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ChrisHallquist comments on Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism - Less Wrong
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Which kinds of deism?
The kind that does not disagree with atheism on any substantive testable question.
Not disagreeing with atheism on any substantive testable question, I think, includes some forms of YECism.
(If so, you may have just suggested a better way to steelman YECism than I ever could've come up with...)
I don't know, the kinds of YECists I see say things like "dinosaurs did not evolve into birds." I don't think these folks understand testability well enough to avoid looking silly (unlike smart Catholics, who understand testability very well indeed).
The kinds of Deists I had in mind aren't really opposed to the scientific method, and will generally go about establishing "theories" in a way no scientist would find objectionable. They just prefer to live in a world with a God. This, to me, is a question of taste, and I am willing to respect their tastes enough to not press them on this.
YECists don't really understand what science is about, I think. There is an enormous gap between deists and YECists.
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.
But if we're steelmanning, couldn't we build a better YEC?
I don't think so, because to approximate how YECists behave out in the wild you would have to, for instance, create a "YECist Bayesian" with a prior so strong it effectively ignored arbitrary mountains of data. This is not how, for instance, the Catholic Church behaved historically.
The problem is this: "the stupid is conserved under sensible transformations."
If you are not concerned with approximating the YECist behavior, you will set up an actual Bayesian who will just move away from their weird prior fairly quickly (many folks from that background do precisely this, it's called "deconversion.")