I recently had a couple of experiences with my YEC friends that gave me an
even deeper insight into YEC psyche.
last week, I had emailed my friend the link to Jack Chick's infamous online
tract, Big Daddy?, available at
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp.
I thought of it as a lark, something that they would see as amusing( I find
it hilarious: I never fail to get a chuckle out of viewing it).Imagine my
surprise when at church,Sunday, my friend T. came up and thanked me for
sending the link to him. " Our biology textbooks are full of falsehoods" ,
he said in all seriousness, referring to the Haeckel embryo drawings
mentioned in the tract.Now, T. is no dummy, he is an electrical engineer who
works for the NSA. Yet he was prepared to to take the ludicrous scenario in
Big Daddy at face value! I staggered away , not knowing really what to say.
On Monday night, another friend J.dropped by my place and we watched the
"Real Eve" on the Discovery Channel
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/realeve/realeve.html . The show
purports to trace the rise and spread of modern humans through analysis of
their mitochondrial DNA. He found the show a little speculative(as I did).
He then commented that the dating was based on on "uniformitarian
assumptions".I replied that you should rely on uniformitarian assumptions
until there was evidence to the contrary. We got to discussing the age of
the earth. I pointed out that see we can see stars millions of light years
away, the earth must be very old . He said that the speed of light was not a
constant and varied throughout the universe.I said that if he was right,
then Einstein was wrong and that I was betting on Einstein. When the show
mentioned Neanderthals, he said that there was evidence that they were
modern humans who suffered rickets from living in cold caves. His thoughts
on continental drift? The continents could have drifted apart to their
present positions in a little as three years.Start rewriting your textbooks,
Keith...
The show ended and "Walking with Dinosaurs" began. I mentioned that they
discovered feathered dinosaurs: he said that's been disproved. I said,
"Disproved? They've found a bunch of them". We then said goodnight.
Now J. is not some banjo strumming hick from the sticks.He took
undergraduate physics and chemistry and has graduate degrees in mathematics
and computer science. He understands about Schrodinger's cat, for Pete's
sake! He has a much better s science background than I, yet there he was ,
regurgitating stuff that even Answers in Genesis wouldn't stoop to.
I think that Glenn is right. YECs don't just have a different view of
science:they have a different data set than anyone else. I tell you, I saw
Morton's demon http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/feb02.html in
operation last night, sitting on J's shoulder, keeping away any fact that
might contradict his YECism. And I felt sad.
Shuan Rose, Attorney at Law
2632 N Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21218
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