One more thought. Actually a question.
Maybe you could shed some light on this perspective for me because there is something I honestly don’t understand about the thought process of people who hold these ideas (and I know many people who agree with you, I’m just too chicken to ask them.)
These people who share your perspective on science, if they were to be diagnosed with cancer, would trust their doctor’s recommendation for a course of chemo or radiation therapy or a surgical intervention. They fly in planes and ride in cars. They trust emergency warnings from the national weather service. They believe the lunar landing actually happened and is not a hoax. They don’t get too worked up about whether or not their electricity comes from a nuclear plant, as long as the lights come on when they flip the switch. If some of these people had some extra cash, they wouldn’t have a problem investing in petroleum companies. So, in all sorts of different areas, they trust the applications of scientific knowledge. They put their health and their personal safety and their finances on the line when they do so, and it doesn’t seem to be an issue for them.
But all of the sudden, when the application of scientific knowledge is the age of the earth, or radioactive dating, or common ancestry, or fossils, scientists transform from being these trustworthy people who make our lives better with advanced technology to being these incompetent liars who have mere guesses and “concoct” creative stories whose true motivation is to stick it to God, Christians, and the Bible. Now all of the sudden their “knowledge” and “science” and “theories” get dubious quotation marks.
But it is the same biology, chemistry, physics, and geology as they used to develop medical treatments, locate oil, send up space craft, predict hurricanes, and split atoms! It is just a different application. How does something completely trustworthy become completely untrustworthy just because the context changed? How are the same facts and constants and models that are perfectly acceptable in context A, automatically suspect and discounted in context B?