Inspiring Philosophy vs AiG Debate : Is evolution compatible with Genesis?

I think you are on the right track, as there is a lot that motivates us to hold our positions other than facts and truth. You mentioned your youth group, pastor, mentors, maybe parents and friends who are important in your life and your faith beliefs. They are a huge influence as when confronted with something that might alienate them or exclude you from their group, we are going to go with our tribe the vast majority of the time, no matter how true it is or how wrong our tribe is. The few that buck the trend suffer pain and rejection, and while some, like Martin Luther become iconic figures, a lot like John Brown wind up dead, literally or figuratively. Some like Martin Luther King wind up both iconic and dead. (Probably some better examples, but that is what popped to mind.).
So, I do think AIG does shoulder the blame for much of the division, the pain of individuals, the schism in the American church and elsewhere over this issue for its part in promoting the conflict narrative. Your point that individuals are ultimately responsible is true as well, but institutions and communities are also held responsible by God for their actions.

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The Flat Earth community is fascinating to watch, and I think there are a lot of parallels with the YEC movement. In the end, it is much more about human psychology than it is about either theology or science.

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It goes back much further than AiG to the Puritans.

I did not even bother to listen to it. I’ve watched , read and listed to thousands of hours of content by YEC over the last 15 years starting off at accepting bits of it like ID and being semi critical of scientific work and by honestly looking at it and looking at countering arguments by those that are “progressive Christians” and real science I have just gotten to the point that I already know YEC is not going to bring up something shocking.

As soon as I read the OPs statement about someone having a hard time debating a YECist with a this and that degree in instantly started thinking…… no it’s not…. 9th grade science undermines the entire pseudoscientific approach to data by YECist. Im now fully convinced that in order for someone to have degrees in science like paleontology and disagreeing with evolution are either liars or lucky and very dumb.

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Hi Adrian,
I had seen your reply a few days ago and then forgot about it, got lost in the flow.
I’m not a scientist, but have personally known many and relied on many throughout my life. My science learning was in high school and undergrad decades ago, and while, I think it was better than that of many non-scientists I know, it doesn’t even count as Kindergarten level compared to the expertise of people who make the pursuit of their particular, ever-narrowing area of research. And all that time away, I have been forgetting much of what I knew.

We live at a time, when the is an in-credible level of distrust of expertise. My husband is a PhD’d economist and expert in our state’s tax structure but has been schooled by people who aren’t, telling him how to make it all work better and get better results. I’m a librarian and am regularly schooled by devotes of drastically skewed news sources on how no one in the media tells the truth and no one can be trusted. Finding information and evaluating it is my bread and butter. Our expertise counts for nothing in the eyes of people who don’t know what they don’t know.

I live surrounded with people who follow every kind of pseudoscience, and while I find it frustrating, no one is telling me I am a compromised Christian (apostate/carnal) because I’m not into supplements, crystals, homeopathy, all-natural “cures,” kombucha brewing, Old Testament based diets or the like. Not being a scientist myself, I have a hard time encouraging people to look for better sources of information than “their guy” because they have already built a well reinforced paradigm that I don’t have the time or energy to try to dismantle. And obviously, I don’t know as much as “their guy” who has the equivalent of 3 PhDs in alchemy.

I’ve been surrounded by young earthers most of my life, back when some folks thought it was important, but could cut slack for those of us who were deluded by our science teachers. Back when there was no blaring mouthpiece insisting that YEC is a component of the Gospel. Nor using it as a major form of apologetics.

Pators, who are relying on theological claims to say things about science are doing all kinds of mischief. And I say that about pastors I love and have great concern for. But even more I am concerned about the people in their congregations who are sucked into some form of belief that relies on a faulty, disprovable apologetic. They are presented with a dilemma. Distrust reality to keep “faith.” Or give up a faith based in fiction. While I don’t believe the dilemma really exists, most will. At least that’s what I’ve seen.

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Which reminds me of a question that occurred to me recently.
A Math Question Involving Two Equilateral Triangles

Some YEC claims are insanely complex (e.g. Jeanson’s Traced or the RATE project’s claims about helium diffusion in zircons), but they can be dealt with by applying the FizzBuzz Principle:

If a scientific or pseudoscientific claim contains serious, deal-breaking errors that are well within your competence to fact-check, then it is pretty safe to assume that their more esoteric claims that are beyond you will not be any better.

