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Creation 18(2):19, March 1996

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Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles and Further Reading below.

Mount Rushmore ... evidence of design

by

Dean Franklin, wikimedia commons MtRushmoreMonument
Mount Rushmore: intelligent design; not blind natural forces of erosion. The presidents are, from left, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Click for larger view.

Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA, is a spectacular memorial to four United States Presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Sculpted from a massive granite bluff, the memorial covers about five square kilometres (two square miles), with each head measuring about 18 metres (60 feet) from forehead to chin — making the individual sculptures twice as high as the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt.

To suggest these images just happened to appear on the granite face as the result of millions of years of rain, wind, and frost would of course be ludicrous. It is impossible to imagine that the recognizable images of four great American leaders could appear by accident, regardless of the time allowed for such a process.

In fact, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock were blasted and chiselled from the rim of Mount Rushmore as the heads were painstakingly sculpted from 1927 to 1941 by famous American sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his workers.

It's obvious then, that the Mount Rushmore National Memorial is the product of an intelligent designer, as surely design points to a designer?

How is it then, that those who subscribe to the theory of evolution can believe the memorial itself was deliberately designed, when the very men it honours were not?

It is impossible to imagine that the recognizable images of four great American leaders could appear by accident.

They will tell you man's existence—and the existence of the Presidents immortalized in rock on Mount Rushmore—is nothing more than the result of a series of unexplained, chaotic, biological accidents, interacting with whatever environments happened, by chance, to be there!

No one doubts the memorial is the work of an intelligent designer, yet much greater design and laws in the universe are overlooked, or disregarded, by people who believe that evolution produced everything in existence, with no intelligence or design behind it.

This makes no sense.

History tells us Gutzon Borglum was the designer of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial; the Bible tells us God is the Designer of the universe, and man was made (designed) in his image (Genesis 1:26).

Posted on homepage: 13 July 2016

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