Former YEC's, what made you change your mind?

Paraleptopecten · May 13, 2024, 10:07pm

It had gotten started by the latest 1600s, and basically everyone in geology was convinced by c. 1775.

Although some young earthers (notably George McCready Price) have slandered William Smith as making up an old earth and inventing evidence in favor of it, the reality is that Smith’s combination of being self-taught outside the academic mainstream of geology and his single-minded focus on recognizing layers rather than wondering how they formed meant that he was actually a young-earther while doing much of his work. Eventually a couple of pastors who were friends of his explained how the evidence pointed to an old earth. William Townsend, one of those two pastors, first published a significant chunk of Smith’s data on the pattern of fossils marking different layers in his book The Character of Moses Established for Veracity as an Historian, Recording Events From the Creating to the Deluge (2 vols., 1813-1815). If you can’t figure out from the title of that book that Smith was not challenging prevailing theological views on the age of the earth, you can make a lot of money writing purported history books like The Map that Changed the World or Common-Sense Geology - Simon Winchester’s claims about the history are not remarkably more reliable than Price’s, just changing who is supposedly a hero or villain.

Lyell did not propose an old earth; the fact that geology points to an old earth was established by the mid-1770’s, over two decades before Lyell was born, and suspected over a century before his birth. Lyell’s theology was not particularly sound; like most young-earth and ID claims, his approach was deistic, claiming that God is not involved in things that happen according to scientific laws.