Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism

I think that the flavour of young earth creationism you can get from Answers in Genesis is already as steelmanned as it gets. Notably they have a list of creationist arguments they consider weak and suggest not to use.
The fact that AiG young earth creationism is still quite weak despite all these efforts, is just evidence that young earth creationism is an inherently untenable position.

So on Pennock's view, testing young-earth creationism and thereby demonstrating it to be false is not possible without relying on naturalistic assumptions. This creates an opening for the creationist to question whether science needs to rely on naturalistic assumptions, and argue that one could create an equally valid version of science based on (fundamentalist) Christian assumptions.

Not quite. You don't really need naturalistic assumptions to falsify young earth creationism, you just need reasonable assumptions.
For instance, even if you don't outright assume that God couldn't have flooded the earth to punish mankind, magically creating water out of nothing and magically destroying it afterwards, you can't still explain the order in the fossil record, the geographical distribution of living species and fossils, the geological evidence of plate tectonics, and so on.
Young earth creationists resort to handwaving at this point, but they can never produce reasonable models explaining all this evidence.
The only real assumption that could explain all the available evidence consistently with young earth creationism is that God (or the Devil) forged evidence to make the earth appear much older than it is, but this assumption is not only theologically disturbing to theists, it is also epistemically nihilistic, since it can explain everything and therefore explains nothing.

I think the best steelman argument for YEC is that God simply created the world to seem old to science.

According to those who buy into a YEC interpetation of the BIble, God wrote it and indicated the earth is 6,000 years old and therefore it is 6,000 years old. It is inconsequential what sience has to say about it, since a sufficiently powerful God could easily make it seem as if the godless scientists and their fancy evidence are right.

The truly faithful will eschew "human knowledge" in favor of Godly Wisdom, trusting the Lord and having faith no matter the secular evidence says.

In my view, that is the only steelmanning that works for Creationism. Appeals to science and evidence by these folks always seem quite silly.

Is your original point that people are reluctant to steelman "LW-unpopular" positions? I have seen steelmen (of varying quality..) of frequentism, deathism, conservativism, etc.

I think the problem with young earth creationism is that it's just kind of a stupid position, along the lines of "pi is exactly 3!" Creationism you can steelman (I think smart Catholics try to).

Steelmanning anything:

A witch did it, using logically unexplainable magic. Therefore, you cannot logically explain it, and I win!

What? That doesn't even make sense...

It might not make sense using your paradigms (such as science, evidence, or logic), but I am using a different paradigm (unexplainable magic defined by my whim), and I don't accept any refutations coming from your paradigm. In democracy, all paradigms are equal, and emotionally, I prefer my paradigm. Therefore, I win!

One could take various simulation hypotheses as examples of modernized young universe creationism.

I don't think you can really "refute" that kind of hypotheses. They just stay right where they start, at their priors, not predicting any distinct experiences until a future date.

At most there may be good reasons for the priors to be very low, albeit you won't get very far with the complexity of gods in general - if our universe can plausibly culminate in creation of a super-intelligence, then the complexity of a god is at most not much higher than that of our universe; and for all we know it might well be lower.

What was the point of this exercise? Did you learn anything from it? I'm not sure I understood your essay, but I think you wound up retreating to general-purpose skepticism. That's an important topic, but the YEC doesn't seem to have contributed. Did you at least learn something about steelmanning, a topic you recently asked about?

I doubt that this particular idea is worth steelmanning. As far as I understand, the whole point of steelmanning is to learn something new by analyzing a perspective vastly different from "ours". Steelmanning is hard and the payoff is uncertain. Steelmanning something you know to be nonsense is very hard to do, given that you don't expect any payoff whatsoever.

Why is Young Earth Creationism not a good candidate for steelmanning? Because you know where these people come from: they have a severe case of motivated cognition due to their literal interpretation of a specific religious text. Given all the other problems with literalism, all the contradictions one has to overlook to believe it, what are the odds that their house of cards contains an element of a sound structure?

If your goal is to learn steelmanning, then it is best to start with an idea or a position which might contain a seed of new and useful information or ideas. Steelmanning deathism is something I've been trying to do here on occasion. Homeopathy might be another good candidate.

YEC on its face is false, and YEC steelmanned into something that could be true, for some tortured definition of "true", simply doesn't pay rent. Ham has basically admitted that his belief in YEC is not entangled with reality. Any attempt to steelman his position into a philosophical position by which YEC can be "true" leads directly into solipsism. To believe that there is such a thing as reality, and reality can be perceived by humans, is to reject YEC.

Creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians all have the same evidence—the same facts.

