“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the log in your own? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a log in your own eye?"
Answers in Genesis ran an interesting article critiquing the Flat-Earth Movement back in June. I missed @Laura’s thread (Young-Earth and Flat-Earth views using similar rhetoric) on it the first time around, but I didn’t want to re-open it just for this.
As Laura and others have noted, the AiG piece by astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner does a good job describing the problems with believing in a flat Earth, but all of his arguments apply equally well to a young Earth. Thus, I determined to try an experiment. I copied and pasted Dr. Faulkner’s article into a Word doc and used “find/replace” with these terms: flat/young, shape/age, "a sphere”/old, “a globe”/old, and astronomy/geology. Before anyone starts worrying about copyright issues, satire is 100% protected by Fair Use. I offer this satire not for the purpose of making a joke, but in the hope that some among the Young-Earth Movement will recognize themselves in this mirror.
Now, observe the results (emphasis mine):
How Do We Know What We Know?
Young-earthers raise an excellent epistemological question: how do we know what age is the earth? For three decades, I asked this very question of students in the first semester of my introductory geology class. The context of this question was the early history of geology. I would ask my students what age they thought the earth had. All my students would answer that the earth was old… When I asked my students how they knew the earth was old, not one student could give me a good reason…
… if one becomes convinced that the earth is young rather than being old, that is a major change in one’s worldview. If the earth truly is young, then we have been lied to about the earth’s age our entire lives. One must ask how and why this lie was created and perpetuated. Ultimately, this line of thinking leads to the conclusion that there must be a vast conspiracy about the earth’s age that has been going on for a long time. … It seems that the conspiracy to hide the earth’s true age is the motherlode of conspiracies. All other conspiracies easily are subsumed by this one.
… Why is the cosmological conspiracy believed by young-earthers all-encompassing? The answer lies in the fact that the alleged conspiracy is cosmological. Cosmology is foundational to one’s worldview. If we have been lied to about such an important, fundamental issue, then all other conspiracies are relatively small matters in comparison. Once one comes to believe that there is a vast conspiracy about cosmology, it is a relatively easy step to believe in many other sub-conspiracies.
But young-earthers typically are undeterred by such advice. They dismiss it as the mere teaching of a man. They proudly proclaim that they want to stick solely with what the Bible says. They fail to understand the importance of sound teaching taught in the very Bible they profess to uphold. God has ordained the church for several purposes, including instruction in the Scriptures. 1 Timothy 3:2 says that an overseer must be able to teach. But young-earthers frequently dismiss instruction from Godly men, insisting that they know more about what the Bible says than men who have devoted many decades to prayerful study of the Scriptures. It never occurs to young-earthers that they may be wrong in their understanding of the Bible. Nor does it occur to them that they have set themselves up as authorities on the meaning of the Bible, but their approach completely undermines the possibility of such an authority in the first place. … Some young-earthers also fashion themselves to be experts on science and the methodology of science. Consequently, they think of themselves as competent to dictate to scientists, both godly and ungodly, on how science ought to be conducted. But their definitions and practice of science appear to be formulated to make science as generally understood impossible.
Where do these young-earthers get the notion that they are capable of rewriting so many disciplines of study? This is particularly galling when one considers the limited science education that most young-earthers seem to have achieved. Their ready stock answer is that they haven’t been indoctrinated by all those years of study. These young-earthers fail to realize that without all that study, they don’t even understand what they criticize.
It is intellectually lazy for Christians in their fear to insist on a strictly literal approach to all of Scripture. Sadly, young-earthers who demand this hyper-literal approach to the Bible readily abandon it when it suits them. Ultimately, young-earthers place themselves in a position of authority while simultaneously deconstructing the idea that there can’t be any authority other than Scripture. They are blind to the fact that they have equated their understanding of Scripture with what the Bible says.
Another irony is that while young-earthers regularly dismiss any teaching on Scripture that they disagree with as mere teachings of men, they readily embrace the teachings of men with whom they agree.
This raises the question of whether the Christian version of the young-earth movement is a cult. The young-earth movement has some elements of a cult. Young-earthers insist that their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil. This is the major defining characteristic of a cult. On the other hand, a cult often denies one or more cardinal doctrines of Christianity, such as the deity of Jesus Christ. While some individual young-earthers who identify as Christian may stray a bit from orthodoxy, there is no consistent pattern of denying central tenets of Christianity among young-earthers. Furthermore, a cult usually is led by a central figure. As of yet, there is not a single person who seems to be leading the Christian version of the young-earth movement.
I have found that young-earthers readily believe almost anything that a fellow young-earther says. A young-earther comes up with a very lame argument that he posts on the internet; soon, another young-earthers endlessly repeat the poor argument, an argument that is easily refuted and often contains demonstrably false information. Yet it is nearly impossible to convince young-earthers of the folly of the claim. At the same time, young-earthers are highly resistant to any arguments for the conventional cosmology. Consequently, young-earthers have no skepticism for the claims of fellow young-earthers but have nothing but skepticism (or is contempt a better word?) for those critical of young-earth views… When young-earthers finally post the memes outside of the young-earth echo chambers, they often are surprised by the sharp, and well deserved, criticism that they encounter. Yet, the firm believers of a young earth are never deterred by this, because, as I pointed out before, young-earthers have zero skepticism of young-earth claims and impossibly high skepticism for any opposing positions.
In order to escape the delusion of a young earth, believers in such ideology must first realize that they have been duped by some very poor arguments.
So, I continue to battle this threat to biblical Christianity. I’m not interested in debating young-earthers. I don’t even try to convince them. Instead, my target audience is those who are true seekers, not those who think that they’ve already found truth in the falsity of young earth, without doing the proper research. I also provide answers to those who have seen the unfortunate effects of the young-earth movement in people that they know and love.
REMEMBER: The essay was written by a Young-Earth creationist to criticize the notions of Flat-Earth believers. Other than the global search replacements noted above, the words are Dr. Danny Faulkner’s.