As @moderators seem unwilling to create a new thread for this blatantly off-topic issue, I’m going to do this myself. I’d suggest posts relevant to this topic be moved here. (New threads for the recent explosion of, often lengthy, posts on other topics likewise unrelated to the “Evidence for YEC” would also be welcome.)
That rather depends on how narrowly we look at it.
Viewing it narrowly, YEC is virtually invisible in New Zealand – I am only aware of its existence here through passing mentions of it in discussion of American creationism.
Viewing it more broadly, I can see a strong correspondence between conservative Christian denial of reality in the form of denying that the uplands of neither Kangaroo Island nor western Arnham Land are neither flat nor uneroded, with conservative Christian denial of reality in the form of affirming that Trump is ‘doing God’s work’ in spite of the fact that he is the living embodiment of most (all?) of the Seven Deadly Sins.
As his chaotic reign of misrule has emboldened authoritarian anti-democratic tendencies in countries such as Hungary and Turkey, aided Russia’s imperialistic aspirations and has completely vaporised the developing unity with Canada and the EU in dealing with China on trade (completely undercutting Trump’s vaunted ‘China pivot’), I see him (and thus the reality-denying forces that put him back in power) as doing great global harm.
I marvel (and groan) at that correspondence daily here in America—especially in my own very MAGA region of America.
[By the way, I used to consider myself a “conservative Christian” but the meaning of conservative has changed so much in recent years that I scarcely recognize it. Of course, the meaning of Christian used to be closely tied to the teachings of Jesus Christ but that has changed as well. Now the word is so often tied to demanding power and dominating others. And anger. Lots of not-so-biblical anger.]
I recognize this correspondence, and am concerned about the consequences of both. At the same time, I think we need to be aware of the possibility of confounding. It may be that both can be explained by something like authority bias leading to a greater trust of authorities from one’s group and a corresponding distrust of authorities and institutions (perceived as) outside of the group. Do young Earth Christians distrust science and the universities where it is conducted because they are “secular” and therefore must be wrong about the age of the Earth and the origin of species, or is it the teaching of an old Earth and evolution that makes those institutions generally untrustworthy? Either way, there are outcomes that I would prefer to see changed, but accomplishing that change may require getting the causal relationships correct. And getting the causal relationships correct will also inform which harms are the result of young Earth teaching and which are coincident with it.
I don’t have answers to those questions at the societal level, but I can speak to personal harm. I’ve written here previously about my own childhood and education in conservative Christian churches and schools that were exclusively young Earth. I won’t repeat all the details, but the short version is that I was a young Earth believer, then an age-of-the-Earth agnostic once I learned that there were other Christian perspectives. It wasn’t until I started taking seriously the creationist (and ID) encouragement to see for myself where the evidence pointed and followed up the papers they cited that I discovered how much the case for a young Earth and against evolution relied on rhetorical obfuscation (at best) of the actual data and research and very little if at all on the scientific method.
This has led to what I have called a crisis of fellowship rather than a crisis of faith. I am still content to affirm the Nicene Creed and I stand by my confession from 5 years ago–except for the part about going to church on Sunday. A variety of events, most of them related to scientific issues, have broken my ability to trust the Christian communities I was a part of. How can I fellowship with people who tell me privately that it is OK to be a Christian who affirms evolution, but from the pulpit misrepresent science, make jokes about how dumb you have to be to believe evolution, and sing songs about how evolutionists are liars? How can I fellowship with people who explicitly dismiss the field of public health that I’ve spent my career in? And how do I trust that they aren’t wrong about other areas where I am not an expert when I can see how wrong they are in the areas where I am?
More recently, I have also begun to reflect on the less consequential but still personally significant harm of having missed out on studying interesting science. From my personal investigations of the past 5-10 years, I’ve discovered that I find evolutionary biology quite fascinating and enjoyable to study, even going so far as developing my own simulation to understand it better. I can only imagine how differently my scientific career might have turned out if I had started on that path two or three decades earlier. At the very least, a better understanding of evolutionary dynamics could only have helped my work as it relates to infectious disease biology and epidemiology.
You have described my current frustrations. I have friends, some of them pastors, who are friendly and smile but in various contexts I know that they speak of me as an “enemy of the truth” and “deceived by liberalism.”
This passage yielded both an element of agreement, and a contrary thread of cognitive dissonance.
Agreement, because I was already thinking that that a degree of intellectual curiousity within the individual YEC (or other creationist, or FEer, or MAGA) would be necessary in order to reach them. Otherwise they would simply gloss over the distortions and inconsistencies and happily continue on with their beliefs.
Cognitive dissonance, at the idea that creationists (including ID) would encourage their followers to ‘follow up’ and risk them seeing ‘how the sausage gets made’, as you did. This would seem counterproductive, unless they are sufficiently confident in the complacency of their followers, that they expect only an insignificant number to take up the idea – in which case, it becomes a form of bluff.
My journey out of YEC was basically the same, and I think you’re right that it’s a bluff. They say to think for yourself, but most people don’t have the time or energy to look deeply at the evidence.
When I started looking at the evidence for myself, I kept going back to the CMI “Contact us” page where they gave me some just-so answer for my question. Eventually they got so annoyed by the volume of my questions that they basically told me to stop emailing them! After that, I quickly left YEC, because I had to examine the evidence untethered from their propaganda and just-so stories.
I see what you are saying. It is possible that in some cases I have missed some subtext of “You don’t actually need to check, you can trust us.” And it is possible that my own curiosity about the details of referenced papers made me feel encouraged to investigate when no such encouragement was actually stated or implied. At the same time, some of the encouragement I was referring to comes from folks that you probably would put in the “followers” category, who figured I would come to the same conclusion they did.
While I suppose that could be the case, I wasn’t talking about some broad reference to “the evidence” in the abstract which I then had to go and track down for myself. I meant that specific papers were being quoted or referenced that I would then go and read.