Join Fred Williams and Doug McBurney on Real Science Radio as they interview special guest Mike Snavely from Mission Imperative. In this episode, Mike shares his fascinating journey from being a missionary in South Africa to founding Mission Imperative, an organization dedicated to educating Christians on geology and natural history through the lens of creationism. Discover how Mike’s childhood experiences with nature in Africa ignited his passion for combating the theory of evolution and how it led to the unique Mission Imperative safaris.
God could have completely ruined everything at the global flood. But when the waters receded, he left behind some of the most incredible scenery on the planet all over the world.
SPEAKER 05 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country.
SPEAKER 1 :
This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I’m Doug McBurney.
SPEAKER 04 :
Fred, this week we have a special guest, extremely special. It’s Mission Imperative’s Mike Snavely. If you’ve been around creationists or the creation world for any length of time, you’ve probably seen Mike’s work. Maybe you’ve heard him speak. He spent decades helping Christians understand geology, fossils, natural history, all from a biblical perspective. And importantly, he doesn’t just do it in classrooms. He does it, well, in churches, but then also out in the field where there are actual rocks out in the field. Mike, thanks for being with us.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, thank you for having me.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. So tell us a bit about Mission Imperative. What is Mission Imperative? Where did you get the name?
SPEAKER 03 :
So, okay, years ago, we were appointees to go back to South Africa as missionaries. My wife and I were missionaries there. That’s where I grew up. My dad was a bush pilot for a hospital mission station. So we had already been missionaries there. We’re headed back. But the whole issue of creation evolution had always been… very near and dear to my heart because growing up in Africa, I had all kinds of animals as pets, everything wild, everything beautiful. I had just, you name it, the bug world, the animal world was phenomenal. My parents did not need to teach me that God made everything. I could clearly see it. So I was absolutely appalled the year that we actually began to learn about evolution in school, in the public school. Initially, I thought they were joking. I thought they were telling us a fairy tale, you know, whatever. It turns out they are telling us a fairy tale, but they were presenting it as, you know, and I thought they were joking. And when I realized they were serious, I was utterly appalled because at that time, I was just, I don’t know, maybe 10. At that time, I did not think adults told lies. I thought only kids told lies to get out of trouble. Wow. And so when I realized my teachers are telling me a lie, I was appalled at that, but then I was appalled at the lie they were telling us. So I was always a big enemy of the whole evolution theory. I just, I could not believe that people would actually believe this. So now advance into this, into the time that we were appointees to go back to South Africa. I was asked to teach a Sunday school class, an adult elective on creation evolution. And so I said, oh man, I’d love to do that. Give me a couple months to prepare. And they said, you don’t have a couple months. You only have two weeks before the class begins. I thought, oh, thank you so much. So anyway, so I began to throw this thing together and the class grew to over 200 people. And I was astonished at that. And as soon as the class was done, other churches began to invite me to go and speak on that topic. And I said, well, this isn’t even what I do. I was just a Sunday school class. Well, as time went on, what happened was I began to condense 13 weeks of the Sunday school elective down to presentations I could do over the weekend. And we had actually even thought that maybe we could include this with what we were going to do in South Africa. I was going to be teaching at one of the mission colleges. And I could do this in maybe public schools and whatnot. Anyway, one thing led to another. And I always loved the Mission Impossible TV series. And somebody mentioned to me at the end of the Sunday school class and while talking with them about these sessions I was doing on the weekends – Somebody said, boy, it’s absolutely impossible to overcome the teachings of evolution. And I said, well, I don’t know how impossible it is, but it’s imperative that we try. Voila, mission imperative, and the name stuck. And so we said, wait, sounds good to us. So that was all back in 94. And so we have made it official in 95. We realized that the Lord seemed to be changing the direction of our ministry from full-time in South Africa to doing this full-time. And so that’s what we did. We established Mission Imperative in 1995 and have been doing it full-time ever since then.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, so you’ve got some safaris, and I’ve only heard good things about these. You’re not just a great speaker, because you’ve been, I think, keynote, or you’ve been a big speaker at these homeschool conferences, and you’ve got these safaris. And I wanted to introduce our audience to those who don’t know about your safaris. I’d like you to maybe present. I know one of your most popular ones is the Southwest Safari. Yes, yes. So if we could take a look at that, but before we do, I want to make sure people know that tonight you will be at Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, and that’s at Littleton Baptist Church. It’s 7 p.m. And so if you’re in the Denver area or anywhere near Denver, you need to go see this because I believe tonight you’re talking on Lucy. They need to meet you. What’s that?
