There is so much evidence that Grand Canyon (GC) was formed by a lot of water in a little time, not a little water over a lot of time. Here's a quick summary and is not exhaustive.

• Bent rock layers: Rocks are hard, so when you bend them, they break. But there are numerous places in GC where the rock layers (many of which are thousands of feet thick) curve up and down, indicating the material was exposed to incredible forces between the time the material showed up in this location and the time it turned into solid rock. If the exact same curve is found in multiple layers then that dictates they must have been bent at the same time. (What's the best way to bend sedimentary rocks? When they're freshly wet minerals that have just been deposited and before they dry out.)
• Polystrate petrified fossils: Trees are organic. Big individual trees may last a couple hundred years. Under the right circumstances (mainly including rapid burial) organic things can petrify. Petrified trees that stick up through the rock layers are evidence for a short-time-scale flood and is evidence against a long-time-scale explanation. Even a petrified tree would not survive millions of years sticking up out of the ground if that is indeed how the layers were formed. And fossils only form when buried, not when sticking up, exposed.
• Erosion: Erosion is an extremely common phenomenon in the observable world around us, with rain and other weather being the primary cause. (Remember, everyone agrees erosion is the cause for why GC is there at all!) But there is no erosion between the layers of rock exposed at GC. When we look at the layers we see a very clear distinction between them, the line of differentiation is very sharp, and their thicknesses are consistent for vast distances. Evidence of erosion would include a blurry/​rough distinction between the layers and uneven thicknesses of the layers (even to the point of some layers possibly eroding away in at least one small place in the over 4 trillion cubic meters of GC.) The lack of erosion is direct evidence of both rapid deposition of the rock and rapid carving of the canyon.
• Cross-continental layers: Also referred to as megasequences, the idea is the same sheets of rocks, which are over a hundred feet thick in most places, can be found consistently over most of the continent. Not only are the rocks present, which would by itself be only slightly more than trivial, but they have similar characteristics. Namely they are sedimentary rocks that demonstrate the same current of the worldwide flood whether analyzed in Arizona, Wyoming, or Kentucky. So this is not evidence in GC exclusively, it's larger evidence GC exposes to us that would be less dramatically visible otherwise.
• No delta: The Mississippi River is a great example of a little water over a reasonably long period of time. At the end of the river (where it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico) is a delta. It is made of about 3 million acres of land that was deposited by upstream erosion (and there are no canyons it supposedly carved out). The delta at the base of the Colorado River is teeny. Yes, we've dammed the Colorado River, but that was long after GC formed.

» Polystrate Fossils & Petrified Wood
» AIG: No Slow and Gradual Erosion
» AIG: Transcontinental Rock Layers
» Wikipedia: Mississippi River Delta
» Wikipedia: Colorado River Delta
» Wikipedia: Grand Canyon
» National Park Service: Grand Canyon
» AiG: Sand Transported Cross Country

For those interested in how GC formed, the short story is probably post-flood waters collected in Canyonlands Lake and Hopi Lake, which ruptured and sent an insane amount of water gushing out, carving the canyon. But explaining how GC formed is not the purpose of this article, so here are some others that try (though I've heard talks in person that go into the science much better than any articles I can find online).

» AiG: When and How Did the Grand Canyon Form?
» AiG: What Carved the Grand Canyon?

In the case of the rock layers, you are incorrectly comparing rock layer formation with tree rings. Trees have been observed to grow a ring for every year they are alive. Rocks are not alive so the analogy is foolish.

When Mount Saint Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, it unleashed the equivalent of 33,000 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs (minus the radiation). This caused ash to be deposited, and after being compressed into solid rock was 25 feet thick in some places. In only a few hours a canyon was carved into these rocks, revealing sedimentary layers resembling those found in thousands of other places around the world. Except these were obviously laid down in an extremely short amount of time, not thousands or millions of years as was once assumed. Thousands of trees were uprooted and tossed into the surrounding ash and lakes, immediately petrifying and still observable in this state today, destroying the previous "given" that long ages are mandatory to form rock layers and petrified plants. The only thing rock layers tell us for sure is what order the rocks (things) were laid down.

