No matter how often I fly, I never lose the thrill of looking out the plane's window at the vast panorama spread out below me.

Flying over the Grand Canyon area recently, I appreciated having taken a geology course years ago as I marveled at the folds of different layers of sandstone deposited over time -- folds that were cut, twisted and uplifted in stunning displays of color and beauty.  

I reflected on the eons it had taken for all this to reach its present state, on the variations of life that must have existed for each period and were now gone, leaving only fossil remains to be studied by later intelligences.

The thought of "intelligences" reminded me that the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore is now selling a book asserting that Noah's flood created all this grandeur. Where is the intelligence in that?

I recalled that even though the National Park Superintendent tried to block the sale of this book, the National Park Service overruled him, and the Bush Administration is standing by the book's sale. The park service spokeswoman says the book has become quite popular.  

I will never understand how people can be so naive in their thinking. One can look down from a plane and see that the science of geology gives convincing explanations as to why this marvel exists.

Musing on this, I realized that people approach the question "why" quite differently. Some use scientific reasoning to find answers they can test through experimental verification. Others reject any explanation that doesn't agree with their preconceptions.

Perhaps it all starts with the "Terrible Two's" -- a time when children want to know the why of everything. Why does this work this way? Why does that do that? Parents who realize the reason is too advanced for their immature minds to understand will sometimes invent simple explanations or make a fairy tale out of the answer. And then there are the times when the tots are told to stop doing something, and they demand to know Why? Exasperated parents frequently answer that one with a simple "Because I say so," establishing the boundary of undisputed authority.

Could this explain the Creationists' acceptance of the childish explanation that the Grand Canyon was all created in one fell swoop by a worldwide flood? Perhaps these believers had a case of arrested development in their Terrible Two's period and are not capable of comprehending anything more complex. When ministers, acting as stand-ins for their authoritative fathers, tell them that the world is only 6,000 years old according to the Bible, they have to reject the scientific explanation that the Grand Canyon took millions of years to form. They believe the Bible's tale that Noah's flood encompassed the whole earth, creating all the landscapes scientists claim require eons to produce.

This tendency to believe utter nonsense simply because their accepted "authority" says so, lets them believe -- just like the tot of two -- that they have the answers to the why of everything.

Opening the Discover magazine I had brought along for reading, I found a picture of an ancient river system on Mars taken by the Mars Express orbiter. It looked surprisingly like the terrain below me. What? Did Noah's flood reach Mars as well?