YECers are deeply enmeshed in a modern materialistic view, specifically scientific materialism, so much so that they can’t see that they are operating from an a priori principle that for something to be true it has to be 100% scientifically and historically true. YECism is thus a reaction against having to step outside of the worldview they picked up starting before they could even read.
It’s not easy to cut loose from the worldview one was born with. When in a seminar on Colossians I mentioned in a paper I wrote that I had to remind myself about every other sentence I wrote just what the worldviews relevant to Colossians were, the professor put a marginal note that any scholar worth his salt had to do the same, it’s just that when you do a master’s degree and then PhD studying a particular worldview sometimes you only have to remind yourself once every paragraph.
So by recognizing the need to step away from the “modern materialistic view” you’re in good company; there are in fact people who got PhDs in ancient Hebrew and ancient Israelite history who never actually made that disconnection.
That’s pretty profound, and it’s another step that very few manage. It makes me think of others in the seminar on Colossians who managed to get a decent grasp of the gnosticism Paul was responding to but never escaped from seeing Paul’s response from within a modern materialistic worldview instead of managing to step into Paul’s shoes and his cultural mindset.
This is something I mentioned one day in a discussion of whether being able to connect knowledge modules to our brains via embedded computer chips would be a good idea: I said I didn’t know if it was overall good, but that I would dearly love to be able to hook up modules so filled with ancient material that I could “step over” and see the world from within the worldview of ancient Egypt or Persia or Second-Temple Judaism. The tragedy there was that several people couldn’t grasp that there is such a thing as a different worldview, so they didn’t see the point.
I remember reaching that verse in a New Testament readings course (Greek text only, of course) and the professor asking, “Was that the case always, or just after the Incarnation?” Too many students got a blank look, but the “Aha!” and “Whoa!” reactions on a bunch of faces told me I wasn’t alone in undergoing a bit if a shift in understanding.
If God cannot change, then the above declaration was true the moment God mused, “Let’s make some people in our image” – because if the Incarnation affected human nature, it affected it all the way back to the beginning.
[Totally off-topic, this is a point dispensationalists tend to totally miss, that ultimately there has only ever been one Covenant between God and man, and that is the one found in the God-Man Jesus; everything else is footnotes.]