It's one thing to show why YEC is scientific and theological nonsense - this website is replete with more than enough information to make that point several times over. However, the most potent arguments against it come from former YECs, particularly the earnest, eager, zealous members, whose faith in YEC failed when they found evidence that undermined it. Even more damning is the usual response of the YEC hierarchy, which invariably is to belittle, insult, and demonise the YEC with doubts.
Former YEC Samantha Field, in an article at Homeschoolers Anonymous notes how she was a dedicated, loyal YEC, doing her best to read all the YEC arguments at Answers in Genesis in order to be 'current with all the creationist arguments'. One can hardly call her a half-hearted YEC. Things changed when she began discussing the subject with others, and encountered the killer argument of shared identical endogenous retroviral elements. Field continues:
Toward the end of that conversation, one of my fellow debaters brought up a point I’d never encountered before: endogeneous retroviruses. He sent me a few journal articles about it, and after reading them I was deeply disturbed. ERV insertion points in human and chimp genomes matched too closely for comfort, and I was sick and tired of the “common creator” defense. A common creator could explain a lot of things from an early 20th century phylogeny perspective but not with modern understandings of genome mapping—and most especially not ERV insertion points.
So, I did what any good creationism-defender would do: I wrote a letter to Answers in Genesis. I outlined the debate I was in, included links to the journal articles, explained all the research I’d already done (which included everything AiG had on genetics at the time), and asked if there was a creation scientist who’d studied ERVs and had a compelling argument against them as evidence for common ancestry.
The letter I got back was … infuriating would be putting it mildly.
They sent me a link to an AiG article on genetics that didn’t even mention ERVs (they’ve since updated a page to include it after I called them on it last year, but they only fall back on their position regarding “junk DNA” and don’t engage with the evidence satisfactorily), and then they went on to call into question my salvation, my faith, my relationship with Jesus, my intelligence, and my dedication to creationism.
They didn’t even bother answering my question.
They sent back an irrelevant blog post and then told me that my actual problem was not having enough unflinching, blind, unquestioning faith in the creationism model.
If I really believed in creationism, then my confidence should be unassailable and no amount of evidence for common ancestry should bother me, they said.
That was when the house of cards come crashing down. I’d spent the last few years struggling with other aspects of my faith, struggling to believe in God, struggling to believe that Christianity was true. I’d clung to creationism like a lifeline because if I could prove creationism, then Christianity was a fact no matter my doubts about the matter, and I didn’t have to go through the excruciating process of asking questions I didn’t want to think about.
I’d turned to AiG in a literal moment of desperation because they were my intellectual stronghold. AiG supposedly encouraged learning, thinking, engaging, criticizing, evaluating. They represented the last reserve I had in keeping my fundamentalist faith intact, of believing in Christianity as a literal, falsifiable, provable fact.
What I received from them was the opposite of everything I’d trusted them to be. I thought my question would be received warmly, my willingness to engage with evolutionary arguments praised.
Instead they shamed me for daring to do what I’d always believed was a central part of creation science: asking questions.
At that moment, I could no longer in good conscience defend creationism or any other part of my fundamentalist faith—the only faith system I believed had an ounce of integrity or truthfulness on its side. I was rudderless.
Field remains a Christian, unlike other YECs whose faith crashed and burned on this issue. What stands out here is the bigoted, vicious, anti-Christian behaviour of YEC Christianity which privileges human dogma above the witness of creation, and routinely insults, belittlers, and abuses honest Christians who ask hard questions that the YEC cultists cannot and do not want to answer.
