Arguments that Young Earth Creationists should avoid.

The other day I posted about arguments against Young Earth Creationism that just do not work. You can find that post here. I got two primary complaints, first that I had not shown proper nuanced forms of the arguments I had issue with. This is a fair point, and I am happy to admit that the arguments I discussed are invalid in the form I presented them, but arguments of that type are not necessarily invalid. My complaints in the other post were about the tokens represented, all of which I have heard. Every argument needs to be evaluated on its own merit.

The other complaint I encountered was that I said nothing negative about arguments used by Young Earth Creationists. After all, when I talked about Baptism I took issue with both the side I disagreed with and also those who I did agree with. (You can see that, here.) Why did I not do the same with Creationism? Well,  my policy on blog posts is that I do not want to write a post longer than what I would want to read if I were clicking on the link. I personally do not prefer long blogs, if I want the full scale arguments I will buy and read the book. So, in order to write a blog post that addresses both sides of the Creationism argument, I would have to break that rule. However, I am happy to write on both sides, and had actually already started this post when I published its cousin the other day. So, here it is: Arguments that Young Earth Creationists should avoid.

Exact dating of the earth using OT genealogies

I really appreciate everything Answers in Genesis does. I support their ministry and I look forward to getting out to the Creation Museum once their Ark Encounter project is complete. However, they use one argument, extensively, that just is not conclusive as they would like it to be. An example of this argument can be found here. The issue here is not that the majority of modern Biblical scholars think these genealogies are not exact, it's that the text never claims that the list is exhaustive. Before we start to worry that this leads us down some slippery slope, consider the genealogies we have in the New Testament. We know that they are not. Now, I understand that the Genesis account is a different language in a different time, but let's keep in mind that we still have a framework here for an divinely inspired genealogy that doesn't  include every single name.

So, here's the rub, if it is possible that a Biblical genealogy can be less than exhaustive, then it is illogical to argue that the earth must have a certain age because a genealogy in the Bible includes names and ages that add up to that age. The information available does not give us the deductive conclusion that this argument is attempting to give. The AIG article above would have been completely fine if it had gotten to the end and said: "Thus, based on the evidence available, we think that a no gap genealogy is the best conclusion" there would be no issue. However, too often this argument gets tossed out by Young Earth Creationists as an indisputable proof, and this is not a rational conclusion. 

Yom

In the Baptism post, linked above, we have a discussion on the use of the word baptizo in the New Testament, and the logical fallacy of assuming that a word has the same meaning every single time. (We cited D.A. Carson's work on exegetical fallacies.) Too often YEC adherents do the same thing with yom, insisting that it means a 24 hour day. I think that it does mean a 24 hour day, here, and I quite like arguments that try to show that grouping the word 'day' with qualifiers about evening and morning indicates that 24 hours is the time period being described. But, again, this is not a deductive argument, so using this argument as a indisputable proof is logically invalid. 

Don't argue that Young Earth Creationists have science figured out!

We don't, and that's perfectly okay. If we as Creationists have scientific theories that do not work, we should be honest and reasonable enough to admit it. There's nothing wrong with seeing a scientific question that has not been answered yet and saying: "This topic needs more scientific research." Science has been done by Christians for centuries, and they never had all the answers. There's no reason to think that we suddenly have it all figured out now. If we want to reproach Old Earth adherents for acting as those their science doesn't have serious gaps we absolutely cannot do any differently for our own theories. That would be a special pleading fallacy, and I've seen it happen way too often. I am not a scientist, but I've seen enough science that comes to Young Earth conclusions to be satisfied, as a Philosopher and Theologian, intellectually in being a Young Earth Creationist. 

Conclusion

Being correct does not give you the right to use invalid arguments. In fact, I often tell my students that those with the correct conclusions bear a greater responsibility in their argumentation, because bad arguments tarnish the reputation of the truth. It is the same reason why I get infuriated when I see people claim the Bible is the Word of God and then try to prove it by KJV Onlyism (here). Defend the truth, but do so in a way that has integrity. 

Arguments against Young Earth Creationism that just don't work...

Maybe you are reading this as an Young Earth Creationist, maybe not. I have no idea. What I do know is that even if you believe Young Earth Creationism is wrong, there are some common arguments against it that simply do not work, logically.

The Book of Genesis is not a scientific text!

Cards on the table, I am a Young Earth Creationist, and I am intellectually satisfied in being so, my reasons for it are primarily theological, but those are a very different discussion for a very different day. One of the most common arguments I experience against YEC is that the book of Genesis is not a scientific text, or in other words, it is not trying to make technical scientific claims. Therefore, it would be wrong to base a scientific hypothesis on it because it was never intended to be scientific.

