Lucy Stulz
Well-Known Member
What's wrong with calling out the beliefs of young earth creationists? If someone makes a claim about something what are you supposed to do?
Well the only thing I can figure is that they probably knew I was hoping to hear some YEC's proudly show off what I think I already suspected which is that almost none (certainly on CF) who work to have a go at "geology" have, themselves, never darkened the door of a geology class.
And they were probably right. I would like to have had a real YEC step up and say "Yeah I took intro geology and historical geology etc and I thought the whole thing was a crock" at which point it would have been fun to see how such a simple concept as one is taught in the early years of a geology major would be so easy to dismiss. Or it could have turned ugly.
As it was when Juvenissun stepped up with his modified YEC stance I had no real problem with his position but I felt it was arbitrary and an attempt to not accept the standard...kind of a "phased-in" version of YEC.
I jumped on Juvenissun not because of his YEC-lite position so much as his maddening refusal to treat everyone like a grown up. It looked like the rest of us knew more about the topic than he did but he still insisted on acting as if he was some sort of "sensai" dripping out wisdom for our meager minds.
OR, perhaps he really did know his stuff (he has occasionally been on track for these topics but just not able to discuss it like a professional geologist), and he just opted to play it as annoying as possible.
There are real YEC's out there who have had geology classes. They seem to form the small hard-core of the "YEC Science" community and with few exceptions their science is usually easily debunked or shown to be flawed at the most basic and fundamental level. But they still come to the table with at least something to offer other than merely parrotting someone else's writings without any real comprehension.
Take for instance the Steve Austin stuff about the Mt. St. Helens K-Ar dating. The scary thing is this guy did one of the most basic bad science forms imaginable: he relied on a lab who had explicitly given the detection limits on their K-Ar system and then he took the data they provided which was below det lim and drew conclusions about the failure of the science in general!
It would be like someone saying pH meters were LIES and unplugging the pH probe from the unit and dipping it in a solution and pointing to the blank screen of the read-out and saying "Seeeee! Seeee!"
That doesn't even count the second worst thing he apparently did which was not to take account sufficiently of xenoliths !!!!
Yikes!
And the YEC crowd just gobbles this up. But all they would need is basic undergraduate science classes to understand these howlers and not pass them along as good science.
So my agenda, bad as it was, was eliminated in service to "open minded" "truth".
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