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s called Aunt Lucy. The program is called Aunt Lucy. It’s about the human evolution idea.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And if people get a chance to meet you and maybe you’ll get brochures on your safaris, I highly encourage people to check these out. So, Mike, if you want to let us know about your Southwest Safari, you have a presentation here for us to share with our audience.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. Let me just preface it by saying this was based on the program I do called The Horror of the Flood. And in that program, we include an animation and a description of the hydroplate theory, which you’re familiar with. And Walter Brown himself is in that video. And so… So it’s based on that idea. And of course, one of the subchapters of his book is on the Grand Canyon. And so back in 2007, I went on a trip on a raft through the canyon and taking pictures to document it so I could correlate it with his chapter. When I finished that, we made in 2009, we made a video called Grand Canyon, the puzzle on the plateau, because so many people are puzzled about how all of these things could fit together to all the national and state parks on the plateau in that region. mainly Utah and Arizona, how they all fit together. And it was always a mystery to geologists. Well, it wasn’t a mystery to this theory because the post-flood catastrophe, a dam breach, literally explains all this. So we came up with the video and it was released in 2010. The very week it was released, about two different couples came to us and said, we had no idea. Could you take us out there and show us? And I said, what, you mean like a tour? I said, we’re not tour directors. We don’t do that. And they said, well, would you please do it? Well, six of us went out and tried an itinerary that we worked on, worked on for a number of weeks. And we tried it all out. And 2011 was the first official one. And we’ve had over 30 people basically. And sometimes we do two a year. So that’s the preface behind this. This tour, the tours are all based on things that I teach about. So they’re educational as well as a lot of fun. Wow, that’s great.
SPEAKER 04 :
And so before you go on, I just want to thank you for saying the horror of the flood. You know, so often we teach our kids about the flood and there’s a pretty picture of the ark with the pretty animals and, you know, the giraffe’s neck always sticks up. But it was actually a pretty horrible event where God judged the whole world and killed everybody.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 04 :
And just I appreciate you reminding everyone of that. And I can’t wait to see. how it all fits together in the geology of the Southwest, I’m assuming of the United States?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, in fact, specifically southern Utah and northern Arizona, that’s where we go. That’s where the Grand Circle is around these parks. And so we visit all the national parks and some of the state parks in that region. But what is interesting to me, and it’s how we conclude the video on the Grand Canyon, is all of these parks are here because of the astonishing scenery. Now, God could have completely ruined everything here. at the global flood. But when the waters receded, he left behind some of the most incredible scenery on the planet all over the world. This just has a concentration of geological features that we’ve turned into national and state parks. So God shows his incredible creativity even in destruction. Look what he left behind. And I’ll show you some pictures of it.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s amazing. Okay, Mike, let’s go ahead and take a look at your Southwest Safari. And again, so if I get this correct, you started this whole idea with the hydroplate in mind, and then people found out about the hydroplate there. And it’s like, hey, why don’t you show us this whole Grand Canyon thing?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, the hydroplate theory came first, then the video on Grand Canyon based on the hydroplate theory came second. And then once people saw the video, they were like, oh, we have to see that for ourselves. And so that’s kind of what gave birth to it. And so the trips we do are always, this particular trip is always the end of October into November because it’s the best time of year for three reasons. Number one, the weather is just about perfect. usually. Number two, most of the kids are back in school, so the parks aren’t crowded. And number three, it is just off of high season, so the prices tend to drop. And by the way, our trips are all at cost, because it’s just an extension of our ministry. So all of the trips we do are a high quality. I’m on, I’m one of the top, top writers for trip advisor. And so we only use trip advisor, top choice hotels and lodges, but, but we, we can, we charge about half of what it normally costs to do a commercial venture apples for apples.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Okay. Yep. All right. Well, I’m looking at a picture right here, Southwest Safari. So let’s dive into this thing. Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
