The Attack of the Young Earth Creationists

Quick honey! Turn off the lights and hide underneath the table, the Young Earth Creationists are coming! - Anon.

It's interesting to me that internet skeptics are often quite quick to be dismissive of Christians and their belief system while lumping the vast majority of them together as, quote "Young Earth Creationists". Young Earth Creationism can be described as "the belief that the age of the Earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old" and is sometimes posited as a competing, alternative origin of life theory to that of Evolution.

What I find interesting about such dismissal out-of-hand by internet skeptics is that many Christians do not believe in a so-called "young earth". For example, neither William Lane Craig nor Stephen C. Meyer adhere to the idea that the earth is that young and instead subscribe to the guesstimates put forward by many geologists and others that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old.

I found the above picture in my inbox yesterday because that I am on the mailing list of Coast to Coast AM, an internationally syndicated radio talk show on late at night here in the states. The guest that was on a couple of nights ago was Michael Cremo who spoke on the topic of "Forbidden Archeology" which can be described as the act of "exploring the artifacts and discoveries that don't fit into conventional timelines and theories.". Cremo apparently has some questions concerning Darwinian evolutionary theory and rather than arguing for a "young earth", he instead attempts to provide information on, what he terms, "extreme human antiquity". The provided link states,

"In 1968, 43 miles northwest of Delta, Utah, William J. Meister found apparent human shoe prints inside a 2-inch-thick slab of rock. Also in that slab were obvious trilobite fossils, one of which was squashed under the “heel.” (The 10-inch-long shoe print is at the left, and its rock mold is to its right. Notice how the back of the heel is worn, just as most of our shoes wear today. The heel was indented in the rock about an eighth of an inch deeper than the sole.)

According to evolutionists, trilobytes are among the oldest living organisms on earth. Trilobites were a Paleozoic marine animals living 600 to 280 million years ago, and have been extinct for at least 200 million years. Further validating this dating, the shale rock of the area is from the carboniferous period (290 to 355 million years ago).

Cremo stated that the above picture was from "William Meister's discovery of an apparent human shoe print in a slab of rock in Utah which also contained a crushed trilobite fossil in the bottom of the print.... Even more ancient are metallic balls with grooved sides found in an African mine, which are over 2 billion years old, he said." (Note: I don't have the link for the "metallic balls" example, but if anyone is aware of one, feel free to post it in the discussion thread).

Let me just say that none of the above is actually central to my faith. I am of the opinion that if a discovery were to be made in the near future that throws the entire, commonly accepted timeline of the planet's history into doubt, that scientific knowledge would continue to develop on much like it is today. An acid would still be an acid. A base would still be a base. Water would still boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit and life would go on pretty much like it is right now.

I guess what I'm trying to gt at here is that I do not understand the unusual amount of venom hurled at YEC'ers, (usually from skeptics who believe they are the renegade defenders of "good science") due to their profoundly held beliefs. Nor do I think that the issue is the most important topic out there while there are people suffering in this world and there are numerous threats to the freedoms that we in the West typically enjoy.

So I guess the question is, "Why all the venom out there on this topic?". Your thoughts on the matter please...



UPDATE: Froggie, in order to expedite your response, I took your patented first step in responding to an entry of this type and I will link it here.