Space For Doubt

*This post is in response to a video my wife was sent from a YEC.*

Young Earth Creationism (YEC). The pinnacle of anti-science.

I’ve seen PhD holding “scientists” (YEC apologists) defend this idea by seemingly forgetting everything they learned to get that PhD. They’ve written books. They’ve created traveling science shows to promote their ideas to conservative churches. (The only places who will host them)

Their mission isn’t to go out and prove that YEC is correct by nature of the evidence for YEC, an understandably hard task considering there is none. Instead, it’s an attempt to poke holes in the science of an old earth accepted by 99.99% of scientists the world over.

YEC apologists comb through the evidence of an old earth in search of a nugget that, to them, looks a bit flimsy. Then they’ll poke at it and attempt to undermine it.

When they believe they have cast enough doubt on that particular thing, they will then declare victory. They conclude that due to the doubt on that one small thing, that YEC must therefore not only be plausible, not only probable, but the only conclusion.

I guess we’re all just supposed to ignore the fact that the other 99% of old-earth evidence is rock solid. (pun intended)

That’s YEC apologetics in a nutshell.

In this post, I am going to dismantle YEC with just two examples. You will see the strained logic used in attempts to keep this theory viable. You will see how obviously silly it appears when you look at some unique graphs.

For YEC to overcome the whole “science shows the earth is really old” thing, there are two main pathways available.  

Path 1: The earth, despite only being “6,000 years old”, was created with built-in age making it appear to us as though it was billions of years old. The science therefore is “allowed” to be correct.

Path 2: The science beyond 6,000 years is all wrong. The earth does not have built-in age, and is only ~6,000 years old.

These are mutually exclusive ideas to hold, however every YEC I’ve talked to has promoted both. If God created the earth with built-in age, then the science showing this age must be correct right? How else would we determine this “built-in age” if not by science? That’s the whole point of path 1….to make room for the science to be correct. It’s an attempt to make YEC more palatable in the face of modern information.

Let’s look at what each of these paths looks like with two examples. First though, let’s see the video that spawned this post. The embed feature isn’t working for some reason, but I’ll share a screenshot and a link. (source)

At first watch, this might seem like built-in age is a convincing argument. Let’s unpack it though. Does it hold up?

Example 1: Dinosaurs 

This is one of my favorite topics to discuss. Dinosaurs are awesome! They also date to be extremely old, per the same science used to date the earth itself. Let’s see how path 1 and 2 play out with the dinosaurs. 

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Path 1: The earth was created with built-in age. 

Under path 1, a YEC has three sub-choices available to them to explain these creatures and their extremely old dating by science.

A.) The fossils are a forged insertion by God to test our faith. 

In this position, God never actually made dinosaurs “alive”. The bones were a plant to test our faith in the Bible’s accuracy. (Yes I’ve actually heard this point argued!) The science is correct because God built-in the age to those fossils too.

Here’s the deal though, there are more things than just dinosaurs that are old. There are trees and grass. Bugs the size of your head. Small mammals. Reptiles. Fungus. Sea creatures. All of the other things that lived alongside dinosaurs would be just as old. 

How would a YEC explain all the life that went along with the dinosaurs? Is that all fake evidence too? Is God only responsible for fake-dating the earth and dinosaur bones, but all other life was fake-dated by “bad” science?

What kind of God does that? Is that how you see God? Does that make sense to you? A God that deceives your eyes with what you witness in His first book (creation), just to test your belief that the words on the pages of a human created book are literally accurate?

Keep in mind that this built-in age isn’t uniform. God must have progressively dated all of this fake life to appear to us as though it occurred over a 500-million-year time span. That’s weird right? 

What’s interesting here is SDAs cannot take this route. It’s not an option, as Ellen White has chimed in the matter, definitively stating that these were real living creatures in the antediluvian world. (For SDAs, see options B & C below)

B.) They are actually young, and were alive, but were divinely dated to appear old.

This position holds that the dinosaurs were alive sometime in the last 6,000 years, however they were artificially dated (and buried) by God during the flood to appear as old as they do. (I’ve heard this one too!) I guess this would again be explained as a faith test?

