Glenn Morton wrote:
"Having jumped back onto the list today, I am jumping into the middle of this, but that won't stop me. As a former young-earth creationist of some infamy, I can tell you why I didn't listen. I placed my interpretation of the Bible as the utmost metaphysical truth. By doing that, all contradictory data simply had to be wrong. Thus when faced with clear evidence and logic that my viewpoint was wrong, I did the only reasonable thing--I ignored the data or assumed that there was some way to discount and ignore it. There was also an emotional reason not to listen to contradictory arguments. They challenged my world view and made me extremely uncomfortable. Since I could not doubt my ultimate metaphysical truth--the YEC paradigm without thinking I would become an atheist which I didn't want to do--I would flee from the truth."
No, you were not faced with clear evidence, you were faced with interpretations of data from within the religious philosophy of Naturalism. You had not been educated in the pervasiveness of the underlying assumptions within which all standard geologic interpretations are being done. You had not been shown the religious nature of Naturalism and its corollaries of Abiogenesis and Actualism (i.e. non-uniform Uniformitarianism) within which geologic science usually functions. You had been taught the falsehood that Science stands alone without philosophical assumptions.
In geology, interpretation of sedimentary rock according to the actualistic assumption that there are ONLY 3 allowable depositional environments -- marine, non-marine and transitional -- automatically precludes interpretation within a global flood catastrophe environment. Thus all those "facts" of geology demand that there could not be a global flood catastrophe.
Creationists START with the assumptions that God's natural laws are not violated and that there was a global catastrophic event as told us by God. Within these assumptions, Creationary geological science studies and interprets nature's facts.
Yes, the Bible is the utmost metaphysical truth because we know we can trust the God of the Bible to tell us the truth. Naturalism is a metaphysical belief based on blind faith in the rationality of human imagination. Abiogensis and Actualism must be true because according to Naturalism, nature -- matter, energy, etc. -- is all there is. There is no God. There is no Creator. There is no one but us to tell us about the past.
We have the choice to believe God and the Bible and interpret nature within it's assumptions, or we can choose to believe in Naturalism and interpret nature within it's assumptions. You were not fleeing from the "Truth," you were fleeing from false religious teachings.
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