An overview of how YECs deceive themselves

My previous blog post looked at how the ultra-conservative Fox News acts as an echo chamber for conservative science denialists who by watching it exclusively ensure that nothing challenges their right wing view of reality, whether it be related to politics or to science. The parallels with extremist YEC Facebook pages which act as echo chambers for scientifically uninformed fundamentalists seeking to avoid evidence that challenges their worldview are clear and obvious.

While fundamentalist dogma is clearly the underlying motivation for Christadelphian science denialism, the cognitive biases involved in distorting reality so that it does not threaten their fundamentalist view of reality are not found exclusively among Christians, and are not a function of intelligence. Some YECs are highly intelligent people, so it is misleading to perpetuate the stereotype of YECs as unintelligent and credulous. The problem lies not with intelligence, but disorders of thinking and reasoning.

Fox News, the conservative mind, and echo chambers - or how YECs avoid reality

Given the sheer volume of material readily available today on the subject of evolution and the age of the Earth, it's fair to conclude that YECs are actively working hard to remain ignorant and preserve their distorted view of both Bible and science. That's not in doubt. As to how the YECs maintain that ignorance, science writer Chris Mooney, in a 2014 Alternet article looking into why viewers of the ultra-conservative Fox News are some of the most misinformed on issues ranging from politics to science argues that conservative, authoritarian people seek out environments like Fox News which acts both as a source for validation of their views, and a safe haven where they will find no challenge to their beliefs. In other words, they resolve the cognitive dissonance experienced when reality challenges their worldview by avoiding reality altogether and hiding in an echo chamber. The parallels to evolution denialism in our community are obvious.

Five Reasons Why Interpreting Genesis 1 Literally is Impossible

I've pointed out that YEC cannot be honestly reconciled with both the scientific and the Biblical data as a literal reading of both creation narratives contradict each other in the length and duration of creation, the sequence of creation events in Gen 1 does not harmonise with what we actually know from science, and Genesis 1 when taken literally teaches the existence of a solid firmament. I've made these points repeatedly, but for the benefit of those needing a summary of why a literal reading is untenable, I've gathered together five of the main points. Read on.

The difference between peer-reviewed literature and uninformed argument from YEC websites

One of the tactics used by Christadelphian evolution denialists is the appeal to irrelevant authority, with the two most common variants of that approach being the appeal to an evolution denialist with a technical qualifications in areas completely irrelevant to evolutionary biology such as engineering or nuclear physics or mathematics, or the uncritical citation of material from pseudoscientific websites maintained by science denialists whose arguments have never been scrutinised by experts in the field to check for basic flaws and errors. 

I have lost count of the amount of times I have seen videos or articles by laypeople with absolutely no relevant scientific training confidently asserting that command descent and large-scale evolutionary change are false. In every case, it is painfully clear that almost all of these people would be flat-out reading the primary literature, let alone designing a scientific experiment to test their anti-evolution hypotheses, or have the knowledge required to act as a referee for such papers. The simple truth that evolution denialists in our community refuse to acknowledge, is that unless you know what you are talking about, have the expertise to test your anti-evolution arguments, get them written up and published, and have those arguments positively cited by the scientific community, no one will take your anti-evolution rants seriously. It's that simple, and no amount of appealing to fundamentalist distortions of the Bible, or verbal abuse of evolutionary creationists is ever going to make the scientific facts confirming the reality of evolution go away.

The special creationist burden of proof - and how they always evade it.

One of the more obvious examples of special creationist intellectual dishonesty can be seen when they attack evolutionary creationists who point out the flaws, blunders, logical fallacies, and scientific errors in the special creationist position. The special creationist argument - that evolutionary creationists are not 'qualified' to talk about evolution is more than a little bizarre when the evolutionary creationists appeal not to their own opinion or expertise (except when directly relevant such as the impact evolution has on medicine for example), but to the relevant scientific authorities.

We Don't Need No Education? Oh yes we do.

Young Earth creationism, while a major problem in our community, is ultimately a symptom of a far bigger problem, namely fundamentalism and an overweening anti-intellectualism which regards mainstream scholarship with contempt, and maintains the delusion that a layperson armed with nothing more than Strong's lexical definitions and the Authorised Version does not need to consult mainstream scholarship. 

An excellent essay highlighting both this endemic anti-intellectualism, and how it represents a marked deviation from an original Christadelphian position that respected scholarship and would regard the anti-intellectualism that infests our community today with dismay and contempt, found at the Facebook page Science and Scripture follows.

Why Christian fundamentalists deny the reality of evolution

Any intellectually honest person who has read even a fraction of the articles on this website summarising the evidence for common descent and large-scale evolutionary change would acknowledge that common descent and large-scale evolutionary change are facts, and can be no more denied than the atomic theory of matter, the germ theory of disease, or the reality that the Earth is not a fixed flat disc around which the universe revolves. Therefore, when any Christadelphian claims that they have looked at the evidence for evolution and claim that is is not convincing, the only possible explanations for this failure to recognise the fact of evolution are:

• The Christadelphian science denialist has not examined the evidence for evolution, but looked merely at the usual YEC distortions, and deluded himself into thinking that he has examined the evidence
• The Christadelphian science denialist is simply lying when he claims to have examined the evidence
• The Christadelphian science denialist has examined the evidence for evolution, but his fundamentalist dogma prevents him from accepting the evidence.