“Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”” (from
Dinosaur Shocker)
The assertion in the above quote, that the Bible teaches a recent creation, is the basis for YEC’s rejecting scientific evidence for an earth that is 4.5 or so billions of years old. However, the Bible does not actually “teach” that the earth is a recent creation.
The young earth interpretation involves an extrapolation of and sometimes forced interpretation of various texts in the Old and New Testaments. Nonetheless, the Biblical authors had no concern whatsoever with “teaching” anything about the age of the earth, a scientific fact of which they were completely unaware, as were the intended audiences of the sacred texts.
Supposing, though, we take literally, and as scientifically accurate a biblical text that at least appears to indicate a young earth. By employing the same logic and consistent hermeneutic one must then take literally and assert that the bible teaches the existence of the firmament as a metal bowl, which is the literal meaning of
rakia.
We can add to this cosmological list those other relevant factors, such as a flat earth that floats on a body of water; that the earth is stationary; the sun literally rises and sets, and other such ancient semitic pre-scientific cosmological ideas depicted in the Bible.
For some reason, the creationsists in this thread have continued to evade this problem with their biblical literalism, an issue which is the crux of the matter.