fma 03 enjoyer

Believing something not only without evidence, but that actively contradicts the evidence, creates patterns of thought that make you completely incapable of what is necessary in academia. Occasionally you'll find someone who is able to compartmentalize enough that they can succeed in academia and hold a completely different set of ideas in their personal life, but those people are rare.

Now, there ARE plenty of people who I would consider to hold conservative ideas and values in academia, but they're the kind of people who the MAGA movement has spent the last decade pushing out of the Republican Party, people like Ben Sasse or Jeff Flake, and they're not the kind of people Mr. Sachs and those like him consider "conservative" when they bemoan the lack of conservatives in academia.

I grew up in a British fundamentalist Christian free school, and while there I was really into young-earth creationism.

And the thing I think not everyone gets is that YEC, at least among the most devoted followers, doesn't just respond to science with "nuh-uh, the Bible (as interpreted by me) says the world is 6000 years old". They've tried to create their own scientifically supported paradigm for it, and in the process they've developed beef with every single academic discipline. And I do mean every single one, including Egyptology (Egyptian written history stretches back to before Noah's Flood on their timeline, so they have to rewrite the chronology of it to all postdate c.2500 BC) and English literature (they argue Beowulf is a historical narrative, and that Grendel is actually a T-Rex). I remember as a kid reading an article in one of their magazines that denied that stars are powered by nuclear fusion, because nuclear fusion could last for millions of years, so it's clearly an evolutionist lie - stars are actually fuelled by collapsing in on themselves.

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YEC-ism tends to imply a world that simply does not operate according to general scientific-materialist assumptions, at least in the elder days, a world with numerous blatant miracles in the range of recorded history.

As you pointed out, there's no reason to try to scientifically prove YEC theory, just accept that part of the theory is miraculous. There's no reason to have Christian rock, it's just worse versions of popular secular music, just accept that Christian music is different. The real problem is that they think aping popular culture will allow them to dominate it, instead they just make themselves into a pale copy of it and lose anything that involved true faith.

Growing up in an area where fundamentalist Christians were the majority, I've seen two different ways in which they've responded to secular science challenging their ideas about how the universe was formed. One group, the majority backed by the institutions, has decided to double down and challenge scientific understanding on its own terms (an option doomed to fail in my opinion because, if the methods of science could support YEC then at least some scientists would already be arguing for it). The other group, smaller and largely disconnected individuals, has incorporated scientific understanding as part of the works of God, imagining him as the creator who set everything in motion with deliberate intent and uses elegant methods like the laws of physics and evolution to guide creation.

I feel like the latter is a better option not least because that God is enormous and truly beyond understanding. The YEC God is just so small and... human.

In my own denomination (Eastern Orthodoxy), young-earth creationists (such as Fr. Seraphim Rose) don't bother with these elaborate pseudoscientific explanations, instead just invoking miracles. As for this and Christian rock, a lot of this comes down to the fact that American Evangelicalism is big and strong enough to be an important social bloc, but not enough to dominate society - Orthodoxy is either so small and ethnic-minority-coded it has no hope of being politically important (in the West and the Middle East), or the 1000+-years-old state religion deeply intertwined with the culture (in Eastern Europe and the Balkans), so they don't try to chase secular society's approval.

The other group, smaller and largely disconnected individuals, has incorporated scientific understanding as part of the works of God, imagining him as the creator who set everything in motion with deliberate intent and uses elegant methods like the laws of physics and evolution to guide creation.

Interestingly, support for young-earth creationism has absolutely cratered in the last 20 years. The percentage of Evangelicals who think that evolution is the best explanation for the origin of humanity has gone up from 24% in 2007 to 71% in 2025, among Mormons it shot up from 22% to 81%, and even among denominations that were already mostly pro-evolution, support for evolution has gone up - 58% to 80% among Catholics, 51% to 83% among mainline Protestants, and 54% to 76% among Orthodox. Any idea why this is? The obvious reason is "young-earth creationism is baseless pseudoscience", but it's not like it was better-evidenced in 2007.

I feel like the latter is a better option not least because that God is enormous and truly beyond understanding. The YEC God is just so small and... human.

In Germany in the 1980s, there was a radical disability movement. There were also huge gains in abortion rights (at the time, supported by Christians!). No one had exactly worked out how to bring together disability rights and abortion rights. In the late 1980s, conservative Christian groups started to use disability rights to attack abortion rights, going after the "disability indication," which allowed for abortion if the fetus had a disability. At first, disability rights groups resisted this. One group refused to support removing this indication because it would not improve the lives of disabled people, and out of the recognition that any parent who had a disabled child and wanted to raise them without institutionalization would be facing an immense political and social battle alone.

Later on, they started to embrace it. One specialist said that abortion was between the woman and her partner, but if they chose it based on disability, that was murder. Let's stop there and agree. In many ways, I do agree! I am very uncomfortable with the support of aborting fetuses that we know will be disabled. Let's say that abortion due to prejudice against the fetus is murder.

So what?

There is no way to enforce that. You could: 1) only allow abortion in the case that the parent has not had any screening of disability. (OR only allow post-screening abortion of able bodied fetuses if we want to be insane.) 2) Interrogate every candidate for abortion as to their reasons and only abort if the doctor is convinced it's not due to the fetus's disability.

Let's assume that in either case, you allow for an exception in the case of the health and life of the mother. This exception is the very heart of the problem with abortion bans. There is no way to make this exception under bans without killing women (nuance). We know that women died waiting for abortions to be approved pre-Roe, and we know that they die waiting for abortion approvals now. You have taken what might be a murder and made it a definite murder. Whatever you think of abortion, I think we should not kill people (women) in our efforts to not kill people (fetuses).

So now the wheat and chaff. A man has sowed good seed in his field and someone else has come after and sowed bad seed. My pastor just preached on this and in Kansas this is known as "cheat seed" which looks exactly like wheat and can't be told apart until harvest time. The man doesn't tell his workers to tear up all the cheat seed, because they'll pull the wheat up too, and the wheat is too important to risk.

The really hard thing about human life is that you can't always have justice. Sometimes that's because there is an injustice blocking it that needs to be removed. But sometimes, it just costs too much. You lose the wheat.

This is why abortion rights hinged on privacy. This is why there can't be any bans, even if you think it's wrong. But the people you think deserve abortion look exactly like the people you think don't, and when you spend time trying to sort it out, you tear up the wheat with the cheat. And by tear up the wheat I mean you actually literally kill people.