My concern is not really that YECs don’t have a perfect grasp of reality; kind of wish I did. And I avoid discussions about it in person. I am too impatient and flappable.
My real concern is the use of YEC as an apologetic. That I will state, if it seems the right time and place. I won’t argue it, though. I will only express my concern that a faith that is based on YEC is apt to be undermined by a real science education. Christians should be engaged in real academics, rather than hiding from them, worrying about losing our faith by being exposed to “The World.” But we shouldn’t be going into them with the idea that we can scientifically prove our faith, either.
I’ve been wanting to come back to something RichardG said in another thread that I think is related to this and many many other discussions here:
In my experience, almost none of the christians I sit in the pew with are scientists, and the vast majority of them are YECs of some sort or another. I assume most are, because they don’t see another possibility for retaining faith, or they simply have never really thought too much about it. The questions the hard sciences ask seem irrelevant to them in the day to day.
Richard makes a really important point in the posts that I quoted from. For some people tearing down their YECism is the same thing as tearing down their faith, because it had been used as a foundation.
All the AIG, ICR, etc damage aside, the way we engage with people who are hanging on to YEC (or ID or anything else) matters. Faith is fragile1, and there are more ways to destroy it than to strengthen it, I’m afraid.
As frustrating as it is to let the (YEC) matter lie, we must prioritize people’s faith over our “rightness.” Maybe we can work toward common ground, but that must always take place with the goal of building up real faith at the same time.
None of us has the whole perspective and has it all right.
1 Penner, Myron. The End of Apologetics, (pg. 79):
We have lost, as it were, the naivete-or immediacy or directness-of belief, in God due to a massive shift in the overall context in which we seek to interpret our lives and understand the world. As a result, there is a fragility that characterizes faith today. Having faith, believing for oneself, must be understood not only in reference to our being able to establish the reasonableness of belief but also in terms of how it fits with our lived experience and the sense we make of the world.