christ so those in the dark can see the truth. It is only God’s Word that brings power to change the world.
