Part 5 of David MacMillan's series on understanding the YEC mindset is up at Panda's Thumb. This time, he's looking at the YEC belief that evolutionary theory was proposed specifically to eliminate God, and how this leads on to a flawed understanding of geology and biology by YECs:
Because of this misconception, creationists rarely understand the actual history of how geology, paleontology, and biology built upon each other to provide us with our understanding of the world. Mainstream geology emerged significantly ahead of Darwin’s work; many early geologists were Christians. Studying the distribution of rock layers around the globe allowed geologists to construct a complete geologic column and begin appreciating the incredible amount of time the column represents. Moreover, the regular progression of extinct species fossilized throughout the geologic column had been well-catalogued.
Full article is here.However, creationism requires that the development of evolutionary theory be ad hoc, driven by presupposition rather than by observation. As a result, they often assert that the geologic column doesn’t actually exist: that it’s cobbled together from bits and pieces around the world and that the layers aren’t actually consistent. It is true that there are few places in the world where all layers of the column (the Hadean and Archean and Proterozoic and Cambrian and Devonian and Permian and Triassic and Cretaceous and Paleocene and Miocene and Pleistocene and Holocene) are visible simultaneously, but this fact does not prevent geologists from identifying them. The layers of the geologic column are identified relative to each other using clear and consistent markers which function the same way no matter where you are in the world. Constructing and identifying the components of the geologic column is not the random guesswork creationism makes it out to be.