So what we’re going to do is just show you a couple pictures of what we do. Now, we used to start in Vegas and end in Vegas. But when the Raiders moved their football team three blocks from our hotel, we knew we were on borrowed time. So we stopped doing that. We now land in St. George. We start in St. George and end in Phoenix. We still do the same route. But the advantage is we’re that much closer to Zion. So the first day, the first official day, it’s a full day in Zion. So Zion, if you’ve ever been there, Zion is just pure majesty. It’s actually a leak point in the plateau, according to the theory. As the plateau rose out of the ground, there was a huge amount of water within the sediments within the plateau. And it leaked out in various points. And this is one of the leak points. And so it gets narrower. Right at the edge of the plateau, it’s wide. But as you go up into Zion National Park, it gets narrower and narrower. But at the beginning, it’s wider here. And the Virgin River flows through it. This park… It’s not even that long. You can take the shuttle from bottom end to the top end. It’s only 30 minutes altogether. And there’s hikes, trails you can do all over. Some of them are very flat and very easy to do at the north end and the south end. Some of the best scenery is on those two easy trails. but you can hike up into valleys. It’s an absolutely stunning place. One of the things that people like to do is go up to Scouts Lookout. And Scouts Lookout, you begin to ascend the trails. And so this is some of my family members climbing up. And you can see it’s a brushed concrete trail. So it’s not like it’s gravel, it’s hard to walk, but you are ascending. And when you get partway up, You’re going up 1,200 feet if you can do this. You can see the trail snaking down below you, but the higher up you go, you get scenery like this. It’s astonishing. This valley is amazing. So to the south where you’re looking, it’s wider, and up where this is, you can see the canyon getting narrower and narrower. And when you get up to Scouts Lookout, you’re able to see quite well. But there is one thing that you can do beyond scouts look out and you need a permit to do it. Now I’ve done it 12 times and it is a, you, you go onto chains, you have to hold onto chains because you’re going up another 300 feet and you’re going up to, um, angels landing. And so here is a picture. Here’s the video. Some of our group, that’s the saddle. Those people are walking across. And if you fall, you go straight down 1200 feet down.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, I think that’s good.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Mike, Mike, I’ve got to stop for our for our radio audience. You’ll want to don’t don’t even bother looking at this online. If what you’ve been imagining in your mind, give Mike a call, contact Mission Imperative and go and see it. What you just… made a picture of in your mind, you can actually go and see it, right, Mike?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, yeah, you can. And even if you can’t, you can look at YouTube videos of people who have gone on Angel’s Island. You can see it’s a scary thing, you know, and a lot of most people don’t do it. Is parachute one of your required items to bring? yeah yeah well the thing is you have to have a permit now because it got dangerous because the trail is basically when you’re on the chains you you can’t bypass somebody else you have to find little crevasses to get around of people coming down if you’re going up and so the chain you know the chain that that’s what it’s it’s kind of scary to do but you can still see the scenery is phenomenal So anyway, you get to the top of Angel’s Landing, and you have spectacular views of everything up there. And that’s one of the popular things to do where some members of our groups try to do it every year if they can get a permit. But that’s basically Angel’s Landing. And, of course, here I am sitting at the very edge. You’re seeing a shuttle 1,200 feet below me right next to my head. Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, see, I’d be about 10 feet back from where you’re at. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I typically am, too. I’m not a real fan of heights, but I wanted to get a picture of this. So anyway.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now, how far north of the Grand Canyon is this park?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, okay, so it’s about several hours from the north rim of the canyon. If you leave here, you go to the north rim. If you go to the south rim, it’s going to take you a little while to get there. But the north rim, it would just be several hours away. So you’re north here a couple hours. North and west, really, in Zion National Park. And then from here, we basically go over to Bryce Canyon. Now, we spend the whole day here, and everybody loves that. In fact, a lot of people asked, the way we did it before, if we could actually spend more time there. And now we do. We’re spending the whole day there. But… We go over to Bryce Canyon then. Now, Bryce Canyon, I don’t know, man. Zion Canyon is pure majesty. When you get to Bryce Canyon, what is this? This is like a theme park on Mars. This is all what’s considered mudstone. And on the top of the Colorado Plateau, there are mini plateaus on top of the plateau. So this is on the top of the Ponsonjan Plateau. And when the flood left the area, as the plateau went up, water leached out of these areas and formed these very strange things called hoodoos. And these things stick up out of the ground like big towers and they keep falling. The trails get closed every couple of years because these things are falling and they’re not building. They can’t build anymore. They’re solid rock. And of course, they will tell you, oh, these things are building over millions of years. No, they could only build while the material that you’re looking at, the material that makes up these hoodoos, was still soft enough to erode like this. So they are collapsing over time, but they’re not building anymore. They can’t. It’s all solid rock anymore. But it’s astonishing. As you walk through this area… There’s a three-mile trail that we take people on. And there’s many, many miles of trails. But we take people on the trails we’ve researched the most. And we take them on the best scenery possible. And we also do it the opposite of the way the National Park tells you to do it. We do it counterclockwise. