AiG picks at specks in Flat-Earth cosomology

Don’t encourage me! Between a young Earth and a literal Adam and Eve, I have more than enough on my plate.

I’m not sure it’s right for BL, but it’s available at the Rauser link above at the moment. Stay tuned for more developments.

Standing by. I’m even more sure he wouldn’t go to Rauser’s site.

I don’t suppose I could post this to my own website page, giving credit where it is due of course? (I never post anything about religion on Fb so I might learn something new about my online friends in the process.)

I’ve invested a fair amount of time and study on the mentality of young earth creationism. Cognitive biases always factor in, but there’s so much more to what underlies belief. Pride is fairly central, leading to intellectual overconfidence and moral grandstanding. Peer conformity is also a huge factor.I’ve been posting on this on my own blog, and I have a series going at RTB with the second post going online this Friday and the third in two weeks.

These principles are universal. They just as easily explain militant atheists, cults, and political polarization.

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I think this describes a small percentage of highly invested individuals, and in reality the YEC community is comprised of a huge majority of people who are only marginally informed and have invested very little time or thought in the subject. They have been led to believe that YEC is the Bible-believing Christian position and they just accept this. So it is mostly a matter of ignorance and in-group marking.

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If that isn’t a statement everybody could agree with, I don’t know what is.

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Just read your first one. Well done. I look forward to seeing the conclusion.

I would agree with that on the grandstanding. Personally, I draw a distinction between the leaders and the followers. Without seeing the rest of @SWilling’s argument, I still would throw in a place for pride even among the mostly uninformed. That is, when confronted with the fact that we have believed something false, it requires a bit of humility to admit that we were fooled. Ironically, Dr. Faulkner addressed this in his essay. Here’s a bit that was previously “unpublished” because it felt a little too harsh. (Is it okay to be harsh on flat-earthers but not young-earthers?) I highlighted two sentences in bold to orient these paragraphs in the original:

These young-earthers fail to realize that without all that study, they don’t even understand what they criticize. There is a term for this overinflated confidence in one’s own abilities: hubris. Hubris often is defined as exaggerated pride or self-confidence. This describes the attitude of many young-earthers very well – they know very little about the things they confidently claim to know. Perhaps the psychological term Dunning-Kruger effect is even more descriptive…

Conclusion
As I previously stated, the ignorance of many young-earthers is astounding. But their ignorance often is surpassed by their arrogance. The term for arrogant ignorance is hubris. There is much pride among young-earthers, at least among the vocal ones. It is pride that attracts people to young earth in the first place. It is the self-congratulatory confidence that a young-earther has found the deepest hidden truth that few people have found. If they have figured it out while most people have not, that must be evidence that they truly are far ahead of nearly everyone in understanding. That is the appeal of the secret knowledge of Gnosticism. But it is pride that keeps young-earthers trapped. 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. But this means that they aren’t at the head of the class. Perhaps they aren’t even the bottom of the class. They may be miles away from the school building altogether. This is humiliating, even to admit to oneself. But if a young-earther has been vocal, coming out to friends and family as a young-earther, this is even more difficult.

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One difference between most young and flat earth’ers, I suspect most young earth’ers have probably always believed it. They didn’t have to convert to it from a mainstream opinion. But flat earth’ers may well have been exposed to the mainstream understanding first. Leastwise it isn’t as likely something they’d have been steered toward at home or in Sunday school. So converting to flat earth’er thinking probably requires some conspiracy thinking that most who passively accept a young earth as an aspect of faith do not.

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Since the flat-earth thing cropped up within the last few years, I doubt that any of them were raised believing it. Your speculation may have something to it …

@Joel_Duff will be doing something with it in the next day or two. Thanks for your patience!

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Thanks, Jay. I neither agree nor disagree with Christy; I don’t know of any data on how strongly it is held. My experience is with family members, fellow church members, pastors, and reading postings on YEC Facebook groups and sites. Across the board, what strikes me most is not the ignorance but the confidence. Of course that can be totally anecdotal.

The significance of this point is that arguments based on evidence and logic can influence fence-sitters but would be futile on true believers.

Grandstanding can be punctured very easily when it’s identified. “So…you really think that makes you more spiritual than [long list of famous OEC apologists, theologians, preachers]?”

Pride is a tougher nut to crack, because almost by definition a proud person doesn’t know he’s proud (re Jonathan Edwards).

I addressed some of this from a neutral viewpoint in an article “Moral Hazards of the Creation Debate” that was actually well-received by a few YEC’s.

I’m glad you posted the final two paragraphs. It was most amusing. Danny Smallwood is a sharp guy. I wouldn’t be totally shocked to see him switch some day.

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There’s not a lot of data, is there? My experience is similar to yours, but what I think @Christy is pointing to are the folks who don’t let their voices be heard. It’s easy to judge the group by the loudest members. The problem is, how do we know what the silent are thinking?

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Did you mean Danny Faulkner?

Yes, Danny Faulkner

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Yeah, that may be so. But I don’t think it’s always prideful confidence. For a lot of people I know, confidence in YEC is conflated with confidence in the Bible. And confidence in the the Bible (“God said it, I believe it!”) is just more in-group marking.

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I love this phrase. It’s better than tribalism. Where does it come from? It reminds me of chimps grooming one another.

In-group marking is a term from sociolinguistics. Maybe from William Labov.

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Reminds me also of this article about costly signaling. One quote from the article:
“Ritual per- formance reinforces the cognitive and emotional substrates of individual commitment to group ideals and val- ues. Thus, the willingness to perform costly religious behaviors is a reliable signal of beliefs and commitment to the group”

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Christy, I love your approach. It’s refreshing to find someone who doesn’t assume the worst about people (particularlyYEC’s, which I once was) and yes, human motivation is usually complex and multifactorial.

My reading and research in the area has brought me to where I am. I have a second blog post going up tomorrow at RTB, “The Science of Certainty”, that will be relevant to this conversation.

Steve

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Oops, it would help if I had not failed to link the article I quoted. Sorry about that, somehow it disappeared:

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Some of my favorite people are YECs, so I feel compelled to defend their character, even though some of their ideas are certainly indefensible. :slight_smile:

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