Deceptive Rebranding: YEC

Well friends, I missed last week’s post, because despite my habit of writing articles ahead of time and then scheduling them for publication every Thursday, I didn’t have one ready last week. I was busy, and I have since come across some new information that explains where a lot of the nonsense I like to expose comes from, but that’s a deep dive for another day.

YEC, for those who don’t know, is an acronym that stands for young-Earth creationism, which is the belief that the Earth is only a fraction of its scientifically-determined age. YEC is religiously-motivated pseudoscience, and although today it is considered a conspiracy theory, it is actually the product of a subversive parasite religion called Gnosticism, which is the ideology behind scriptural literalism in all three of the Abrahamic religions.

Gnosticism as a term first appeared in the 17th century as a name for the belief system held by the gnostics, or gnôstikoi, a term coined by Plato (428-348 BC) for the adherents of what he called an “ancient religion” whose true name has since been lost to time, but has been in continuous practise by a certain group of people who are invariably drawn to certain ideas, including the closely-related mystic tradition called Hermeticism. Gnosticism is yet another deep rabbit hole I’d like to dive into at some point (maybe after I get back from my secret Hermetic occult meeting on the moon), but for now, let’s talk about Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656).

Ussher is widely credited with inventing YEC as we know it today. While modern creationists like to assert that Ussher added up the ages of biblical figures from Jesus Christ all the way back to Adam in order to determine the age of the Earth, this is a lie. Anyone who has read the Bible (this is your daily reminder that I am one such person) knows that’s not even possible. Rather, Ussher began with the “divine revelation” that the world’s history was divided into seven 1000-year ages, and that, at the time he was alive, it was the middle of the sixth age. The seventh and final age was to be the thousand-year reign of Christ foretold in the book of Revelations, hence all the doomsday prophecies surrounding Y2K, though astute observers will note that the sixth age was actually supposed to end in 1994, followed by a seven-year World War before the seventh age began in 2001… which obviously didn’t happen.

Contrary to the narrative that modern YECs like to push, Ussher began with the presupposition that the Earth was created in 4004 BC, based on the fact that the account he was working with claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was born in 4 BC, and also on the assumption that 2000 years passed between Adam and Abram and another 2000 years passed between Abraham and Christ. Then he used all the passages with the word “begat” over and over to determine the date of the Noachian deluge, which, according to this method, took place in 2349 BC. This is something of a departure from early (i.e. proto-Orthodox) Christians, who “determined” that the Earth was created circa 5500 BC (biblical math is fuzzy, which is why theologians kept coming up with wildly different results), and that the global flood took place circa 1500 BC. Other contemporaries of Ussher used the same methods to get different creation dates in roughly the same range, with Ussher’s actually being the earliest, and the latest being 3761 BC.

While all of this was going on, however, naturalists determined by entirely different means that the Earth had to be closer to twenty thousand years old… and that age kept getting pushed farther and farther back as new methods and information became available, such that by the time Charles Darwin came along, the age of the Earth was already estimated to be millions of years old. Meanwhile, the theologians’ attempts at determining the age of the Earth were consigned to the dustbin of history… until Ellen White, the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church (SDA) dug them up again. Modern YEC is derived from the SDA’s doctrine (and pull my hair, do they hate when you point that out), hence all modern YEC organisations, such as the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) and Answers in Genesis (AiG) both using the Ussher/Lightfoot chronology, rather than the chronology of Bede, Halafta, Kepler, Newton, or Scaliger, to say nothing of the c. 5500 BC estimates from the likes of Maximus the Confessor, Sulpicius Severus, or any of their contemporaries.

Creationism was the law of the land in the United States, in that the Theory of Evolution was illegal to teach in public schools, throughout the first half of the 20th century. However, court case after court case proved to be an utter embarassment for the creationists, be they young-Earthers or not. The First Amendment to the US Constitution forbids the teaching of YEC, for the simple reason that YEC is religiously-motivated, and no government institution (e.g. public school) is allowed to endorse any religious position, because that could be construed as “establishing a state religion.” Evolution, on the other hand, is not religiously or even ideologically motivated, does not support any ideology, and is inconvenient to an awful lot of them (socialism included), hence Evolution being forbidden in ideological states such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union until 1965. But, as I mentioned when I said that creationists and communists are the same, good luck trying to convince them of any of that.