YECs run into trouble here because none of the human remains date to be anywhere near this old. Remember the humans supposedly lived alongside the dinosaurs. Humans and dinosaurs are also never found within the same geologic strata. They are separated by a wide margin, as you would expect if there was a huge disparity between the dates they lived. (There are some horribly tortured arguments to try and make this “work” but they all fall apart immediately.) 

The question remains, why would God do this? Why would God artificially date just the dinosaurs and not the humans that “lived” with them? Why would God deceptively bury the dinosaurs during the flood to appear as though they never lived alongside humans?

Does this ring true to any modicum of common sense?

C.) The science in this case is wrong. 

Ignore the fact that the science dating the earth is correct. That same science when applied to dinosaurs is wrong and the dinosaurs did in fact live just a few thousand years ago. All the plants, insects, and other animals are also incorrectly dated. 

This is a bit strange. You accept that God built-in age to the earth, and thus trust the science, but cannot trust the same science when it comes to dating the dinosaurs (or plants/insects/sea creatures/mammals/etc).

Here again, the science is “wrong” but varying degrees of wrong. We have everything progressively more “wrong” all the way back to when life first started.

What kind of God does that? For what purpose?

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Path 2: The science is all wrong

This path just has one branch; the dinosaurs lived within the last 6,000 years or so, and the earth and all life is incorrectly dated by modern science.  

This is the most consistent….kind of.

The problem here is that the same YECs that decry the scientific dating methods, also love the scientific dating methods when it serves their purposes. They can’t just throw out all science, as they like to use it when it’s convenient.

How so? Well, it’s the Carbon-14 dating that trips them up.

C-14 dating is used to date things back to around 50,000 years ago. Now that age doesn’t align with the Bible, so anything past 6,000 years is immediately rejected. However, for things that date younger than 6,000 years? That’s where it gets tricky for them. 

YECs like it when C-14 dating confirms places or events in the Bible

• A C-14 dated piece of pottery with an inscription proving Canaan occupation by a tribe of Israel in the time the Bible says? All good my friend. That science is awesome! 
• Dating a manuscript that confirms the book of Isaiah has undergone very little modification since this earliest copy we have? We love that science too!

What about some other more recent C-14 dating events? Do we see as much excitement about those?

• A human settlement existing uninterrupted back to 7,000 B.C.E.?
  • Is the science “wrong” up until a little after the flood, when it then is allowed to be “right“?
• Archaeological findings showing languages existing well before the Babel story?
  • How is the science here wrong, but in the above examples, it’s right?
• Egypt having a thriving civilization during the “global flood”? 
  • This one is particularly tricky as we can date this just by counting records. We don’t even need C-14 for that! Darn that simple math getting in the way of our dogma!
• Jericho being destroyed well before any theoretical Joshua comes on the scene?
  • “Thanks, we hate it!” – YEC apologists

No dice. All that gets rejected as wrong somehow.

When the exact same science invalidates the literal accuracy of the Bible, it is rejected. It’s the same methodologies but YECs just don’t like that science.

I want to note here, that old-earth proponents don’t care if C-14 proves Biblical accuracy. I promise you an atheist scientist couldn’t possibly care any less that C-14 dated our earliest copy of Isaiah to when it does.

An atheist scientist is busy doing real science, and I guarantee they don’t have time to try and creatively disprove Bible-affirming scientific discoveries. There’s no cabal of like-minded conspiratorial Bible-disproving secret agent scientists bent on undermining the Bible. (Yes…this is sadly also a belief I’ve encountered)

Example 2: Woolly Mammoth 

I love this example because it requires a complete denial of reality to reason away.  

The woolly mammoth lived from 300,000 years ago, to about 4,000 years ago. This age range is what makes it interesting.

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Path 1: The built-in age position

Let’s say you take path 1 with the mammoth. God built-in its age like He did with the earth.

Remember Carbon-14 dating can only go back to around 50,000 years, so we actually use a different radiometric isotope to date the woolly mammoth from 300,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago. We’re not arguing anything with C-14 yet. For now, this position holds that the science dating a 200,000-year-old mammoth is correct. God built-in the age.

Now let’s say we have a 20,000-year-old woolly mammoth. Here we’d switch to C-14 dating. It’s more accurate than the other isotopes for this age range, and scientists will always use whatever the most accurate method is. This too is viewed as correct. God built-in the age.

