Did God create waterfalls?

Waterfalls don't have to be in the record category to capture the imagination or satisfy the soul. A humble drop of a couple of yards (pic top right) is all it takes to elicit gasps of delight and make poor cameras work overtime.

The powerful magnetism of waterfalls defies logical explanation; no other natural phenomenon this author can think of is more easily scientifically explained. A river reaches a ledge at which a sudden drop in elevation occurs and gravity accelerates the oncoming water down, down, down. Sure, turbulence laws come into play to create the boiling quality of the descending column, and laws of light must be invoked to explain why the falling curtain looks so white when water itself is colorless. But, hey, no mysteries! (Not that I'm aware of, anyway. A Google Scholar search on "waterfall mystery" and "mysteries of waterfalls" yielded no results.) The roaring sound? Well, probably nobody has sought to explain mathematically why falls thunder the way they do. Undoubtedly just the reverberation set up when the falling wet stuff hits the rocks at the bottom, I suppose. No need to invoke creative wisdom (Ps. 103:24).

So easily explained. And yet. And yet. Probably no other category of natural phenomenon attracts as many people or has been so enthusiastically recorded on film as waterfalls. One of the most-read books in my personal library is titled "Discovering the Wonders of Our World". The editors chose Victoria Falls, not the Grand Canyon, to grace its cover. Can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that waterfalls have inspired more poetry than any other natural wonder, too. Given a choice, more men would probably opt to see Niagara Falls (a pipsqueak by world standards) than Lady Godiva. In a word, waterfalls have a magic all their own.

How wondrous. How passing mysterious! Why is it so? Who can say? Perhaps our irresistible urge to visit waterfalls can be partly ascribed to their downright honesty; no smoke and mirrors with falls, no hint that they are trying to con us. Nah! Nonsense. We love them because they are beautiful, evocative, soothing, refreshing to the soul. But why?! But why?! Oh, because the Big Bang set off a near-infinite progression of consequences and consequences of consequences, of course, culminating in a refined creature (you and me) capable of appreciating the universe's happy little accidents. Hmph. If falling water is naught but a lucky spinoff of accidental laws, who can possibly explain their magnetism, their resonance in the human breast? No magic mix of fortuitous mutations can possibly explain our love of beautiful things and our sense of awe in the presence of

geological wonders; being made in the image of the God who planned such wonders does.

But getting back to the title, did God actually create waterfalls? Well, in one sense, no. They have arisen by the grace of natural processes that have operated for untold ages. (Well, actually, even that assertion could be challenged. God may have created new laws, or tweaked old ones, at any time during the protracted creation period, and we could never know about it since all our tools for analyzing past events are grounded in the assumption of static laws.) The sudden drop in elevation is brought about by the differential in rate of erosion found in rocks with different properties. When rushing water meets softer rock it gradually carves out a drop.

Likewise, God did not create sandy beaches or mountain landscapes, the Mississippi River or the Grand Canyon, the Tsingy formation of Madagascar, the Mammoth Caves, or Ayers Rock in Central Australia. All can be explained by recourse to reasonably well-understood geological processes, as every atheist is quick to point out.

But whence come the natural processes? There's the rub. Rocks erode in precise ways according to the dictates of physical and chemical laws. The rate of flow of liquids, including water in rivers and hence its ability to erode solid rock, is a function of each liquid's viscosity which in turn is determined by innate factors of atomic and molecular bonding. The material world comes kitted out with an entire set of measurable values - the spin of atoms, the compressibility of water, the hardness of diamond, the energy levels of electron orbits, the strength of gravity - all of which work in concert to make the universe hum along nicely. Nature's wonders all arise as consequences of these assigned values. Come now, skeptics, can you really swallow the notion that this magnificent planet and all life forms on it exist because of a lucky concatenation of a myriad of universal physical values? Can our aesthetic sense really be traced back to a searing nativity scene?

Change one value, and our planet would not be near so endearing as it is. Give water the viscosity of honey and oh what a sticky mess we would have to negotiate every time it rained. No, I take that back; it wouldn't rain because evaporation from honey oceans would be negligible. Where do the values come from? God ordained them, of course. What could possibly be more self-evident? That is why He can say that He made the "springs of water" (Rev. 14:7) in spite of the ease with which they can be naturally explained.