Many of us here used to be YECs, my old self included, in my youth. God’s very cool creation reveals some irrefutable truths too though, and if they appear to conflict with the Bible, then the interpretation of one or the other or both is in error. A first reading of an English translation of early Genesis can certainly influence a new Christian to think that it is talking about things that are scientific certainty, but are they really, and is that really what is important, as long as we agree on Genesis 1:1
It didn’t take a lot for me to become an OEC, an old-earth creationist, partly because even as a kid I thought that YEC explanations of how there came to be light before the sun was created were stilted, forced and without any solid biblical basis. With some nuclear physics theoretical foundation and practical application behind me after that, I found the variability of radioactive nuclide decay rates that YECism requires for it to be true was a nonstarter, not to mention a variable speed of light.*
I accepted the ID movement’s claims for quite a while, but two things combined to allow me to accept the science of evolution. Learning that evolution could indeed produce complexity was significant. I was under the mistaken impression that it taught that a single mutation in DNA was all it took to produce a morphological change, and I had never heard of neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution – it wasn’t even a thing when I had biology in seventh grade, and it had not been mentioned in the few university level life science courses I’d taken after that. In the same timeframe as I was learning those things, I had a nephrectomy by which it was brought home to me in a dramatic fashion that God is sovereign over the mutations in DNA. When a Christian molecular biologist said to me,
…the most common mutations, transitions, are not really ‘copying errors’, because the keto-enol transition of the base is driving them and the polymerase is working correctly. So if you’d like, that can be seen as providence more than chance.
That was all it took (in God’s providence ; - ).
*An important verse:
This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…
Jeremiah 33:25