#68 – the “New Creationists”

Is there a transition of power in play within the YEC movement?

Think about Young Earth Creationism (YEC), and you probably immediately conjure up a mental image of Ken Ham: he’s been the figurehead of that movement for decades. One can critique his scientific credentials and his way of interpreting anything scientific through his dogmatic worldview, but say what you want, he had long been the face and voice of the YEC movement.

Dr. Joel Duff has long been interested in the intersection between faith and science, and for that reason has been watching the YEC movement. In fact, Boyd and I interviewed Joel Duff on how it was actually YECism that was a bigger threat to his young Christian faith than science (see episode #26).

In this episode, Joel comes back to tell us that he’s sensing a change in the YECist world. The perception that there might be a “transition of power” in play crystalized in Joel’s mind when he went to watch a major movie documentary — Is Genesis History? — that was released in major theatres across the USA a few years ago. This documentary had seven scientific experts exploring various lines of scientific evidence which support a YEC view of the origins of the world and life on Earth. As Joel put it:

“I expect this film to become one of the most effective apologetics tools the young-earth movement has ever produced both because of who produced it—a group outside of the major creationist organizations—but also because of who is not in the film—AiG president Ken Ham.” 

These seven experts, although fully YECist in their worldview, appear to be much more open to the advances of science, and are open to finding ways to harmonize the two rather than take Ham’s approach of misrepresentation and even frank denial of the science. Joel tells us more about these seven leaders — their bona fide scientific credentials, their areas of scientific expertise, and their very different demeanor:

• they’re more accessible to outside critique (Ham and his AiG experts won’t interact meaningfully with properly qualified experts outside of the AiG or YEC fold);
• they engage in more gracious dialogue;
• and most importantly, they’re quite willing and able to say “I don’t know” when raw data and science conflict with their YEC worldview … something which goes completely against the grain of Answers-in-Genesis and its current leader and figurehead who find ALL their answers … in Genesis.

Not only are YECists possibly updating their leadership: their understanding of the origin of species seems to also be in flux. Instead of the traditional view that God made all the different species of animals “each according to their own kind”, they’re now working with a model in which Noah didn’t take hundreds of thousands of different animals onto the Ark, but rather only a few thousand proto-animals. One pair of proto-cats which contained all the genetic diversity of our present day cats (from the house cat to leopards to the sabre-toothed tiger). Same for proto-dogs, proto-apes, proto-birds, proto-insects, and so on. And once all those proto-animals stepped off the Ark, they underwent a process of rapid hyper-speciation: devolving into all the different species of animals within the course of only a few generations. In other words, for proponents of this idea, it might be more believable that all the species evolved over the course of a few hundred years than over many hundreds of millions of years.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Joel Duff and his blog site and YouTube channel, go to Naturalis Historia.

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