Another example of non-living layers are ice cores. "The Lost Squadron" was a squadron of airplanes that got stranded in Greenland in 1942. The crew got away, but the planes had to be abandoned on the ice desert. In 1988 they were found under 250 feet of ice (75 meters), and in 1992 (50 years after they were lost) the "Glacier Girl" was retrieved. It was restored and flown again. There were far more than 50 layers of ice clearly visible while they were going between the surface and the planes. This is evidence that ice layers are not annual conditions, like trees, but are laid down based on weather patterns. Each storm can result in a layer, and of course in Greenland (and everywhere) there can be many storms per year. Using ice layers to estimate age will result in a flawed conclusion because of a flawed initial assumption/​presupposition.

» MSH Creation Information Center
» AIG: 'I got excited at Mount St Helens!'
» AIG: Creation Road Trip
» The Lost Squadron

Fact: the geologic column is observable science. Fiction: the geologic column is conclusive. Fact: the strata can be found in the wrong order lots of places around the world. Fiction: the progression of amoebas to vertebrates can be seen. Fact: all the "evidence" for slow, gradual (or any) change from one species to the next is implied (assumed). The implication of gradual change has its origins in the presuppositions of the person doing the interpreting. Here are some facts that are fundamentally non-helpful to evolutionary interpretation of the fossil column:

• Polystrate fossils exist (fossils that stick up through multiple rock layers).
• Living fossils exist (animals that are found far down in the column so are supposed to be many millions of years old, but are not found higher up in the fossil record so are supposed to have died off millions of years ago, but yet are found alive in the world, unchanged today).
• The fossil column is found all over the world, demonstrates some level of consistency everywhere, yet very consistently contains no examples of transitional organisms nor proto-organisms.
• Soft red tissue has been found in T-Rex bone(s).

We can argue about this observation and that observation, but the fact remains fossils have no birth certificate connected to them. The Biblical interpretation of the billions of fossils around the world (both on the surface and buried in the rock layers) is the flood that happened during Noah's life (Genesis 7:21-23). Remember God made everything good in less than a week (Genesis 1:31) and suffering entered the world only after Adam ignored God's direct command (Genesis 2:15-17, Genesis 3:6).

While creationists (as a category) have strong answers for all the issues, everyone can't have every answer all the time. If a question is asked and we (as individuals) don't have the background to answer it, it's ok to say we are unfamiliar with that specific issue and need the chance to research the facts before giving an intelligent response. If criticism follows that answer, then criticism was the point to begin with, don't take it personally (John 15:18-19). It's important to remember that we don't have a burden of pulverizing all alternative interpretations (remember the last part of 1 Peter 3:15). Our burden is to understand the Word of our Creator and how the facts corroborate it. Our worldview isn't (shouldn't be) affected by how polished or how many holes there are in the alternatives. We're not right because we're creationists, that would be dogma and circular reasoning. Supernatural creation is right and evolution is wrong because both science and history (hence reality) overwhelmingly corroborate this.

» ICR: Ten Misconceptions about the Geologic Column
» AiG: Unlocking the Geologic Record
» AiG: Order in the Fossil Record
» AiG: Where Are All the Bunny Fossils?
» AiG: Living Fossils
» AiG: Do Fossils Show Signs of Rapid Burial?
» Dinosaur Shocker
» ICR: The Devastating Issue of Dinosaur Tissue
» AiG: The Scrambling Continues
» AiG: Solid Answers on Soft Tissue

No. The various creation ministries have an article every few years about another man dug mine that is only a few decades old but is filled with these. Long time isn't required to make stalactites and stalagmites (nor fossils) all that's necessary are the right conditions.

» Creation.com: 1987, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2010
» AiG: 1995, 2011

These were obviously deposited as the result of a catastrophe, otherwise the bodies would have decomposed or been devoured or otherwise dispersed. If the flood were real, we would expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Dino's are just some of those billions of things that we do find. Many evolutionists believe a giant meteor hit the Earth millions of years ago resulting in a radical climate change across the planet. However the evidence fits subtly better if you consider the possibility of the global flood in Genesis being our catastrophe. By the way, the only thing we can surely conclude from the fact that human and dinosaur bones have never been discovered together is that they were not buried together.

