Yes, that’s something that I’ve been thinking myself.
Over the years, the falsehood of YECism has become more and more obvious. My own YEC days were back in the late 80s and early 90s. Back then it was possible for YECs to sustain a narrative that sounded plausible even to university students. The Internet was in its infancy, the only people who used it were computer scientists and physicists, and even then they only ever did so in the lab. Unless you had access to a university library and a lot of time on your hands, you couldn’t easily fact-check their claims. They could also plausibly claim that they only produced flaky results with tiny samples and huge error bars because they were underfunded compared to “evolutionists.”
Nowadays, we have Google, Wikipedia, and mobile phones, allowing anyone to fact-check YEC claims in real time, as they hear them. We have photos from the Hubble Space Telescope showing galaxy collisions drawn out over hundreds of millions of years. We have open source software allowing us to download sequenced genomes off the Internet and do our own comparisons between human and chimp DNA. The $1.25 million RATE project and the $100 million Ark Encounter mean that they can no longer credibly blame flaky results on underfunding. Additionally, rebuttals to YEC claims are getting more and more evangelical-friendly. The days are over when it was all mockery and derision mixed in with attacks on Christianity in general on sites such as Talk Origins, No Answers in Genesis, Sensuous Curmudgeon and RationalWiki. More and more it’s Christians – and increasingly conservative Christians at that – who are taking the lead in addressing YEC claims. And when you get people such as Pat Robertson saying that you have to be “deaf, dumb and blind” to think that the earth is six thousand years old, or Matt Walsh – who is somewhere between Fox News and Breitbart on the political spectrum – seeing their nonsense for what it really is, their ability to sustain a rational argument really is in free fall.
The result is that they’re having to turn more and more to bullying and intimidation to sustain their position. Back in my YEC days, we maybe viewed OECs or theistic evolutionists as not quite as on-fire-for-God as we were (I must admit that I did get a bit offended when I ended up in a Bible study group which was led by a theistic evolutionist geology student and not me), but nobody questioned their faith or even hinted that they weren’t Christians. By contrast, nowadays many YECs seem to be in a state of all-out war, openly declaring OEC, EC, TE to be heresy, not Christianity, or even atheism in the way that Answers in Genesis does. A few years back, a friend of mine, who is a pastor in South Africa, wrote a blog post saying that anyone who didn’t believe that Noah had dinosaurs on board the Ark was a “faithless so-called Christian.” (Incidentally, it was that blog post that prompted me to start speaking out in the creation and evolution debate, because it made me realise that things were starting to get out of hand. My first post here on the BioLogos forum was a couple of months later.) But the latest salvo from Calvin Smith seems to have upped the stakes even further. He is calling for YECs to break off fellowship from anyone and everyone who associates themselves with BioLogos in any way, shape or form. It’s getting more and more cultish and more and more sinister, and if truth be told it even has a distinctly Orwellian feel to it. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”