The most obvious example of YECism that doesn’t disagree with atheism on substantive testable questions is coming up with a philosophical or theological justification for God creating a universe 6,000 years ago that in every measurable way looks like it began to exist with a big bang 15 billion years ago, and that hypothesis would say “dinosaurs did not evolve into birds” because the only dinosaurs that ever existed were created as fossils 6,000 years ago.
The problem with that is that YEC of the biblical literalist type (e.g. most of “Answers in Genesis”) doesn’t limit itself to the claim that the earth is 6,000 years old. It has to argue that the entire Genesis creation narrative—spirit of God walked upon the face of the waters, Adam and Eve, global flood, and so forth—is at least accurate enough that a tortured but in some sense literal interpretation of the Bible can be said to describe factual events. That’s a much taller order, and rules out a lot of reasoning of the “God added dinosaur fossils as a test of faith” type.
The most obvious example of YECism that doesn’t disagree with atheism on substantive testable questions is coming up with a philosophical or theological justification for God creating a universe 6,000 years ago that in every measurable way looks like it began to exist with a big bang 15 billion years ago, and that hypothesis would say “dinosaurs did not evolve into birds” because the only dinosaurs that ever existed were created as fossils 6,000 years ago.
The problem with that is that YEC of the biblical literalist type (e.g. most of “Answers in Genesis”) doesn’t limit itself to the claim that the earth is 6,000 years old. It has to argue that the entire Genesis creation narrative—spirit of God walked upon the face of the waters, Adam and Eve, global flood, and so forth—is at least accurate enough that a tortured but in some sense literal interpretation of the Bible can be said to describe factual events. That’s a much taller order, and rules out a lot of reasoning of the “God added dinosaur fossils as a test of faith” type.