Has anyone here been a young earth creationist? I’m curious to hear the stories of what it was like, and what convinced you to leave YECism. I remember I was one for like 8 hours 
. Then I became an OEC, and now I consider myself an EC
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Yes - but was it … like … eight literal hours? 
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I was until my early 30s. I think I gradually came out of it mainly by asking questions and being willing to consider that I might have been wrong.
One topic that impacted me was vaccines. A lot of anti-vax sentiments use similar tactics and arguments that hardline YECs do – emotional anecdotes, cherry picking without looking at the big picture, starting with a conclusion and then trying to work back up to it, conspiracy thinking, etc. Once I came to accept that vaccines were a good choice for my kids, it opened a door for me to start asking questions about the science around YEC. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it was a start.
Also, about five years ago I went to a dinosaur exhibit that showed a video about how footprints are fossilized, and it hit me that this could never have happened from a global flood of Noah. Since we find layers of fossilized bones interspersed with layers of fossilized footprints and other things that require a calm environment to fossilize, I realized that Noah’s flood did not explain away the fossil record the way I’d been taught that it did. Once I realized how wrong I’d been about one thing, it was less of a challenge for me accept that other YEC ideas were wrong too.
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I was about as zealous YECer as they come. You can find the link to my story here:
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Thanks. I was quite strongly YEC as a child. I read a lot of books that were pro-YEC. It took time, but one of my teachers in high school was a Christian evolutionist. She pointed out to me that I was being unjust to the information–cynical–when I wrote notes in the margins of my tests, trying to refute evolution. When I realized I was not being intellectually honest, I realized I felt relieved to take the evidence on its own merit.
Reading about pseudogenes and mitochondrial genes that were prokaryotic in nature, strongly implying endosymbiosis, really helped convince me. My capstone class in undergrad biology was “Evolutionary Biology,” led by a really gracious researcher who asked to to think carefully. The text really just made so much sense that it was hard to ignore.
My geology teacher was exemplary in patiently explaining things when I kept slowing his class down with questions. He didn’t listen to others who thought I was a drag on the class, and really won me over to his side of looking at the data with a more open mind.
Denis Lamoureux’s lectures really helped make sense of the Bible to me–that it wasn’t even meant to be concordant with science.
there is a book about people who changed their minds about evolution
I have a copy, and have found it very helpful.
thanks.
Randy
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