I have not been under any illusions as to your devotion to your faith. But I may have been under the incorrect illusion that our discussion was an exercise to see if one specific claim made by YECs was in fact supported by science.
I am getting the uncomfortable feeling that you are declaring your stance as non-negotiable as the only ploy left to you to avoid the train wreck you saw coming. In my last post I posed a question as to whether you would follow if the evidence led in ways you might not like. You left the question unanswered where it was asked, but I assume your above declaration encapsulates the answer - no, you will stick to dogma over facts.
I am not sure where to go from here. There is an idea I have seen proposed that seems to fit here. If someone enters a conversation with a non-negotiable declaration that they will not change their mind, then effectively the conversation is a joke. There is no honest exchange of ideas, any more than if that person were just a tape recorder mindlessly spouting the person’s non-negotiable beliefs. The tape recorder gets its message out, but is impervious to anything said back to it.
I could, as I have seen some do, simply say “Thanks, bye, no use wasting my time with someone who has no intention of honestly evaluating what is said.” But I know there is a crack in that armor - one that I personally found. For a good many years I was deeply immersed in church, serving in a number of positions, teaching, missionary work, etc. Like you, I expressed an unshakeable belief that I was right, on hundreds of occasions. Until … until … after many years … one person whispered to me. That person was … me. Little questions, little bothersome things I had seen and heard and read and encountered – each had been neatly wrapped in an insulating blanket of faith and stored deep in my mind.
But a small incident set me to thinking, asking myself where was the truth in hiding things that need to be insulated. When I finally dared ask myself that question head on, I realized that hiding from things that make me uncomfortable was itself a form of deceit. So I very methodically unwrapped each thing I had safely stored in my mind and examined them. Some I realized were insignificant. Some involved wisdom or knowledge I did not have, and so I could not pass judgment on. But a fair number of them were perfectly clear.
If you have been to an unusually spiritual baptism, or seen something that left a deep and lasting impression on you, then you have felt much as I did that day. No sinner coming cleansed out of the waters of baptism felt more than I did that day. But my feelings were engendered by the realization that for decades I had been believing what I wanted to believe, not what really was.
Anyway, to get back to the situation we find ourselves in. Several times you have put forth lists of areas of science that you claim support YEC. Based on the evidence our C-14 discussion has produced, it would be more truthful to assert that starting with YEC versions of science, then the support for YEC is forthcoming.
I am committed to defending something cold and impersonal – real science. When I see the claim that “science” (with no qualifiers to show it is not mainstream science) supports a young earth, then I feel almost like science is being kidnapped and pimped out. And I object. So if you say science supports your YEC ideas, I am going to be much freer in challenging that head-on.
