Are young earth creationism and dispensationalist eschatology to blame for our conspiracy theory problem?

I thought I was seeing a few things along those lines, then came across this essay.

Of course, he doesn’t interact at all with wether YEC and a futurist-linear reading of Revelation are true. And that kind of matters a little bit. (understatement)

But that aside, I think he’s partly on to something. Let’s acknowledge that in all things human there are tradeoffs. With firm embracing of some truths, there’s the tradeoff of a set of weaknesses—a vulnerability to not recognize other truths. It happens all the time. In this case, our belief that science has gotten some things profoundly wrong (mostly by not staying in its lane), and our belief that the world will be reordered in a much more conspicuously evil way before Christ’s return do make us vulnerable to a couple of things: a) Being overly dismissive of science, empirical truth, observation and logic and facts in general; and b) Being overly quick to see secret sinister things going on all over the place whenever lots of change happens.

So, yeah, there’s a smug dismissal of YEC and dispensationalism there. That’s not entirely unearned. But, more importatnly, I think he’s identified some genuine temptations that far too many in our circles have already fallen to.

I would argue the author’s conclusions a bit different. I think what has driven much of this is that science has for the last 30-40 years at a growing rate that Science=Truth. Those who resist Science are diluted. The challenge is that science changes. What we knew about the virus in February before the outbreak and what we know at the end of the main pandemic phase is very different. If Science was really truth, it wouldn’t have changed. In addition, there is not one single “message” from Science. Even the CDC, WHO and other agencies had different opinions, ideas… So people said, if Science doesn’t really know what it is doing, why am I going to restructure my whole life for the Science idea of the week (i.e. one week masks, next week shutown, the next week no masks….)

David hits the bulls eye. When Scripture is rejected, there remains no sure source of truth. Science has been elevated to that pinnacle by many, but the changing declarations of science breeds skepticism. Science fanatics double down and label questioners “science deniers.” In so doing, they yank the rug out from under their own authority. If the views of science are the closest we can come to truth, we’re in trouble, and most people realize that. How much better to return science to its proper sphere as a handmaiden in the endeavor to better understand the physical universe, not the god of the universe.

It looks to me like the article references science, not “popular misunderstandings under the label of science,” which is a different thing.

But there’s a pretty widespread gap in how many view science: not understanding or factoring in how humans work with probabilities. We tend to look at a source of truth-claims and think “either A is definitely true or the source is wrong.” But real science (vs. popular “the science” claims) is always a probability claim.

That doesn’t make it useless or suspicious. It’s like weather forecasting. We get that predicting the weather is complicated and meteorologists are often wrong. Weather is one area where the reality of how science works seems to reach popular consciousness pretty well. We know “the weatherman” could be wrong, but we still find the information useful, because we understand that it’s a probability.

So “science” doesn’t change as much as it may seem to. It’s nearly always—after stripping away the hype—making a probability claim. If the claim is “there’s a 80% chance of rain today” and it doesn’t rain, we don’t usually say “science was wrong.” It wouldn’t be fair if we did, because “science” said rain was probable not certain.

Sometimes the probability is so high, it’s not meaningfully different from “certain” in everyday usefulness. And sometimes there’s a consensus among scientists that something is extremely probable and it turns out to be wrong. That doesn’t make it any more suspicious or useless than meteorology.

I think, too, from our point of view as lovers of theology, we need to recognize something. There’s a nexus where science and theology meet. It’s unavoidable. As an example, Scripture tells fathers not to provoke their children to wrath. But Scripture nowhere tells us what a child is. We know this from observation and deduction as well as from intuition. Both are truth-sources outside of Scripture and Scripture is dependent on those outside sources to communicate to us. This is inherent in communication by means of a book and reading… or any communication using words, I would think.

So, it’s ultimately incoherent for Christians to take a dim view of observation and reasoning. Without them, we don’t have Scripture either in any useful sense—and science is just doing observation and reasoning in a disciplined and intentional way to try to learn something.

The “conspiracy heuristic,” as the author put it, requires maintaining this gap in how Scripture builds on non-Scriptural truth to tell us what it tells us. At bottom, conspiracy thinking is anti-intellectualism + presumed hostility to all that is not overtly Christian (and a few other things in the mix). That second piece is another large topic.

“Archaeology (science) is about fact… if you want truth, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is down the hall.”

-Prof. Indiana Jones

We need to disconnect “truth” from science. Science is about what we can measure, observe, and predict. Truth is something more abstract that is the realm of philosophy and religion, especially the Bible and God’s revelation.

[Mark_Smith]

Facts are things that are directly observable. They require no “faith.” Examples (these are going to make most of you mad at me):

-The universe is 13.8 billion years old (measured observation by multiple independent methods… not opinion… its a fact)

I will just take one of these. Herein lies the problem. It is not fact. It is observed today and with the science that we have today to be about 13.77 Billion years old. But if we go along the path of how science got here we notice that in the 1920’s it was measured to be about 1.8 Billion years old. In the 1950’s about 4.55 Billion years old. In the 1990’s it was thought to be between 12-13 Billion years. Than in the late 1990’s it was thought to be 13.80 Billion years old. Than down to 13.77 Billion years old in the 2000’s. Some new estimates are pointing it to be between 12.5B and 13B years old (https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/universe-may-be-billion-years-youn…).

The truth is, that as science matures, we gather more data, we understand data better, we obtain more observations, it changes what we think and how we calculate things. All of these measurements and calculations are further based on the assumptoins that we are in an expanding universe and that there was a Big Bang. It is also limited by things like the Planck constant. We may find out that the universe is actually bigger than what we can currently observed. We don’t even truly know what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are….

