[DannyTN]

Saw other articles on this episode of book banning but not as in depth.

[John H K]

How does a moron like Hal Lindsey still have anything resembling a career, after his litany of hilariously failed predictions?

[John H K]

Also, Lindsey is a liar; the various supposed deathbed statements by Darwin about evolution are long-disproved fabrications by creationidiot nutballs.

[Phantom Lord]

The Grand Canyon is actually only several decades old. It is a giant stage built by Evil Knevil to jump with his rocket.

I'll tell you, some of these religious nutballs really drive me crazy, and do a great disservice to religion and faith as a whole.

[Hodar]

The book, which claims the famous area can be no older than a few thousand years (contrary to the claims of traditional secular science, which contends the canyon is millions of years old), was unanimously approved by a panel of park and gift shop personnel, the Los Angeles Times reported.”

Wow ... approved by a panel of panel of gift shop personnel!! I guess that trumps a few thousand PhD's, Carbon and Neutronic dating, the fossil record, core samples, computer modelling and a wee bit of common sense.

[claudwitz]

I rate this worth of a 1/2 Hat production.

[Servant of the 9]

I have no objection to this book, nor to Eric von Daniken's books about aliens doing it, but they belong on the fiction shelf.

River Fans are found off the mouths of rivers that have changed position in recorded history. We know it didn't involve floods in any of those cases, so there is no rerason to speculate that a flood was required in any case.

So9

[MissAmericanPie]

What is this if it is not blatant censorship? It is censorship from the earth is flat people. A person could be executed for claiming the earth is round at one time, and these guys are no better.

When Mt. St. Helen's erupted it formed a huge canyon down stream in one day, the canyon has sedimentry layers and looks like it took a billion years of evolution to create, when all it took was 24 hours.

It's not good when science deliberately closes off all competition from other possibilities. Look how long it took them to admit that there was a spontaneous eruption of different kinds of species in one period, just because it jives with the bible. Serious scientific claims made by scientist who entertain another possibility is just as valid as their "guess", and should not be relegated to the spiritual shelf.

[DallasMike]

I don't care much for Hal Lindsey and I totally reject the "Young Earth Theory" of creation. A 15-billion year old universe doesn't compromise my faith in God. However, the story did contain one great and very true line:

"Whenever evolutionists are stuck for an explanation, they always seem to think that adding a few million more years solves everything.)"

[Lurking Libertarian]

Evolution ping.

[narby]

What is this if it is not blatant censorship?

Nobody censored anything. People can still buy the book, but if the Park decides not to sell one particular whackjob book, I don't think it's a bad decision.

No one has a "right" to have shelf space given over for their book, even in a government run park.

It's pretty funny though, these guys making claims the canyon was carved in a short time. Hiking down the canyon is the best place for almost anyone to get a glaringly obvious clue that the Earth is really really old.

Unfortunatly, only a very few visitors to the Canyon will ever hike down to the bottom to see for themselves how the billion+ year old rock differs from the rock higher up. And will certianly never find any of the fossles there, buried under an incredible amount of rock.

In case anyone's interested, the best theory is that the Colorado plateau where the Canyon is, rose up, allowing the river to carve down into it as a Canyon, rather than generating a meander basin over No. Arizona.

But, it's just the current theory. The scientists haven't nailed it down solid yet. Unlike the garbage spread by the creationists (who are CERTIAN of their science, and will not stand questioning), there is much in the scientific literature that isn't settled yet.

But Evolution, for all practical purposes, is settled. Until someone can come up with some real evidence to counteract the litteral mountains of evidence supporting Evolution.

By the way. How come creationists write off the fact that Genesis doesn't mention dinosaurs, but they refuse write off the fact that Genesis doesn't completly describe Evolution either?

[greenwolf]

The idea of claiming that the Colorado River carved or created the Grand Canyon is idiotic. Whatever DID create the canyon compares to the Colorado river about the way Godzilla compares to a piss ant.

[PatrickHenry]

Saw other articles on this episode of book banning but not as in depth.

Two earlier threads, from 2 and 3 weeks ago:
Grand Canyon Made By Noah's Flood, Book Says (Geologists Skewer Park For Selling Creationism)
The Grand Canyon: Created by Noah's Flood?.

[rustbucket]

Morse found that the Evolutionist’s explanation of the ‘river cones’ could never work. Evolutionists contend that the ‘river cones’ were etched into the ocean floor by slow moving currents that etched them out over ‘millions of years’.

First of all, it would be geologists who are most concerned with the formation of canyons off the current mouths of rivers.

There is quite an established science concerning the rise and fall of ocean levels over geologic time. When the ocean levels fall (due to ice ages), large coastal planes are exposed and rivers cut channels through those planes. Those are the so-called river 'cones' the article refers to.

You can see the repeated bands of shale and sandstone deposited during sea level changes quite clearly out in the Book Cliffs of East Central Utah.

[Doctor Stochastic]

If these were formed by slow moving currents over millions of years, why has this not taken place in other places where the rivers are about the same age?

So Lindsey is ignorant of geography too? A trip through the Barranca del Cobre is educational and would have helped prevent Lindsey from making such statements.

Of course, I can look out my back window and see another such erosional feature (although much younger.)

[Ichneumon]

Bookmark for later.

