The Canyons of Mars

Pictured above is the Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars. As the NASA web site helpfully explains:

Valles Marineris, or Mariner Valley, is a vast canyon system that runs along the Martian equator just east of the Tharsis region. Valles Marineris is 4000 km (2500 mi) long and reaches depths of up to 7 km (4 mi)! For comparison, the Grand Canyon in Arizona is about 800 km (500 mi) long and 1.6 km (1 mi) deep. In fact, the extent of Valles Marineris is as long as the United States and it spans about 20 percent (1/5) of the entire distance around Mars! The canyon extends from the Noctis Labyrinthus region in the west to the chaotic terrain in the east. Most researchers agree that Valles Marineris is a large tectonic "crack" in the Martian crust, forming as the planet cooled, affected by the rising crust in the Tharsis region to the west, and subsequently widened by erosional forces. However, near the eastern flanks of the rift there appear to be some channels that may have been formed by water.

The reason this interests me from an atheist perspective is that creationist fundies insist that the Grand Canyon in the American Southwest had to be formed from the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis.

A prominent expounder of this nonsense is Tom Vail of Canyon Ministries.

On his web site, he tells how he "left the corporate world behind and became a career rafting guide, leading trips through the Grand Canyon ever since." It was while leading one of these tour groups in 1994 that "Paula, a passenger on a trip shared Christ with me. A few months later, I received Christ as my Lord and Savior and Paula is now my wife. In 1997, the concept of Canyon Ministries was born and we ran our first Christ-centered rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Since then, we have shared the Canyon from a Biblical perspective with hundreds of people. We have been selected by both Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research, as well as several other organizations, to provide charter services for their Grand Canyon tours and research trips."

Vail now claims "that the creation model of the Canyon made more sense, was easier to believe and answered more questions than the evolutionary model." He purports to show "how the effects of Noah’s Flood, not millions of years of erosion, carved the Canyon." His book, "Grand Canyon: A Different View" is apparently still for sale at gift shops in the park's bookstores, in spite of protests by geologists for the National Park Service, as well as others who complain that it amounts to a national park promoting the viewpoint of a specific religion.

I would be interested to hear how Vail and other young earth creationists would explain Valles Marineris. If a geological formation on Mars can be formed entirely through natural processes, then how can they be so cocksure that the same kind of forces were not responsible for creating the Grand Canyon on Earth? What alternatives are there? Was there a race of Martian Sodomites wiped out in a great deluge on Mars that the Bible does not tell us about?

What I find fascinating as we continue to explore the other planets of our solar system and the moons that orbit them is that our discoveries help to inform our understanding of our own planet's history. To the people who wrote the books that would eventually comprise what we know today as the Bible, the planets were nothing but points of light in the sky that were not fixed like the stars. The Biblical authors had no conception that these planets were bodies that orbited the sun and that most of them had moons of their own.

From Bible times to the present day, religious people tend to believe that volcanic eruptions represent some manifestation of an angry god's wrath, and yet the most volcanically active body in our solar system is Jupiter's moon Io. The last time I checked, Io was uninhabited, so there is nobody living there for god to be pissed off at. As we observe and study violent geological and meteorological phenomena on other worlds that also occur on Earth, it should become abundantly clear that these are forces that occur naturally rather than being signs of god's displeasure over gays or the teaching of evolution in our public schools.