Episode Details

Is there a transition of power in play within the YEC movement?

Think about Young Earth Creationism (YEC), and you probably immediately conjure up a mental image of Ken Ham: he’s been the figurehead of that movement for decades. One can critique his scientific credentials and his way of interpreting anything scientific through his dogmatic worldview, but say what you want, he had long been the face and voice of the YEC movement.

Dr. Joel Duff has long been interested in the intersection between faith and science, and for that reason has been watching the YEC movement. In fact, Boyd and I interviewed Joel Duff on how it was actually YECism that was a bigger threat to his young Christian faith than science (see episode #26).

In this episode, Joel comes back to tell us that he’s sensing a change in the YECist world. The perception that there might be a “transition of power” in play crystalized in Joel’s mind when he went to watch a major movie documentary — Is Genesis History? — that was released in major theatres across the USA a few years ago. This documentary had seven scientific experts exploring various lines of scientific evidence which support a YEC view of the origins of the world and life on Earth. As Joel put it:

“I expect this film to become one of the most effective apologetics tools the young-earth movement has ever produced both because of who produced it—a group outside of the major creationist organizations—but also because of who is not in the film—AiG president Ken Ham.” 

These seven experts, although fully YECist in their worldview, appear to be much more open to the advances of science, and are open to finding ways to harmonize the two rather than take Ham’s approach of misrepresentation and even frank deni