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. But anyway, when you’re going through this, it’s amazing. As you’re going through these things, they have little tunnels like this. There’s about three different little tunnels right through the hoodoos you can walk through. And you can just see what astonishing structures these are. So we always tell people, if you have the capability of doing a three-mile walk, it’s like a 600-foot elevation loss and gain. So if you can do it, and we tell people to start walking, get some exercise, because something like this you don’t want to miss. But there’s always about 10, 15 people on the trip who are maybe older or maybe have an issue that they can’t walk or hike. You can still see all this from the rim. It’s just very cool to be able to get down among them. But two different years we’ve been there, it snowed. Now, there is nothing more beautiful than Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon in snow. And the colors there, look at that white, dark green, and red. I mean, that’s just a beautiful scene. Now, it might preclude you from walking on the trails the day before, but we saw, this is what it looked like the day we left to go up to the next park. And this is the second national park. Kind of in the middle of this area, we do another national park. We actually stop there for lunch. On the day we leave Bryce Canyon, we head up to Capitol Reef National Park. Now, this is where you really, really see a lot of the red rocks and beautiful cottonwood trees at this time of year. They’re all… They’re all blooming, not blooming, but they’re turning yellow. It’s absolutely stunning to watch this. So we go through Capitol Reef, and geological features are astonishing in this park. But after we have lunch, we move on to Moab, where we do two national parks. And one is Arches. This is the most famous arch in the world. We view it from the opposite side. We used to be able to walk up this side to see this. They no longer allow bus groups to do this, and nobody’s ever been able to figure out why. They’ve never told us why. So we do it from the opposite side. But we still get to see Delicate Arch, and some people can hike up closer to it. But there’s also arches like Double Arch. Windows arches. These are very famous. And by the way, you hike up into this thing, and if a bunch of you are in there, you start singing, and it echoes. And you can hear it for like a quarter of a mile away. And everybody’s singing. It’s really cool. I guess it depends on who’s singing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
It depends on if people can harmonize, too. But the world’s longest arch, too. It’s about seven-tenths of a mile out to it, relatively flat. But this is about as long as a football field, about 300 feet long. And it’s called Landscape Arch. So we go to that one as well. We do all the most famous arches in the park. And then there’s not only arches. There are strange features. Nobody knows how that thing is still standing. This is called Balanced Rock. And I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s possible at all for that thing to still be there, but it is. It must be weighted on the right side more than on the left, but I don’t know how that thing still stands. But there are some phenomenal features. I personally think that God left this stuff here just for us to enjoy. And the scenery through the area is beautiful. When we leave at sunset, you’re looking at the LaSalle Range, which is the backdrop for Moab. And this area, Arches National Park, is where, as the lake was receding, it was far from the breach point. So as water was going through this area, it was eroding out all of this sandstone. And when sandstone collapses like that, especially Navajo sandstone and some of these other sandstone features, when they collapse, they collapse in Arches. It’s just the physical structure of that type of sandstone. And so as water was moving through this area, it carved out more arches than anywhere else. And so the areas are – it’s beautiful.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so, Mike, really quick, back to the arches. I know that there’s arches that have collapsed recently. And yet these things were supposed to form over, what, millions of years, and we’re just lucky enough to be around when some of them collapse, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. In fact, in 2007, we were under wall arch. In fact, we stopped under its shade to stop for a drink, to get some water and so forth. We had our lunch under there. Later that year, it collapsed. And so when I take people up to Landscape Arch each year, those who want to continue up the primitive trail, you have to kind of go up on Slickrock, I take them up and show them the collapsed arch. It collapsed just months after we were there. So they are disappearing, but they’re not forming again. They’re disappearing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Exactly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep. Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yep.