So when people say that “this is fact” and then new research comes out from someone like Adam Reiss a Nobel Laureate that questions some assumptions, we need to scratch our heads and be careful what we call “fact”. If it was truly fact, than there could absolutely be no possibility for anyone questioning it. And if anyone questioned it, they should be shunned. Which is the very opposite of the essence of science.

This article sums it up best (https://phys.org/news/2019-09-universe-billion-years-younger.html).

“It is difficult to be certain of your conclusions if you use a ruler that you don’t fully understand,” Loeb said in an email.

There is more uncertainty to the age of the universe than certainty at this point.

Our friend Mark illustrates the problem beautifully. Changing “facts” of science are pronounced irrefutable, and those who question them are considered science deniers. Scientists demand immunity from questioning, banishing dissenters, including scientists with a differing minority opinion, to public discourse jail. All the while, the declared “facts” are not facts at all. They are simply the most recent majority conclusions, which differ from yesterday, and will almost certainly change tomorrow. If scientists can’t distinguish between actual “facts” and tentative conclusions, please forgive the general public for believing that many so called scientific facts are less than factual. To regain credibility, scientists should stop bullying the public with declarations of certainty, and take their rightful place as students who endeavor to understand our physical universe and who humbly offer their most recent unsettled conclusions.

I am not going to get into an argument with you, but what you wrote is silly. You can’t compare the 1920s number to todays for age and say, see, science changes. We know why Hubble’s age was too young. He knew it was too young at the time! He only had the red-shift to a dozen galaxies to measure his Hubble constant!! But he was faithful to sticking to what he could measure… Today we have millions of red-shifts…

Your second article is simply about one method to measure age. There are many methods. Some are susceptible to large errors. The article says one age measurement only used 2 observations of gravitational lensing. Yeah… of course it had large error bars! Other papers used dozens of gravitational lenses and got a result consistent with several other measurements of age. Taken as a whole, we know the age to be 13.8-ish billion years. The point is it is not a few thousand. Dancing around the 13 billion number does not show that science is not right. The point is the Big Bang happened as observed. Its an observation. The FACT as I write is the mechanism for the universe’s expansion (the Big Bang) and the approximate age (13.8 billion years).

So whatever model you come up for the universe had better take those observations into account. That is my point. You can’t say scientists disagree as to whether the age is 13.8 or 13.77 billion years, so I’m going with 7,000.

Also, why would Planck’s constant change due to universe size? We measure it right here all the time… on Earth.

[Mark_Smith]

So whatever model you come up for the universe had better take those observations into account. That is my point. You can’t say scientists disagree as to whether the age is 13.8 or 13.77 billion years, so I’m going with 7,000.

I am not arguing about 7,000. I am arguing about you stating, that is is a “fact” that it is 13.8 Billion years old. And it is not a “fact”. It is what we know today. If you want to believe that it is 13.8 Billion years old and that in the next 2,000 to 5,000 years that the human race will never develop changes to Quantum mechanics or that new observations are not obtained through space telescopes or other scenarios, that is fine. I don’t view it as an immovable fact. We can’t even stay stable on the age in the last 90 years. I don’t view it as the same level of fact as “God is faithful”. That statement, I do view as an unmovable fact that not only exists within our view of age and the universe, but it transcends all of eternity and is independent of any new data or discovery. It stands and it will stand foreever.

[Mark_Smith]

is a measurement or observation. It is not the explanation or hypothesis or theory. Just the mere measurement.

You didn’t measure the age of the universe. You measured something else and then claimed that means the universe must be so many years old.

The fact or data point is the result of measurement you took. No objections to those types of fact statements.

Yes, in a way. If our opinions and biases lead us to reject authority in general, then that will spill over into politics as well. If we reject plain observation and support irrational conclusions based on our a priori beliefs alone, we will be susceptible to conspiracies.

Belief in dispensationalism or YEC need not lead to conspiracy thinking, but all too often the people that hold to both of those reject rational thinking. For example, flat eartherism is increasing, especially among the YEC crowd. I suspect the author used “dispensationalism” to mean belief in a literal end-times with rapture, etc. rather than meaning a separation between the church and Israel.

[dgszweda]

Mark_Smith wrote:

So whatever model you come up for the universe had better take those observations into account. That is my point. You can’t say scientists disagree as to whether the age is 13.8 or 13.77 billion years, so I’m going with 7,000.

I am not arguing about 7,000. I am arguing about you stating, that is is a “fact” that it is 13.8 Billion years old. And it is not a “fact”. It is what we know today. If you want to believe that it is 13.8 Billion years old and that in the next 2,000 to 5,000 years that the human race will never develop changes to Quantum mechanics or that new observations are not obtained through space telescopes or other scenarios, that is fine. I don’t view it as an immovable fact. We can’t even stay stable on the age in the last 90 years. I don’t view it as the same level of fact as “God is faithful”. That statement, I do view as an unmovable fact that not only exists within our view of age and the universe, but it transcends all of eternity and is independent of any new data or discovery. It stands and it will stand foreever.

fact does not mean “true.” Fact means observation or measurement.

[AndyE]

Mark_Smith wrote:

is a measurement or observation. It is not the explanation or hypothesis or theory. Just the mere measurement.

You didn’t measure the age of the universe. You measured something else and then claimed that means the universe must be so many years old.

The fact or data point is the result of measurement you took. No objections to those types of fact statements.

A fact is a measurement in science. For example, I measure the distance to the Moon reflectors left by Apollo astronauts by way of the travel time of light.

But what is your point? I suspect it is to weaken the “billions” claim in preference of a smaller number. Am I correct?