Comment on Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 20:22:43 GMT

I am not sure what I mean.

Trying to steelman your "just kind of a stupid position" point :)

As I mention elsewhere, YEC stems from an extreme level of motivated cognition, uncompartmentalized belief in biblical literalism. A "smart" YEC follower would argue for taking the Bible as literally true in every way, or at least selecting the parts of the scripture which must be taken literally and argue why they should be. Pushing one single consequence of just one implicit idea in the whole text is not a smart way to convince others. Of course, a smart (and honest) YEC follower would probably abandon YEC pretty quickly.

Discuss