SPEAKER 03 :
So then when we go to the next park we go to, which is right close to it, is Canyonlands. And you can look way off in the distance. You can see the Henry Mountain Range. It’s a small mountain range like the La Salles. But here you’re looking at the floor of the drained lake. Now, as far as you can see, all of the hills that you see, you’re at the same level where I’m standing. And this has all been islands. So they call this island in the sky. Now, the National Park does. Back when the lake was there, this would have been island in the lake. So now let me show you what the viewpoint is. This is the Green River Overlook. And you can see the Green River roughly to the top right side of you. You can see the Green River flowing away from you. But if you look… Next to the river, you can see that the ground has collapsed. And if you look right in the foreground, you can see where the ground slumped because when all of that material and the lake left the area and began to carve out where the river is now flowing, all of that subterranean water began to leak out toward where the river is flowing. And as it leaked out that way, all of those You can see it’s like little canyons. They all collapsed into the river. Grand Canyon is a massive collapse. This is a local one at the Green River. And this is absolutely indicative that there was a lake here. Because if you clean a lake today, this is exactly what you’ll see. You’ll have inner collapses like this. This is just on a massive scale. So when people say, well, we don’t see evidence that there was ever a lake there. Oh, yes, there was. Even evolutionists admit it now. And so this is a classic view that we take people to so you can actually see the evidence for where a lake was. But then as you move south through Blanding area, you come into a very famous area where the lake also was. Again, these are famous… Can’t you just picture John Wayne riding down through this valley here? But this is Monument Valley. And again, these would have been islands in that lake. And in fact, if you notice, there’s very little bit of talus. There’s almost no talines at the bottom of these, which indicates that as the lake was leaving the area, as these were collapsing, the water was carrying all the talus away. If this has been sitting here for millions of years, you’d see far more talus sitting there, but it’s gone. So this is indication that it was a much more rapid event, much more rapid erosive event. And then what you’re left with is what we have today, and this would be Monument Valley. So it’s iconic southwest scenery, and this is beautiful. So we always stop here for lunch, and we go in so people can actually see some of this. Well, then when we move on to Page area, we’re close to where the dam actually was. One of the most famous sites in the nation is Horseshoe Bend. It used to be when we first started doing this, it was just a little gravel parking lot and almost nobody knew about it. But then Utah began to advertise and boy, now it is a national park. And now it’s got, now you have to pay to get in and everything is a tarred parking lot. But it’s still worth it. It’s beautiful to go up to the edge here and look down. You’re looking down anywhere, depending on where you are, about 1,500 feet straight down to the river. And this is the day we arrive in Page. Early the next morning, we go into a slot canyon, and then we get onto a raft, and we raft right past this horseshoe bend. And we look up at the people looking down at us. So it’s a really fun thing to do. So the next morning, we go— So you’ll raft around that?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, we go onto a raft. And you’ll see that in a moment. We raft the river for three hours.
SPEAKER 02 :
So it’s a really fun bridge.
SPEAKER 03 :
This is a theory.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
This would have all been underwater. This would have been at the – this is very close to where the dam reached. In fact, if you look at the very top of your screen, you’re seeing vermilion cliffs. That is the right – or I should say the west side of the funnel. Okay. And the funnel is the area that collapsed when the dam collapsed, releasing all this water. And so it’s an amazing sight as the river was carving. All this would have been soft, and rivers carve a meandering path. So you can see how amazing all of that is. Now, on the next morning, the Navajo take us through what’s called a slot canyon. This is Upper Antelope Canyon. This is phenomenal. These are giant cracks in the sandstone that formed when the plateau rose. And this sandstone is as hard as rock. You can’t, I mean, you could gouge into it, I guess, but the sandstones on either side, you can easily even move with your hands. These have been here for a long time since the flood. But they’re amazing things. It’s a site that is on Navajo territory. So you can’t just go there on your own. You have to go through with a Navajo guide. But it is an absolute must to see because it’s an amazing part of the Colorado Plateau. And so that’s what a slot canyon is.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, I got to interrupt here, though. Before we continue the safari, I can’t let Doug off the hook for the interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, no, Fred. I was enjoying the safari. Come on. Let’s get back on. Let’s get back in.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. So here it is, Doug. Are you ready? Yes, of course. Okay. So we’re looking at a lot of rocks, rock formations. So what is the most abundant rock on earth?
SPEAKER 04 :
The most abundant rock on earth. You know, the answer seems really obvious, which usually means I’m wrong.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 05 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