[DaGman]

Any true believer knows it was really Paul Bunion dragging his ax that formed the Grand Canyon.

I'm tired of this legitimate viewpoint being suppressed by those that fear the truth.

[fish hawk]

See the panic? Evolution is dying, and of course, it isn't supposed too. Long after it's death, the WORD will still be with us.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The book, which claims the famous area can be no older than a few thousand years (contrary to the claims of traditional secular science, which contends the canyon is millions of years old), was unanimously approved by a panel of park and gift shop personnel, the Los Angeles Times reported.”

Looks who's in bed with the LA Times now.

[VOA]

My understanding is that these purported accounts of a late-life conversion by
Darwin are bogus...he went to his reward believing what he believed.

At the same time, it is curious to note that he was some sort of big-time
booster of a Christian missionary society to South American Indians...thinking
this was a good "self-improvement" plan for those natives.
To today's mainstream, he'd sound fairly patronizing.

And it's interesting to note his opinion on females: inferior to males.

When the whole Darwin is read, he's not that PC.

[AnalogReigns]

Hal may be right on some of this, but on this he's just very ill-informed (from a Creationist source):


Did Darwin recant?
by Russell Grigg

First published in:
Creation 18(1):36–37
December 1995 – February 1996

Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, at the age of 73. To some it was deplorable that he should have departed an unbeliever, and in the years that followed several stories surfaced that Darwin had undergone a death-bed conversion and renounced evolution. These stories began to be included in sermons as early as May 1882.1 However, the best known is that attributed to a Lady Hope, who claimed she had visited a bedridden Charles at Down House in the autumn of 1881.2 She alleged that when she arrived he was reading the Book of Hebrews, that he became distressed when she mentioned the Genesis account of creation, and that he asked her to come again the next day to speak on the subject of Jesus Christ to a gathering of servants, tenants and neighbours in the garden summer house which, he said, held about 30 people. This story first appeared in print as a 521-word article in the American Baptist journal, the Watchman Examiner,3 and since then has been reprinted in many books, magazines and tracts.

The main problem with all these stories is that they were all denied by members of Darwin’s family. Francis Darwin wrote to Thomas Huxley on February 8, 1887, that a report that Charles had renounced evolution on his deathbed was ‘false and without any kind of foundation’,4 and in 1917 Francis affirmed that he had ‘no reason whatever to believe that he [his father] ever altered his agnostic point of view.’5 Charles’s daughter Henrietta (Litchfield) wrote on page 12 of the London evangelical weekly, The Christian, for February 23, 1922, ‘I was present at his deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier … The whole story has no foundation whatever’.6 Some have even concluded that there was no Lady Hope.
So what should we think?

Darwin’s biographer, Dr James Moore, lecturer in the history of science and technology at The Open University in the UK, has spent 20 years researching the data over three continents. He produced a 218-page book examining what he calls the ’Darwin legend’.7 He says there was a Lady Hope. Born Elizabeth Reid Cotton in 1842, she married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, in 1877. She engaged in tent evangelism and in visiting the elderly and sick in Kent in the 1880s, and died of cancer in Sydney, Australia, in 1922, where her tomb may be seen to this day.8

Moore concludes that Lady Hope probably did visit Charles between Wednesday, September 28 and Sunday, October 2, 1881, almost certainly when Francis and Henrietta were absent, but his wife, Emma, probably was present.9 He describes Lady Hope as ‘a skilled raconteur, able to summon up poignant scenes and conversations, and embroider them with sentimental spirituality.’10 He points out that her published story contained some authentic details as to time and place, but also factual inaccuracies — Charles was not bedridden six months before he died, and the summer house was far too small to accommodate 30 people. The most important aspect of the story, however, is that it does not say that Charles either renounced evolution or embraced Christianity. He merely is said to have expressed concern over the fate of his youthful speculations and to have spoken in favour of a few people’s attending a religious meeting. The alleged recantation/ conversion are embellishments that others have either read into the story or made up for themselves. Moore calls such doings ‘holy fabrication’!

It should be noted that for most of her married life Emma was deeply pained by the irreligious nature of Charles’s views, and would have been strongly motivated to have corroborated any story of a genuine conversion, if such had occurred. She never did.

It therefore appears that Darwin did not recant, and it is a pity that to this day the Lady Hope story occasionally appears in tracts published and given out by well-meaning people.
References

1.

James Moore, The Darwin Legend, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1994, pp. 113–114. Return to text.
2.

Down House retained the spelling of the old name of Darwin’s village, which was changed to Downe in the mid-nineteenth century to avoid confusion with County Down in Northern Ireland. Source: Ref. 1, p. 176. Return to text.
3.

Watchman Examiner, Boston, August 19,1915, p. 1071. Source: Ref. 1, pp. 92–93 and 190. Return to text.
4.

Ref. 1, pp.117, 144. Return to text.
5.

Ibid., p. 145. Return to text.
6.

Ibid., p. 146. Return to text.
7.

Ibid. Return to text.
8.

After the death of Admiral Hope in 1881, Lady Hope married T. A. Denny, a ‘pork philanthropist’, in 1893, but preferred to retain her former name and title (Ref 1, pp. 85; 89–90). Return to text.
9.

Ref. 1, p. 167. Return to text.
10.

Ibid., p. 94. Return to text

Available online at:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1315.asp