Why FizzBuzz? It comes from a question that often gets put to candidates at a very early stage in interviews for computer programming jobs.

Print out the numbers from 1 to 100. But for every number divisible by three, print “Fizz”. For every number divisible by five, print “Buzz”. If a number is divisible by both three and five, print “FizzBuzz”.

The point of this test is that it should be something extremely simple that every candidate should be able to answer cold. You ask them to do it right at the start of the initial phone screen, and if they can’t manage it, you can then short-circuit the process and avoid wasting time calling them for an on-site interview.

Similarly with young earth claims. If they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of even the most elementary basics of how error bars work – stuff that gets taught to high school students – why should we consider them credible when they try to tackle complex postgraduate-level subjects such as helium diffusion in zircons or genetic entropy?

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People cannot handle faith, to paraphrase Colonel Jessup.

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Faunal succession, and the deposits it is seen in are particularly spectacular in contradicting flood geology models. (I study Neogene, Quaternary, and Recent mollusks, so I have seen a decent amount of such things). I still have yet to see any halfway-plausible explanation of coastal marine deposits from a YEC view.

How does one get 10 different patchy layers, each with index fossils, some of the unconsolidated ones with mud that takes days to settle out of still water (I should know, we’ve sieved over a ton of the material), the consolidated ones experiencing groundwater percolating through them for a while (fastest way to make limestone) before the next layer comes in, a record of dozens of individual transgression/regression pulses with associated organisms ranging from freshwater to mid-shelf (50-80 m depth of ocean), and a column of sedimentary deposits 3 kilometers thick out of one flood?

And how can one possibly deal with global planktonic foraminifera correlations in that scenario?

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Have you seen this? It is not about the radiometric dating of artifacts, but extinct radiometric nuclides:

“Radioactive Atoms — Evidence about the Age of the Earth” Ken Wolgemuth

And I love this, speaking of geology (it has one of my favorite words, providential, in it, twice):

I’m not a geologist myself and I’m no expert on the nuances and complexities of radiometric dating, but I was taught the basics as part of my physics degree, and I have read round the subject quite a bit since. I find it a really good example of where the FizzBuzz principle can be applied to good effect. Knowledgeable YECs may be able to talk the hind legs off a donkey about the technical minutiae of radiometric dating, and they may be able to give you a gish gallop of examples, but even so I still find that their arguments fall apart when I challenge them on the most fundamental basics of how measurement works – what error bars are, how they are determined, what they do or do not justify, and so on and so forth. They just don’t seem to get the fact that unreliability has to be quantified, that there is a difference between “doesn’t always work” and “never works,” and that occasional errors of a few percent do not justify claims that the entire body of data could be consistently out by six orders of magnitude. These are very simple, elementary facts that everyone should have been taught by the time they finish high school.

And don’t get me started on the RATE project and its 22,400°C of accelerated nuclear decay. That idea blows every last shred of credibility that they may have had right out of the water. It’s complete science fiction. Total patent nonsense.

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There’s a lot to sort through, isn’t there? And a lot preventing people from even noticing the need for the sorting. Tie it all up with a nice AIG straight-jacket, and don’t expect change to happen quickly, if at all.
Meta-faith, I guess.
But Hambone has nothing to offer but empty promises and a PAC (I’m assuming) to help support the candidate one believes will be favorable to one’s pet Culture War front.
All the while much of the church has nothing to show for their meta-faith or their faith but disasterous political wins and, of course, pseudoscience.

Anyone would think that life is Kafkaesque!

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This

…think that life

or this

…think that life

?

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For me, it is the correlation of data that seems unrelated at first glance, which in this case would be a combination of fossils and radiometric dating.

Even if we don’t immediately use isotope ratios in rocks to determine their age we still have a correlation between fossil species and the isotope content of the rocks above and below them. How does YEC explain that? For example, you will not find non-avian dinosaurs above zircons with a certain ratio of U and Pb, or above other minerals with a specific ratio of K/Ar. Why do we see that? Standard geology has a very, very cohesive answer to this problem, but YEC just doesn’t.

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Ironically, the approach of Bishop Ussher and the like actually led to old earth understanding - modern YEC originated in the 1800’s and is not consistent with historical positions such as that of the Puritans.

Sorry, I wasn’t thinking of YEC, but schism. The wild west started in Plymouth.

hehe.

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Nah. It just resettled in Plymouth.

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