Arguments for/against young earth creationism

[sp1ders]

Anyone here believe in young earth creationism? What are the arguments for and against?

(I'm a Christian and genuinely interested, please don't turn this into an atheist dominated fight opportunity. I'd like mutually respectful discussion) 😊

I'm Christian (of the Catholic variety ;) ... I believe in what science has revealed about an old earth.

I believe the pre-history in the early bible tells us about God and the "why" He wants a relationship with us and is willing to reconcile us to Himself when we faulter.... over and over again. I don't believe the start of the bible is a historical naritive.

The language and understanding of people thousands of years ago when the early part of the bible was written was very different from understanding of us in Europe or America in the 19, 20 and 21st Centuries.

I'm aware there has been a huge amount of work to justify a young earth. I find it interesting how some groups are working to prove it scientifically while others believe the bible cannot be "inerrant" without recognising the different time, language and style that different parts of the Bible was written.

I'm a Christian and believe in old earth and evolution. Personally I feel that creating a living, changing evolving universe at the Big Bang ("Let there be light") is much more wonderful than us all just sitting here, created 6000 years ago.

I've argued with many friends about it, especially when I was at Bible college lol!

I know one very evangelical family who homeschooled because they didn't want their children learning science based biological facts. They're young earth creationists and it's practically all they talk about. I once thought they were friends but over time I realised I couldn't keep on being friends when the only thing they talked about was so very, very different than what I was interested in!

@sp1ders "please don't turn this into an atheist dominated fight opportunity. I'd like mutually respectful discussion) 😊"

You started well.....!

I know what this place can be like 😂

I'm a believer in micro evolution - environmental adaptations - but not sure about 'we all crawled out of the ocean' type thing. I'd love to know how life first got started as the evolutionists admit they don't yet know. I've been watching some for/against documentaries, but I don't have a science education or background so it's a job to know what's accurate and objectively right.

@sp1ders " I'd love to know how life first got started as the evolutionists admit they don't yet know"

I question the word "admit". One of the central tenets of science is that it's absolutely fine-in fact essential to say "we don't know." It's not something to be admitted, as if it's a failing! I won't go into the current thinking, because I'm sure you know as much about abiogenesis, RNA and all the rest as I do. The crucial thing is not to fall into the "we don't know and that's proof of God" trap.

Arguments for, there aren’t any.

it baffles me that anyone believes a word of the Old Testament.

I know many Christians, and as far as I'm aware, none of them are young Earth creationists, so it's not Christians believe one thing, and atheists another.

There's loads of info out there on the current theories of how life started. And also on how Earth formed and changed prior to life (which is a process that continues and is visible to us on an ongoing basis). What more do you want from either side. One is faith, one is evidence, you just have to choose which you'd rather believe in if you can't believe God put all the science in motion and that is how he created the world (like most Christians here in the UK, at least).

Agree with PP - admit is a loaded word. Acknowledge, yes, admit, no.

The amazing thing with science is it is greater to say we don't know then state uncertainties as facts.

Catholic here and cannot comprehend how anyone with even a trace of intelligence can believe in young earth.

I've not come across many young earth creationists in the UK. An American tourist wandered into my church last week and tried to convince me, a woman in a clerical collar, that the Earth was created in seven days. My response was that science gives us some good theories about how the universe came together, but we can look at theology to think about why the universe came together.

Young earth creationism is essentially a conspiracy theory. For it to be true would require a huge number of dedicated scientists to not just be simply mistaken, but to be actively covering up "the truth". It'd be almost as big a conspiracy as you'd need for flat earth theory to be true.

It's weird that young earth creationism and flat earth theory are both conspiracy theories largely driven by American Biblical literalism. It must be something in the water over there.

Accepting evolution and what we know about the age of the earth and the universe is not incompatible with scientific thinking and method. I am an atheist, for full disclosure. But young earth creationism is an outlier in the faith spectrum. Other than 'The Bible says so' all they have is belief, whereas the scientific evidence for an old earth is compelling. As @CurlewKate says, the fact that science doesn't know everything is not evidence that all science is therefore wrong.

Years ago there was a poster here who linked to a page that listed something like 101 proofs of a young earth. It was remarkable. I'm not a scientist and I didn't spend a lot of time looking through it but the majority were arguments of the form "Science says X. Reality is Y. Therefore young earth". But so many of them took all of 20 seconds of googling to show that either science wasn't saying X at all, or they'd blatantly misrepresented Y. It was just strawman after strawman and embarrassingly bad.

Was he called Ruggles, @HowardTJMoon?

I've always wanted to go here! creationmuseum.org/

There are no sensible arguments for, it’s utter nonsense

It's possible to believe that the biblical account is an attempt at explaining and simplifying what actually happened, and that this broadly ties in with science, if you look between the lines; e.g that with God, "a thousand years are as one day"(and vv). So you don't have to believe that the universe was created in six 24-hr days. There used to be a cosmologist in my congregation - he taught at a university. (I'm sure he kept his Christian views to himself!) But he believed that the Bible account was a good layman's explanation. I'm not sure about Adam's rib - some of it you do have to just accept, or not.

Genesis has the sun and moon being created on day 4 - after land, sea and sky.

It's possible to believe that the biblical account is an attempt at explaining and simplifying what actually happened, and that this broadly ties in with science, if you look between the lines; e.g that with God, "a thousand years are as one day"(and vv).

True, but that is specifically not what young earth creationism is. They believe that 7 days means literally 7 periods of 24 hours. That's why it's a fringe religious movement that mostly exists in the US.

@Pocketfullofdogtreats Yes-but that's not what Young Earth Creationists believe....they believe in a literal 7 days. And that the earth is (I think) 6000 years old.

I remember my colleague teaching geology to a new Earth creationist. It was tricky. We all have our own beliefs I guess,

Randy Ruggles! aka BestValue
There's a blast from the past

He first turned up on this thread, which stretched to a whole series of threads
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/philosophy_religion_spirituality/1719381-Young-Earth-Creationists?reply=38685745

The creation museum is hilarious, Adam and eve’s pet raptors are a particular favourite

Young Earth Creationism derives the age of the Earth from the generations listed in the old testament- the people aren't all given with ages, but over time ages were attributed to them, and by adding up the ages of the generations, Christians centuries ago calculated when Adam must have been born, on the literal seventh day. That's how the age of the earth was worked out.

The scientific old earth theory uses what we know of dating minerals, life forms, geology and huge numbers of other things and finds that they all agree really very closely with an ancient timeline. It uses external data.

So for me, either I accept that God has put huge amounts of evidence for an old earth in place to trick us for some reason, or I accept that a diverse group of religious writers in the stone age wrote down the people they had an oral history of, and didn't write down what they didn't know about pre-history. It's an easy choice for me, because the point is about what the Bible teaches us about how to live in God, not about exactly how old Noah was.

No, it was BestValue here - https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/philosophy_religion_spirituality/1740513-YEC-2?reply=38776715&utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

Delightfully the link they gave to "101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe" https://creation.com/age-of-the-earth still exists! I recommend a quick glance through to appreciate just how disingenuous much of the YEC arguments are.