This for me is incomprehensible - I'm left in a mental flap of just how extreme this position is. To me it means a rejection of almost the entirety of modern science. Great swathes of physics, biology, geology, archaeology, astronomy, anthropology and even maths have to be wrong for them to be right.
Perhaps we could have a shot at putting a list together of stuff that no longer works if the YEC world view is right.
I assume that by "if the YEC world view is right" you mean that you come to this conclusion by some type of divine revelation not by science, right? Because if by science ... then it all must still work. So your question is: If we were to find out that the YEC position is in fact correct, what parts of science would we have to abandon because it is untenable?
I would say none. If that is indeed the truth, then we are operating under that truth right now and just failing to see it. Actually that is the YEC position, that we all have the same facts but we arrive at different conclusions. What would change is our understanding of science. It is completely plausible that our senses are being deceived and what we are observing through scientific study is just plain wrong. Finding out that YEC is correct would force us to reevaluate our understanding of most all sciences and to figure out where our senses are being deceived.
As an example ... If all fossils are actually less than 10,000 years old, we would need to have a new understanding of how fossilization occurs because it must only take hundreds of years and the conditions that allow fossilization would be vastly different.
I can't imagine that my cell phone would stop working or that the internet would crash or satellites would fall from the sky if YEC were true. We would still be able to find oil and gas. We would still be able to dig up fossils. I just can't think of anything that would just stop working just because YEC turned out to be true. Like I said, if it is true, we are currently living under that truth we just don't know it.
If your question is what sciences would we need to reevaluate and adjust to the new paradigm, then I would say just about everything. But that is how science works anyway, so no real problem. At any time a discovery could be made that renders our current understanding obsolete, and as scientists we anxiously look for such discoveries. The ToE was one such discovery!
However, I would add that we build our understanding of reality on the best information we have, and based on that information, the earth is NOT very young. And I agree that YEC is a very, very extreme position. If the young earth argument was that the earth was millions of years old instead of billions, well I could probably wrap my head around that. But less than 10,000? Its out of the question for me and I think there are too many problems with that position to list in a single thread.
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*** Maybe a better question is: What
assumptions would we need to abandon if YEC were correct? I would be interested to see some responses to that question.
I think the big one would be that we would have to abandon uniformitarianism as the earth would have had to operate under different principles or at different rates in the past. An interesting thought is that we would need to discover a mechanism for increased rates of atomic decay that would also dissipate excess heat. That kind of mechanism could be a revolution in atomic energy.
HBD
Whoever calls me ignorant shares my own opinion. Sorrowfully and tacitly I recognize my ignorance, when I consider how much I lack of what my mind in its craving for knowledge is sighing for. But until the end of the present exile has come and terminated this our imperfection by which "we know in part," I console myself with the consideration that this belongs to our common nature. - Francesco Petrarca
"Nothing is easier than to persuade people who want to be persuaded and already believe." - another Petrarca gem.
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