I
want to showcase the following quote from a young earthist I shall call “Joe Smith”
Answers in Genesis doesn't
"hate science," many of them ARE scientists. They just hate to see
science being used to make up stories about the past when no scientists were
there, as an alternative to the plain, simple understanding of Genesis and many
other passages in the Bible. Yes, you can be a Christian and believe in Christ
while believing in billions of years and life evolving from microbes, but you can't
honestly get the billions of years of gradual evolution from reading the Bible,
and once you start re-interpreting things because of the claims of
"experts" who can't actually PROVE those claims, where do you stop?
This
is a fine example encapsulating several fundamentalist habits of mind. I want
to unpack the fallacies crammed into this short statement which are in fact
symptoms of an anti-science philosophy. The detailed breakdown of Joe Smith's statement can be found here: I don’t think there is anything in this breakdown I
haven’t already said before but it brings together in one place several lines
of criticism of fundamentalist anti-science.
Here is a very interesting and useful post on Panda's thumb about someone called David MacMillan who was brought up as a young earthist and was very challenged by the star light problem. After much study he realised that no sensible fundamentalist solutions existed and therefore young earthism simply didn't stack up scientifically. The full story can be read here:
https://medium.com/@davidstarlingm/path-across-the-stars-e8dbf93e4405
Two young earthists contribute to the discussion thread on Panda's Thumb (a Floyd Lee and a Robert Byers) but their contributions are incoherent and more or less simply assert that "God did it, just like that!" and therefore who are we to ask too many questions of an omnipotent God? Ironically their "anti-science" responses which appeal to brute omnipotent authority actually run counter to the many fraught attempts of other young earthists to rationalise the star light conundrum within a young earthist scientific framework It only goes to show the disarray among young earthists over the question; for it seems that so far none of the attempts by young earthist "scientists" to fix the problem has become the stock answer reached for by the rank and file.
One final question remains, however, about which I don't yet know the answer. Did MacMillan lose his faith?
ADDENDUM 21/05/2019
https://medium.com/@davidstarlingm/path-across-the-stars-e8dbf93e4405
Two young earthists contribute to the discussion thread on Panda's Thumb (a Floyd Lee and a Robert Byers) but their contributions are incoherent and more or less simply assert that "God did it, just like that!" and therefore who are we to ask too many questions of an omnipotent God? Ironically their "anti-science" responses which appeal to brute omnipotent authority actually run counter to the many fraught attempts of other young earthists to rationalise the star light conundrum within a young earthist scientific framework It only goes to show the disarray among young earthists over the question; for it seems that so far none of the attempts by young earthist "scientists" to fix the problem has become the stock answer reached for by the rank and file.
One final question remains, however, about which I don't yet know the answer. Did MacMillan lose his faith?
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