In 1987, a science teacher named Don Aguillard sued the state of Lousiana over the issue of YEC. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCotUS) ruled in Aguillard’s favour, finally killing off YEC as a mainstream movement and driving its adherents to the fringes of society. This, as I hinted in the previous paragraph, was the culmination of several decades of court cases challenging various laws either criminalising the teaching of Evolution or even merely protecting YEC, which I shall reiterate, is pseudoscientific religious extremism. However, as anyone over the age of a zygote is indubitably aware, YEC still isn’t actually dead.

The Discovery Institute (DI), a sort of law firm dedicated to the advancement of YEC, doubled down after Edwards vs. Aguillard (don’t ask me why the plaintiff’s name is second, but that’s the convention when referring to this case), but since YEC had been dealt a backhanded blow from which there was no recovery, the DI decided to rebrand instead. The Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), a self-described Christian think tank and a not-for-profit publisher closely associated with the DI, decided to replace all instances of “creation” with “intelligent design” and “creationists” with “design proponents” in their flagship textbook, Biology and Origins. They also changed the title to Of Pandas and People. The book was distributed by the ICR, which is responsible for all of the talking points that everyone’s favourite fundamentalist lolcow, Kent Hovind, repeats ad nauseam even to this day.

The YEC ideologues’ intent was to push the exact same equine excrement in public schools, and having removed the strictly religious terminology, they thought that the next high-profile court case would go better for them. This case was Kitzmiller vs. Dover in 2005. The judge who presided over the case was appointed by President George W. Bush (a.k.a. “Shrub” in the online circles I frequent), so the DI was confident that they were going to win that time, and keep the proverbial Trojan Horse of intelligent design in public schools. Nonetheless, they also prepared for the worst, and FTE already had a draught for another edition of their book in which “intelligent design” would be rebranded as “sudden emergence.” As it turns out, the DI’s worst fears were realised, because all their efforts to cover their tracks were laid bare in court. The judge lamented in an interview afterward that he was appalled that his fellow Christians would be so deceitful in the efforts to advance their religion.

The previous three paragraphs are condensed from the following 1-hour-long video, so feel free to watch it if you have the time. If you don’t, keep scrolling to read my conclusion, I won’t keep you much longer.

Eighteen years passed between Edwards vs. Aguillard and Kitzmiller vs. Dover. As of this writing, it has been eighteen years since Kitzmiller vs. Dover, and even though the ICR is basically defunct at this point (the video contradicts that statement, but to be fair, this was a lecture from all the way back in 2007 that was published to YouTube in 2011, and a lot has changed in 16 years), since AiG and the DI are still active, it’s about time for there to be another court case involving “sudden emergence” and the new edition of FTE’s book, titled The Design of Life, or more likely, some rebranding thereof. Nonetheless, YEC has been backhanded so many times by now that it’s not going to magically return to the mainstream, despite the constant fearmongering that “even though atheism is on the rise, creationism is also on the rise,” as said by the same people who think that biological men belong in women’s sports.

YECs love to screech that “not teaching both sides is an attack on academic freedom,” and this is something that I love to point out to people who think that “not teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an attack on academic freedom!” CRT has just as much validity as YEC (i.e. none at all), so if you believe that schools should teach only that which can be shown to be true, then neither has a place in the classroom. In my original draught of this article, prior to making the decision to break it up into a series, this is the point at which I would segue into talking about how the word “racism” has been re-defined by racial ideologues and their useful idiots, the race grifters. However, this article is long enough, so you’ll have to wait at least another week for that. My next article might not be another instalment of this series, but instead the beginnings of a deep dive into Gnosticism. Meanwhile, I need to head off to my secret Hermetic occult meeting on the moon and get a star of chaos tattoo on my forehead.