I’ve seem to be the opposite where I find myself less and less wandering into there! Probably 10-11 years ago I was a frequent reader of exclusively YEC material. I basically filtered everything through that lens, basically afraid to learn anything outside of its constructs. When learning about a new topic, I would carefully come back and see ‘what does AiG or CMI or ICR’ have to say about this. And then through that filter, I successfully had my viewpoint never challenged.
The thing that broke the camel’s back for me… was when I actually went to research a topic on my own (in my case it was cosmology). I slowly began realizing that scientists actually do know what they’re talking about and models like the big bang model are on really solid ground.
Then, I became disillusioned and shocked at my previous arrogance. I was disillusioned that the articles never actually taught me why or how it is that scientists came to various conclusions… and when they reported or articles they often just cherry picked a phrase to cast doubt, but they would leave off the explanation oftentimes literally right after the statement in an academic paper. And then I was really humbled at the arrogance that came from me reading this material exclusively. I had superpowers… where I was able to read any scientific paper and know better on any topic than the actual authors. This is pretty shocking to think about in retrospect as I’ve written many scientific papers and a random person couldn’t just read my paper and have the slightest clue about correcting my conclusions. That would be a joke and even then, they would have to set up many experiments to prove me wrong and publish their own paper.
So today, I don’t really care what they have to say about much of anything beyond just loosely keeping tabs on the most recent ideas to share in some of my classes. It’s better for my blood pressure levels anyways.