Every YEC I have ever known is simply dumbfounded by how anything anti-YEC is supposed to follow from the statement 'Genesis is not a scientific text.' Our response is and always has been, to put it eloquently: 'Duh'.The fact that this text was not written for the purpose of science by its original author does absolutely nothing to show that it is not literal in what it says happened. 

My wife and I like watching the show 'Mythbusters'. Every week, the team takes on three or four myths and test them scientifically to see if they have any merit to them. For instance, one week they tested whether or not you could stick your hand in molten lead without burning it. As it turns out, you can: 

Something called the 'Leidenfrost effect' makes this possible. There also happens to be a specific minimum temperature that the lead has to be heated to for this to work. This 'myth' can be a good analogy for what we are talking about here. Nothing in the myth said anything about the very important scientific detail of minimum temperature, because the 'myth' was not trying to be a scientific hypothesis. However, that does not mean that it is not literally true that you can put your hand in molten lead without, well, losing it. 

So if Genesis is not trying to a scientific document, but it is trying to give us a historical account, then it can be literally true that the earth was created in six consecutive twenty-four hour days without it being a scientific hypothesis. Thus, saying that the Genesis creation account is not a scientific account does nothing at all to prove that it is not literal. 

"That's a poem if I ever saw one..."

This little quote comes from a Christian musician in the group 'Gungor' very recently about why he believes that the Genesis creation account is not a literal account. The reasoning goes, presumably, that if it is a poem it cannot be a literal account. Is this true?

I apologize to my British friends for this particular example, but the following is an excerpt classic American poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called Paul Revere's Ride: 

"Listen my children and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch

Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--

One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar

Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,

Just as the moon rose over the bay,

Where swinging wide at her moorings lay

The Somerset, British man-of-war;

A phantom ship, with each mast and spar

Across the moon like a prison bar,

And a huge black hulk, that was magnified

By its own reflection in the tide."

What we have above is definitely a poem, and a quite good one, but it is also chocked full of historical fact. http://www.paulreverehouse.org/ride/real.html has a brief retelling of the actual account. From Longfellow's poem we get actual history. There is no logical reason why something must be historically fictitious simply because it is poetic. Because of this, any argument that says "It is a poem, and not history.." commits a logical fallacy, the two genres are not mutually exclusive. 

But all scientists believe the earth is old...

I love it when two fallacies happen at once, that's the kind of nerdy that a couple years of study in Philosophy will get you. The most obvious of the two is called an argument ad populum. This fallacy ('argument from the people' for the English speakers out there) asserts that because the majority of people believe something, it must therefore be true. In this instance it is appealing to the majority of a specific people group, but it is still a fallacy. There is no logical connection between the number of people who believe a theory to be true and whether or not that theory is actually true.

On a more fundamental level, look at the historical track record of science for numerous example. The Sun did not revolve around the Earth when the majority of scientists believed that it did, and by that same logic the fact that a lot of scientists now believe the earth is billions of years old does not in any way prove that it actually is.

That being said, the arguments put forth by the majority of scientists do carry weight and have to be engaged, but these arguments are to be judged on their own merit, not by the number of people who already support it.

The other fallacy here is what is known as a 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. It goes like this: one person says "No Scotsman likes coffee" two which a person can reply "Well Farquar is a Scotsman, and he likes coffee a lot". The first person responds: "Well, no True Scotsman likes coffee."

The meaning of Scotsman is a man of Scottish descent, and the arguer has claimed that all men who fit this description feel a certain way about coffee. When shown a Scotsman who does like coffee, he simply insists that this person is not a genuine member of the category in discussion.

I've heard Old Earth adherents say: "All scientists believe in Old Earth." To which I reply "Jason Lisle (PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado) is a scientist, and he does not believe in Old Earth." The reply I've heard so many times is "All real scientists believe in Old Earth." This is logical nonsense, a desperate attempt to eliminate dissent from the discussion. 

Conclusion

In brief, we have shown in a very basic way that some of these complaints about YEC are simply invalid arguments, they are not based in reason and should be discarded by those who use them against YEC and not taken seriously by those who support YEC. There is no strength in these arguments, by themselves. Nothing here is in any way proof of Young Earth Creationism. Just because an opponent of YEC uses a logical fallacy does not mean that his side of the argument is wrong, he or she simply happens to be logically invalid. YEC needs, and has, its own positive arguments, but those are beyond my purview today.