I’d say there’s a substantial difference between believing that there could be fossils left over from the Flood and that the Flood caused macro-level geological formations that we see today.
Why would you say that? How could fossils from the flood be embedded in sedimentary rocks if the rocks weren’t deposited by the flood?
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Rocks, yes, but not rock strata in the sense that we understand them.
As soon as the earliest geologists began to recognize the principles of superposition and the concept of a geologic column, any thought that Noah’s Flood was responsible for the deposition of all strata went flying out the window. The prevailing thought among Diluvialists in the early 19th century was not that the geologic column was the result of the flood, but that erosion and large, irregular deposits of gravel (now known to be the result of last glaciation) was evidence of a global flood which took place after all strata layers had been deposited.
Price was really the first one to articulate a vision in which Noah’s Flood was actually responsible for strata.
Because early naturalists had no concept of sedimentation or the geologic column. They didn’t even know how fossilization occurred. These were fossils which were uncovered at the surface, after all. Homo diluvii testis was found on the borders of a lake in Ohningen.
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You may have heard the spiritual death explanation commonly, but not commonly from YECs. It is a position of many OECs to explain how, as scripture says, death could enter through one man if in fact there was lots of death prior to the fall. At the 99% level when OECs make that argument, YECs say “no, no, no, Adam’s death must refer to physical death.” You are simply wrong.
No worries, we live in a post-modern world where everyone is entitled to their own definition of words.
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I’m going to need some evidence for that. It’s not my experience. If my experience is unusual, let’s get some quantitative sampling.
Your definition seems particularly odd, as you say that some young earth creationists are not YECs; you’re defining the acronym in opposition to the words it stands for.
It is not odd at all. The term YEC has come, from usage, to mean the form of young earth creationism that sprung up as a result of the advent of evolutionary theory. It was recognized that evolution needed a great deal of time, and so modern YECism arose in an attempt to deny it that time. YECs proclaim a young earth in spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. That is the distinguishing mark of a YEC, and it is not shared by the ancients. Augustine and others from the first 500 years? I don’t actually know how old they thought the earth was, they probably just accepted whatever the consensus was, which was certainly not billions of years. But they didn’t dig their heels in in the ground in the face of scientific evidence. You really don’t see the difference?
In the very same way, ancients who might have believed the earth was flat are not the same as modern “Flat Earthers” who, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, still proclaim flatness. Again, you don’t see a difference? It’s one bin for all?
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Then why was Buffon forced to recant his idea that the earth was at least several hundred thousand years old? That considerably pre-dates evolutionary theory. Were the officials of the Sorbonne YECs by your definition or were they not?
I don’t know the history of Buffon…
My suspicion is that google will help. Perhaps Wikipedia. I could look for you, but not immediately.
This seems like a fairly detailed account.
I propose a distinction that might help avoid all this wrangling over a term.
Many people have said that they believe in “intelligent design” (i.e., that the universe or life is intelligently designed by some mind), but do not believe in Intelligent Design (i.e., a particular attempt to prove design by scientific means that arose in the 1990s).
One might say: all members of the Intelligent Design movement are also believers in “intelligent design”, but not all believers in “intelligent design” are members of the Intelligent Design movement.
We could say that Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin all believed in “intelligent design” but not in “Intelligent Design.”
Similarly, many Christians over the centuries have believed that the earth is young, and of course have believed that it was created, and hence could be called, by the naked dictionary meaning of the words, “young earth creationists”, but “Young Earth Creationism,” as that term is now used in popular discourse about origins, refers to a movement that got started in the late 19th century, and reached a high level of influence around 1960 and for a few years afterward, and whose doctrines and emphases were very much shaped by two things it was reacting to, i.e., the theory of evolution, and the “higher criticism” of the Bible (and related aspects of theological liberalism). It is very much reflective of the American Protestant free-church culture milieu in which it grew up, which was a very different sort of Christian culture than that of Augustine in North Africa in the 5th century or even of Luther or Calvin in Europe in the 16th century.
One might say: all Young Earth Creationists believe in a created and young earth, but not all those who believe in a created and young earth are Young Earth Creationists.
Thus, while Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Luther and many others could be described as “young earth creationists”, none of them were Young Earth Creationists.
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I agree that labels can fail to capture important distinctions and context. Historical context matters. This is also true as concerning matters of natural theology as expressed by such scientific figures such as Newton, Bacon, or Maxwell - none of these were creationists in the modern sense either.
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Eddie is spot on here, and I’m amazed how often we equate “young earth” with YEC (i.e., the creationism part goes way beyond the simple age of the earth/universe). I would add that the early church assumption (i.e., they didn’t really research it) of a young earth through a literalistic reading of genealogies was due to (a) no awareness of the ANE (e.g., genealogies), and (b) a chiliastic bent.
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I would be interested in further explanation. Is it that the genealogies (or at least the ages of the patriarchs) were originally intended to be purely symbolic? But if we discount the ages, doesn’t the world become younger? Are the genealogies themselves not to be taken as real?
I agree with @Eddie too except to point out that some YECs don’t even affirm a young earth. It is notable that Young Life Creationists are considered a subset of YECs though they believe the earth is old.
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Are there actually any such people? A couple posters here have flirted with the idea but seem to have abandoned it quickly. Can you name any actual YLCs?
The Hebrew/ANE world was completely foreign to the early church; maybe 1 or 2 notable figures actually knew Hebrew (and the whole ANE context was gone by then). Most were filtering things through the lens of Greek philosophy (and we could add ongoing debates with Jews, which didn’t always produce the most charitable responses from Christians). Given this bigger picture, I don’t see any reason or evidence that the early church would’ve asked the question (let alone, know how to answer) about the nature and purpose of ANE genealogies. Actually, we still don’t know much, but we do know that the genre of genealogy does not necessarily conform to more Western presuppositions. So where we go from here might take us several directions. One, we do know that ancient genealogies were not complete, so we should expect the possibility of gaps (actually, a comparison of biblical genealogies already shows this). Two, there is good reason for suspecting that the numbers of years are symbolic and/or based on a different base-system (e.g., Babylon’s base-60). Third, the larger issue of “historicity” (for anything in Gen 1-11) would be based on several other factors. I for one am open to different possibilities, though I work in a context that even asking these large questions yield frowns from my colleages. Oh well, the pursuit of truth is more important than conformity 
You can see the first of several lectures on the genealogies form Denis Lamoureaux here: wlgen1.
I didn’t touch on chiliasm, but you can probably Google it just to get a glance at why it was convenient to see 7 epochs (of 1000 years each) as advantageous.
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Would you then agree that the genealogies are useless in determining that age of anything, including the creation, Adam, the hypothetical Flood, etc.?
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Yes! I think normal historical and scientific investigation would serve us much better here.
There may be some limited utility in the genealogies, albeit entirely theoretical. One fairly reasonable possibility is that the genealogies reflect age gaps between notable patriarchs. In other words, it was not that Lamech was actually 188 years old when Noah was born, but that Noah was a descendant of Lamech born 188 years later. Then the “age at death” was added as a form of gemetria. So it’s possible that there’s something in there with a grain of historicity. But probably impossible to suss out.