Easy, God did not send fully grown dinosaurs to Noah. There would have been no reason to bring fully grown dino's, kids or teenagers would work better for repopulating the planet anyway. (Genesis 7:2-3, 7:8-9, 8:17)

Another easy one. How did many creatures go extinct? We killed them off. A few must have survived the flood because something like them is referenced twice in Job (Behemoth, Leviathan) and the word "dragon" can be found in historical non-fiction. The term "dinosaur" was only coined in the mid 1800's. If you read the King James Version of the Bible you may notice that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and a psalmist were contemporaries of dragons:

• Isaiah 27:1 KJV  hub
• Isaiah 51:9 KJV  hub
• Jeremiah 51:34 KJV  hub
• Psalms 74:13 KJV  hub
• Psalms 91:13 KJV  hub

And Isaiah used the term "fiery flying serpent":

• Isaiah 14:29 KJV  hub
• Isaiah 30:6 KJV  hub

Why am I referencing KJV (published in 1611 AD) instead of something a little more modern? Perhaps the more modern translators thought using such language would be too hard to accept for their modern readers. (Compare to how NIV translates a word into "living creatures" in Revelation but into "animals" most everywhere else in the New Testament. See Heaven by Randy Alchorn, page 379.) In Job 41:18-21, God describes Leviathan as breathing fire (with or without KJV). And curiously in Revelation 13:11 hub, John nonchalantly mentions a dragon's voice. There are actually 34 references to dragons in the King James translation of the Bible (31 in the Old Testament and 3 in Revelation) not that every use of the word has to mean exactly the same thing.

» Amazon: Randy Alcorn's Heaven
» AiG: Dragons: Fact or Fable?
» Were there really fire breathing dragons?

According to Wikipedia, the oldest pyramid is dated about 2670 BC. According to Archbishop James Ussher in his book, The Annals of the World, the flood ended in 2348 BC. Assuming both of those dates are accurate, that's a difference of 321 years. The keyword is "assuming." Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies recorded in the Bible, the earliest of which were very intentional to say the exact age fathers were when their sons were born (Genesis 5:3, 5:6, 5:9, etc.) Like radiometric dating and much of origins science, there's a lot of assuming required to draw any conclusions about ancient history. To think that one or both of these numbers are slightly inaccurate is not a terrible stretch, though I'm not educated enough to say if either or both are right or wrong. Ussher also concluded that the incident at the tower of Babel happened about a century after the flood, roughly 2240 BC. If we assume the oldest pyramid was built a hundred years after that (2140 BC) then the archeologists who dated the oldest pyramid would only be off by 25% or less. Not bad considering how hard it is to precisely date things that happened long ago, and convenient if you want to try to discredit the Bible.

The Chinese say their culture is over 5,000 years old. That would mean it dates back to at least 3000 BC. The evidence for their culture being so old is based on pottery and similar archeological finds, which are again conclusions drawn using assumptions. Assumptions that are no more scientific nor accurate than the fossil column. It's not a stretch to say those assumptions are off by up to 28%. The oldest Chinese writing is found on Oracle Bones which are dated around 1250-1350 BC. This is about a thousand years after the flood, and there is fascinating evidence of the history of Genesis found embedded in the design of the language. My favorite example is how strongly the word boat reminds us of Noah's ark (Genesis 7:13).

Boat
Ark	Eight	Mouth

If you're going to be picky and say the "eight" isn't perfect, the point is not how modern Google renders the characters but how the Chinese did over three millennia ago. My second favorite character alludes that the people who invented the Chinese language also believed in the hope of the savior promised by God.

Come
Man	Wood	Ten

(The number ten is symbolic in Asian culture as completion/​fulfillment/​finality.) The foreshadowing of this character to the events recorded in Matthew 11:28/​John 14:6, John 19:18, and John 19:30 is amazing. A prophet from China (a non-Jew) is perfectly within a Biblical worldview. Remember the prophet Balaam in Numbers 22:4-5 (full story is Numbers 22-24), God's lament to Amos (Amos 9:7), and how easily He went to the gentiles (Isaiah 49:6, John 10:16) and there's Malachi 1:5. But prophecy is outside an evolutionary worldview. These two characters are just my favorites, and there are many more. (See the AIG & CMI links below.)

» Genesis Code Hidden Within The Ancient Chinese Language (YouTube) (found from Contradict Movement)
» God’s Promise to the Chinese
» Wikipedia: Egyptian Pyramids
» Wikipedia: Ussher chronology
» AiG: Ussher's visual timeline
» Amazon: The Annals of the World (But search the Internet for a free copy before you buy your own, the copyright of the original text expired long ago since it was originally published in the 1600s.)
» Wikipedia: Chinese language
» Wikipedia: Chinese culture
» Google Translate
» AiG: Chinese Characters and Genesis
» CMI: Linguistics Q&A: Are ancient Chinese characters related to Genesis?
» CMI misrepresents ancient Chinese language?
» CMI still misrepresents ancient Chinese language?

