The history of Young Earth Creationism is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Eart

The history of Young Earth Creationism is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism#Backgr... It wasn't really a controversy or dogmatic issue to average Christians until the early 20th century. Trying to argue with a Young Earth Creationist on scientific grounds is super pointless - literally everything can be either dismissed because you weren't present, or reinterpreted to fit the viewpoint. I would know because that used to be me. It's also highly unlikely that you'll successfully argue with them from a theological/hermeneutical perspective either. If you'll forgive me entering into a major time controversy here: a young earth creationist, and many evangelicals, place the original Biblical text as penned by the human author at a nearly deified level. Unless the text is blatantly poetic, even in translation, or explicitly labelled a parable the text is assumed to be literal. The human author of scripture is basically assumed to be, more-or-less, possessed by the deity lending only their authorial voice to the literally word-for-word transcript given to them by God. (For support they quote scripture, of course, "All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness" (II Timothy 3:16). Believing that, the stakes become incredibly high for a biblical literalist, many/most of whom are also YEC. If any scripture is found to be "false" by modern standards, it basically invalidates the whole thing. I say this having believed this version of Biblical inspiration and knowing I'd have been given permission to teach it in church once upon a time. The tricky bit is that modern standards aren't an appropriate measure to hold an ancient document with different goals, but that's literally a books worth of argument and background to dive into.