No River Flows Through Mountain Range

Psalm 104:7-8

‘”At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them.”

Sometimes we can look at a map and not see something quite astounding. Ranges of mountains and hills are nothing out of the ordinary. And rivers, with their valleys, are things that we expect to see. Then we will often notice gaps in the mountain ranges, where rivers flow through them.

But these so-called water gaps defy evolutionary explanation. On a millions-of-years evolutionary timescale, did the river form first and then the mountains, or the other way around? If the river came first, why did the new mountain range not block the river and divert it? Evolutionists have to believe that such an antecedent river eroded its own valley at exactly the same rate as the rise of the mountains. Another explanation is that the surrounding land eroded, leaving mountains of harder rock below, with the river carving its new valley at the same rate as the erosion. Both of these popular ideas are based on coincidence. A third idea is that the mountains were bounded by parallel rivers, and a tributary to one river carved a gorge through the mountains, eventually joining the other river.

When we start by accepting the biblical account of a worldwide flood, the explanations become easier. Floodwater draining off the continents at the end of, or some time after, the Genesis Flood would easily carve through the hills, and a river could follow the resultant gorge afterwards.

Prayer: Lord God, we know that Your word speaks the truth and makes sense of our questions. Thank You, Lord. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Oard, M.J. (2019), Water and wind gaps carved during channelized Flood runoff, Creation 41(2):48–51, April 2019. Image: Hell’s Canyon, CC BY-SA 2.5 Generic.