Notes from a Flat Earth Conference
I&#x27;ve been spending quite a bit of time interacting with the young-earth creationist community on Reddit and YouTube.  It is closely related to flat-earth, though there is one significant difference: YEC is overtly religious, and specifically Christian.  Other than that many of the forms of argument are the same.  From that experience I have made two observations:<p>1.  These people are not idiots (at least the YECs aren&#x27;t, I can&#x27;t speak for the flat-earthers) and to dismiss them as idiots who will just go away is a serious mistake.  They are <i>very</i> good at presenting convincing-sounding arguments, and refuting them can actually be quite challenging.<p>2.  The root of their reasoning is a tacit acceptance of teleology, which cannot be <i>logically</i> refuted.  They approach existential questions with the <i>assumption</i> that there has to be some kind of point to existence, some transcendent meaning or purpose.  If you accept this premise, then there is actually a logically defensible line of reasoning that leads you to Christianity and thence to the inerrancy of the Bible, and thence to YEC (and even a flat earth if you&#x27;re really being intellectually honest!)  A failure to appreciate this is IMHO one of the reasons that the secular world is having such a hard time effectively resisting these movements.  A life without purpose makes no sense to these people, just as a theory at odds with the data makes no sense to someone with a scientific mindset.  So if science leads you to the conclusion that life has no transcendent purpose (and it does) then, on their world-view, science must be wrong, full stop.  No amount of data is going to persuade them otherwise.