You may have noticed recently I’ve been criticising young earth creationism more than usual. This is working towards creating a single Blog page - a kind of comprehensive YEC critical page - which contains all the hyperlinks to all the different rebuttals, both articles and videos. Then I can just share that one source when it's pertinent, and it should be like a portal that leads to all the material.
Given how extraordinarily wrong young earth creationism is, one of my lifelong puzzles about YECs is whether they really believe this stuff or not - and to what extent is it pride, ignorance, deception or self-deception at the heart of their misapprehensions (probably a mix of all four).
I've engaged on the Answers in Genesis Facebook page a bit in the last few weeks, and we've got in to a bit of a rinse and repeat cycle. So, I asked this genuine question: How many times are we going to go around like this, where you present an article that's wrong, I tell you what's wrong with it, you ignore it, and then just carry on posting more articles that make exactly the same or similar kinds of mistakes? How long can you keep presenting dishonest falsehoods before you start to develop a conscience and question yourselves and the material you're producing?
As expected, the question has been totally ignored by AIG, as have most of other critiques of their pseudo-science. As I said, I suspect there's a heady mix of pride, ignorance, deception or self-deception at the heart of it - but it's the deception and self-deception parts that interest me most, because we are all ignorant of many things, and all susceptible to pride - but we do not all deliberately deceive and suffer the consequences of self-deception in the teeth of deliberate external deceit.
Normally, when you believe something genuinely and honestly, you know why you believe that thing, and you justify the belief by drawing out the empirical, rational and logical consequences of that belief. But when you're mired in self-deception by being outwardly deceptive, you obviously don't do that. If you tell a lie, you don't try to explain why it's true, because you know it isn't - you either stay quiet and hope no one questions it, or you distort the picture to make the lie more believable.
So, from experience of AIG, I think the shadow sits somewhere between deception and self-deception. Because if you observe what they say, and how they operate, they never draw out the empirical, rational and logical consequences of their own beliefs. They perpetuate the deception by staying quiet on the things they are omitting, and they spend most of their time criticising evolution to distort the picture in an attempt to make the lie of young earth creationism more believable.