Let’s go forward to a mammoth that is only 5,900 years old. But wait…the ones that lived after 6,000 years ago should be ok as-is right? What do you do? It seems like they’d have to say that God stopped artificially adding age to the wooly mammoth around 6,000 years ago. That’s when God made them for real and after that we’re good to go. (Well…not really, as you’ll soon see.)

Uh oh. Here’s that same issue again. Why is it that if God did add age to the mammoth, that He did so progressively? He dated the mammoth’s history as progressively older and older until the first few at ~300,000 years old. Then I guess He must’ve just said “yep. That’s far enough back. That’ll really throw those humans off!” 

What purpose does this serve? Does this seem like something God would do?

YECs in path 1 would say all mammoths date right so far, and affirm the science as valid up to this point.

For a little background, the woolly mammoth at this time period existed solely on a small isolated island in Arctic Ocean near Russia. Nowhere else in the world were there living mammoths. 

Here’s the next wrench in the gears. Those mammoths living on that small island dating to during/immediately after the flood would be “wrong“* under path 1, despite all the previous science being right.

*Due to the whole “water killing everything” ordeal, all but two mammoths should be dead. We shouldn’t have a nice population existing without a big break in numbers for a time as they repopulate (which would take a while, with them being very large mammals).

This is before considering how they managed to travel to the ark and back again. They swam across the ocean, to then travel about 5,000 miles on foot to get on the ark (this would take about a year). Then they traveled the 5,000 miles back (another year), swam back across the ocean (again), and settled back on that same small island again. (And nowhere else in the world)

At some point after the flood and prior to the last mammoth’s death, the science is allowed to be “correct” again. The population has been replenished from the two ark survivors. There’s about 400 years of additional mammoth life that follows after the flood until the mammoths go extinct. 

Here we have science being right, then wrong, then right again. It’s all the same science though.

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Path 2: All the science showing ages past 6,000 years is wrong

With path 2, God didn’t add any age to anything. Dates derived from Isotopes used for dating 300,000 to 50,000 years ago, are all wrong. The C-14 dating methods are also wrong until ~6,000 years ago, when they magically become right.  

From ~6,000 years ago until the flood (~4,400 years ago), there’s no issues. The science is right. The woolly mammoth is allowed to exist unbothered by modern fundamentalist protest.   

The C-14 dating is again somehow wrong in that intra/post flood decade or two. Afterall, how can a population exist undisturbed by a global flood? (same ark issues)

Finally, we again have a period of 400 years where the science is right again before the mammoths go extinct. 

The science is wrong, then right, then wrong, then right.

Think about how crazy this is. You’d have a relative committed to a home if they acted like this with anything else. This is cuckoo for cocoa puffs. 

Conclusion

These are just two examples. There are literally thousands more examples of things that become problematic with YEC. We could talk about plants. We could talk about some fungus issues. We could talk about geological oddities like the earth’s iridium layer or crystallized minerals. 

Just for fun, let’s see how Carbon-14 dating science is viewed by the average YEC believer with respect to a wide range of events.

Most YECs have not thought through any of this. They will attempt to wave it all away as “God just did it that way” but to what end? All of these tortured arguments are just to make the words on the pages of our Bibles literally and historically accurate. This is a position that the authors, later redactors/revisors, and many early Christians were never concerned with taking.

Genesis is largely fictional mythology that’s been turned into historicized myth. A YEC will run into immediate and unending problems in pursuit of forcing alignment of science and myth. It’s like trying to make sounds match up with colors. YEC apologists live in anxiety, never knowing when and where the next conflict to their dogmatic belief will crop up. 

The truth (an old earth and an old creation) takes no effort to make “work.” It just works…because it’s the truth. Truth is simple. Truth is efficient and logical. We don’t have to invent all kinds of crazy ideas to bend it into submission. We don’t have to perform next-level mental gymnastics to maintain it. It just is as it appears to be. Uncompromising. Unbiased. Unchangeable. And for almost everyone…Undeniable.

I have no interest in trying to make science align with myth. That’s not a pre-requisite to faith. Not now. Not ever. If we let our faith dictate history, we betray both.

Peace