The conventional logic goes like this: the city of Rameses is named 5 times in the Bible. The city is named after the Pharaoh with the same name, who has plenty of evidence in Egyptian archaeology. The Bible wouldn't name this city if it didn't exist, so the events where it is named must have happened during or after the reign of Pharaoh Rameses. Since there is no archaeological evidence of anything like the exodus happening during or after Ramses's reign, most archaeologists think the Biblical account must have been made up. Let's start with the verses:

• Genesis 47:11  hub
• Exodus 1:11  hub
• Exodus 12:37  hub
• Numbers 33:3  hub
• Numbers 33:5  hub

The rebuttal begins with a disclaimer that we don't know with absolute certainty, but that reality doesn't force us into or away from any conclusions. Skeptics of supernatural creation are quick to claim the Bible was altered over the centuries by people (with corrupt motivation) who wanted it to say something different. Ironically they also desperately wish Genesis had been altered so it would align more with biological and astronomical evolutionary theory. In that case, the evolutionist is wishing the original Biblical text was updated with a fact check (called historical revisionism). So here we actually could have an example of that. It's possible Moses called it the contemporary name at the time in Exodus, and then when the name of these places changed to the district of Rameses, the scribes who copied the texts simply updated the names. This wouldn't have been corrupting nor diluting the message, nor dishonoring the original intent. Compare how the town of Kiriath Arba (that is, Hebron) is mentioned throughout the Old Testament (here's a link to a text search). In one case they used one style, in another, another style. It's not necessarily scandalous.

There is a recurring theme in scripture that it was written in the vernacular (the common language of the original target audience). So altering the text simply to keep the names current should be neither a social shock nor a theological problem.

Largely because of those five verses, historians (specifically, Egyptologists) place the exodus during the "New Kingdom." But all of Egypt was fine and happy during that time. It's more likely that Joseph's pharaoh (Genesis 41:14-16) was Amenemhat III, and both the accounts of late Genesis and all of Exodus were during the "Middle Kingdom." There is too much evidence to discuss in this short FAQ, and there's an excellent documentary movie that does better justice to this topic than I could. Check it out on Blu-ray or Google Play.

» Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus (Google Play)
» Wikipedia: Historical revisionism

Glaciers are reasonably agreed to have come from the ice age. What we believe about the ice age influences our interpretation of why they are melting now. To form glaciers we'd require massive snowfall for a long time (so buildup exceeds melt and gargantuan ice sheets can form). To have massive snowfall we'd require massive volumes of moisture in the atmosphere. The land masses don't have that level of water, and no extraterrestrial sources of water have been determined, so we're talking ocean water, specifically. We require massive, unprecedented evaporation from the oceans. Evaporation occurs fastest with hot water. If glaciers are going to form on the poles of the earth then we need a lot of hot water at the poles. There's no good evolutionary explanation for what might cause that, but to a creationist it's really easy. Genesis 7:11 and 8:2 describe that water came up from deep underground. The deeper underground we go, the warmer the water is. And the flood is the Biblical explanation of how Rodinia broke up to Pangea and then the continents we now know. The process of breaking up the planet's crust involved, for all practical purposes, unimaginably massive volcanic activity. Since most of the tectonic plate edges are in the ocean, when the magna came up and hit the oceans it would have had a huge geothermal effect. The volcanic activity on the surface would've created massive atmospheric contaminants that would have cooled the surface, further supporting glacial growth conditions. So here we have forensically (and by process of elimination) determined the origin of the glaciers. Remember, if you don't like where the facts lead doesn't mean a scientist may dismiss them. Making up stories (sorry, "models") of how it may have happened just because you don't like the current evidence is fine, more power to you, but don't call that better science, it's wishful thinking.

Many evolutionists today attribute the recession of the glaciers to global warming. They are less concerned about the glaciers themselves, as novel as they are, and fear global flooding. But more to the point, they fear (claim) the glacial melt is caused by us evil people burning fossil fuels. (Ironically, these are often the same people who might claim that people are inherently good and therefore don't need a savior, like Jesus.) But the glaciers are almost as old as the flood. They would have formed within that first century after the flood, beginning with Genesis 8:1-5, and perhaps peaking about the time of Abraham. That was the peak, and they've been shrinking ever since (so for about 4000 years). Evolutionists believe the glaciers are significantly older than that. The global trend of using fossil fuels at scale has only been since the combustion engine became popular (namely in cars, boats, and planes) about a hundred years ago. A study published in 2008 found 1200 years ago Europe was slightly warmer than it is today, and 400 years ago it was slightly cooler.

