YEC and rigourous science

[laptoppop]

One complaint heard about Young Earth Creationism is the limited amount of deep scientific research. While ICR.org, creationism.org, answersingenesis.org, etc. are addressing this over time to some extent, I contend that it is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

1) There are just plain fewer creationist scientists than evolutionary ones -- some crazy number, maybe 1000:1 or more. Think of all the various biology departments -- professors wanting to publish. Many professors only publish a handful of papers in their career, but there are so many professors that research can go on assuming the basic tenets of evolution and building upon that (flawed) framework. You end up with tons and tons of detail work, while the elephant in the living room (such as how did we end up with such huge geologic deposits all over the globe unless there was a global flood???) goes unchallenged.

2) The prime purpose of the Christians involved in creationist research is typically evangelism, with scientific investigation being secondary. We are called to preach the gospel, not YEC. YEC is a fascinating topic, related to many things, but it is secondary to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

3) "Popular" science -- articles, books, etc., written to communicate with the general public, will reach many times more people than scholarly research. If you only have so much time, you need to choose wisely what to pursue.

 

[MatthewDiscipleofGod]

I know you mention ICR but they have done a lot of research which goes unnotice. Two guys I know at church follow ICR very closely and I plan on borrowing some of the materials to get caught up to speed since I know almost everything about AIG but not nearly as much on the ICR side of things. The cool things is one of the guys has a degree in geology so he can give unique insight. That all being said I agree that making disciples of all nations should be #1 on every Christian's list of things to do. That is why I like to remind Christian evolutionists that they better be even more passionate about witnessing to the lost then they are about evolution. Of course the same goes to YECs.

 

[laptoppop]

I absolutely do not mean to put down ICR or anyone else -- they are doing the best they can with limited resources. I particularly like ICR -- they are just a couple of hours away from where I live.

But as an example -- they recently got a 40 processor computing cluster that they'll be using for computer modeling of various things. PTL! On the other hand, the level of compute power is small compared to most universities.

From http://icr.org/article/2980/ :
Anticipated computational research topics include modeling of submarine debris flows, submarine cross-bed formation, runaway subduction, rapid mountain uplift, Ice Age climate dynamics, cosmologies without the assumption of the Copernican principle, galactic spiral structure development, limits and costs of natural selection, effects of environmental "noise" on genetic selectibility, effects of near-neutral mutations on long-term genomic stability, genome comparison between human and chimpanzee, as well as many yet to be identified areas of origins research.