I got here via a link on the Age of Rocks blog, sometime in the summer of 2015. I was looking for resources that would help me to address the subject from a perspective that was both (a) honest and informed, and (b) unashamedly Christian.
I had started researching the subject because I had seen that the young earth lobby was getting out of hand. I had generally avoided the debate since giving up on YECism when I was at university, viewing it as the kind of foolish controversy that Paul tells us to avoid in Titus 3:9. But it had increasingly come to my attention that young earth teachings were having a real, harmful effect on people (including my own nephews, who were questioning their faith on account of it) while at the same time I’d noticed the increased militancy with which they were being promoted by organisations such as Answers in Genesis, and it had really, really shocked me. When one of my friends, who I’d have expected to know better, wrote a blog post denouncing anyone who didn’t acknowledge that Noah had dinosaurs on board the Ark as “faithless so-called Christians,” I realised I couldn’t remain silent any more.
The problem was that when I first started researching the subject, the rebuttals to YECism that I was aware of all approached it from what seemed to me to be a distinctly atheistic perspective. Sites such as RationalWiki, Talk Origins, No Answers in Genesis, Panda’s Thumb and Sensuous Curmudgeon sometimes seemed to be more interested in berating YECs for “introducing religious presuppositions into science” and squabbling over the First Amendment than in demanding that they get their facts straight; they often went beyond just critiquing YECism and attacked Christianity in general; and they sometimes degenerated into mocking and derisory tones that I found quite off-putting. To encounter organisations such as Reasons to Believe, BioLogos and the American Scientific Affiliation who shared my concerns and actually provided resources that addressed them firmly but respectfully, while remaining steadfastly Christian, was like a breath of fresh air.
That you don’t have to compromise the Bible or become a Progressive Christian if that’s not your thing, let alone abandon your faith altogether, in order to take evolution seriously as the rock-solid, well established, indisputable fact that it is.
Not recent, but the one clear winner by a country mile: when @Jay313 turned Danny Faulkner’s rebuttal of flat earthism into a rebuttal of young earthism by doing a simple find and replace for just five words.
Incidentally, has Answers in Genesis ever responded to that one?