If glaciers have been around (and melting) for at least four millennia, and fossil fuels have only been used at large scale for a century, why on earth would we claim that glacial melt is caused by burning fossil fuels? Answer: because it allows politicians to use large amounts of taxpayer money to fund pet projects of their own invention. There's no better problem to be the hero of, than one that's just in your head. So much for man being inherently good (Genesis 8:21). And don't forget Genesis 8:22, 9:11, and Jeremiah 5:21-25 (local floods and tsunami's notwithstanding, due to their temporary nature).

» AiG: A Proposed Bible-Science Perspective on Global Warming
» AiG: Environmental Science (topic)
» Eyjafjallajökull Awakens: How an Icelandic Volcano Shut Down Europe's Airspace
» Loehle Temperature Reconstruction Corrected

Evolutionists are quick to claim people cause global warming and that's what causes the Sahara to expand, ruining conventionally usable land. The Biblical perspective also involves man's fault, but in a completely different way. Man's rebellion against his Creator grieved God (Genesis 3:6-7, 6:5-6) and eventually He decided to send a worldwide flood (Genesis 6:7). After the flood (and certainly because of it) we had radical climate change, including most notably the ice age. The ice age was (as described in more detail above) caused by the large scale evaporation of unusually warm oceans. The same high level of atmospheric moisture that fueled the glaciers could have supported the rain forests, including those of Africa. The Earth's oceans have since cooled, causing less oceanic evaporation, glacial recession, and desert expansion. While this disaster was caused by man, it wasn't the cars we drive nor how much stuff we ship across the oceans, it's our rebellion against our Maker (Jeremiah 9:12-14, 50:38). Ironically, the problems espoused by global warming advocates are actually caused by global cooling.

» AiG: A Proposed Bible-Science Perspective on Global Warming

It's not weird or necessarily prehistoric that people lived in caves. They have done it in recorded history. Just because an atheist claims what they find in a cave is 20,000 or 100,000 years old doesn't mean it is. There were many cavemen in the Bible:

• Genesis 19:28-30   Lot
• Joshua 10:16-27   Kings
• Judges 15:6-11   Samson
• 1 Samuel 22:1   David
• 1 Samuel 24   David again (notice PS 57 and PS 142)
• 1 Kings 19:7-13   Elijah

Besides being called cavemen, another less common technical term is a troglodyte. Other, non-Biblical, famous cave dwellers include (but are not limited to):

• Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, USA
• Petra, Jordan
• Göreme Tarihi Milli Parkı, Turkey

As with Neanderthals, just because they don't exist anymore, or in this case, the practice of living in caves has largely been culturally abandoned, doesn't automatically mean they exclusively existed prehistorically. Like the fossil column, people who claim cavemen only lived tens of thousands of years ago simply prefer to believe it, or it's all they know and they've never thought critically about what they were taught. Cavemen fit perfectly fine into a Biblical worldview with only a few thousand years of human history. By the way, where did all the Neanderthals go? Same answer as for the dinosaurs: the rest of us killed them off.

In Genesis 1:9, God is attributed as saying "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear" (NIV). (Here's a link to a bunch of parallel translations, and here's a link to the original Hebrew.) Before we circumvented the globe and made maps of all the continents, we would have had no reason to believe all the continents at one time fit together. But now we do. Evolutionists and Creationists alike believe that the evidence points to all the continents of the world being combined in one supercontinent in the past. Perhaps I'll elaborate on Rodinia and Pangea someday...

If the Bible, and more specifically Genesis 1, was written by regular con artists of the day, they wouldn't have had reason to pretend God said the waters (and therefore, the land) should be "gathered to one place." Even by Moses's day there were nations that had impressive navy's. If mere mortals claimed that there was only one ocean to begin with, the only reason they'd have to claim the one ocean was to try to convince people of a total lie, just to test how gullible they were. Still today, when we observe the world, it'd be laughable to say the waters are in "one place." But before the world wide flood, when there was only one supercontinent on the planet, then there would necessarily have only been one superocean, too. God is omniscient, plus He was there, and the more we learn about science the more that reality is confirmed.

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