It's hard to come up with an interpretation of that that is true. Clearly, Ken Ham does not have the same facts in his head as I do. Perhaps in some sense he has the same facts available to him as I do. Putting his claim in LW terms, he seems to be saying that he simply has a prior of P(Bible is true) = 1. But it's simply a flat-out lie that YEC is just a matter of different priors. For instance, look at this page: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html . This is not merely a matter of "I agree with science about the facts", it's "I'm going to write a bunch of bullshit to make a claim that quite simply is not true". As just one example, Ham presents the case of a dead plant not being able to use sunlight. He purports to prove a universal quantifier (in no case can energy being added to a system increase complexity) by presenting a existential quantifier (there is a case where energy being added doesn't increase complexity). This is both invalid logic (you can't prove a universal quantifier by proving a particular instance) and based on a false premise (even a dead plant, when exposed to sunlight, increases in entropy [ETA: I didn't phrase that quite right. A dead plat, when exposed to sunlight, increases in "complexity", at least for some meanings of "complexity". Part of Ham's strategy is to use words with contradictory definitions]). Ken Ham doesn't disagree with scientists about what 2LOT says because he has different priors, he disagrees because he's a liar.

Furthermore, look at how this debate came to be in the first place. There was a video on YouTube of Nye saying that YEC shouldn't be taught to children. AiG replied with a video saying that YEC should be taught to children. You can't "teach" priors. Either someone has the same prior as you, or they don't. If you give an argument for your position, you aren't changing their priors, you are changing their posteriors. The very fact that Ham believes that YEC can be transmitted from one person to another shows that he has implicitly admitted that this is not a matter of priors, or "presuppositions", or whatever he wants to call it. You can't debate priors, Ham agreed to a debate, ergo Ham's YEC is not a matter of priors.

It's going to be really hard to come up with any models that don't run deeply and profoundly afoul of the Occam prior.

The problem with steelmanning YEC is that you can't do so without converting it into something that YECists would vehemently disagree with. For example, you could state that God created the world via an evolutionary algorithm, then implemented it recently, and either the Flood was a small local event or the layer in question was deleted from the record. This however would seem more like entirely rejecting YEC. You could say that God made it seem like evolution was true as a test of faith, but such is a universal explanation that has no predictive power, plus the bit about calling God a liar.

You could also reject the data -- claim that there is a massive conspiracy among all scientists to pretend that the fossil record looks like millions of years of evolution, migration, extinction, etc., instead of looking like ~2000 years of land and marine life covered with a year of massive flood sediment covered by ~4000 years of land and marine life, and also a conspiracy in the genetics community to cover up the fact that there was a genetic bottleneck of all species down to one or seven pairs of animals ~4000 years ago, and also that the rate of evolution is actually millions of times faster than scientists say it is, and a few others like that. Notable creationists like Ken Ham are obviously ringleaders of the conspiracy, else they would be decrying the conspiracy instead of acknowledging that data and pretending that a flood is really good at sorting by species things like pollen.

Some things are just really hard to steelman. The most convincing arguments for YEC, and most pleasing to its adherents, are those that argue as though science was about explanations, rather than predictions.

Note: for much of my life, I believed (gave roughly equal credence to vs evolution) in YEC. I maintained this via privilaging the hypothesis, motivated skepticism and related reading from AIG, until one day I made the "mistake" of saying I would change my mind if someone would provide , which someone did. Contrary to Bill Nye's fears that this belief would somehow cripple me in science or technology, it was compartmentalized into irrelevance, and in fact I was usually considered one of the smart kids in class. In fact, it was because of people from Ken Ham's group that I had in the same compartment as YEC not science, but religious belief (and therefore also many moral and political beliefs). As such, the fact that I'd have to restructure my core beliefs made me hold on to YEC for a couple more years. However, I think others don't take their beliefs as seriously as I do. Ken Ham, for example, doesn't actually believe YEC because it does not constrain his expectations (nothing would change his mind, as he has admitted).

If steelmaning in is to take the presumed weak idea to be refuted as serious as one can, the Sagan / Velikovski debate is instructional in general and the Talk Origins site is instructional in particular.

I think a good steelman would investigate the concept of faith.

Even when you live in a country with statistics that show a high divorce rate it can still make sense to have faith that your partner keeps their weeding vow. If you don't have that faith and your partner knows that you don't have that faith that will damage your marriage.

If you look of the entomology of believe at webster you see that it comes from a word having something to do with "to allow". Choosing to believe is an active act of allowing something instead of rejecting it.

Having strong belief in your own religion makes the things that your religion provides better. Mormons are a religion with relatively strong believe compared to some other Christian sects and the happen to be healthier as a result. Enough healthier that there's a published paper that says that one Mormon can tell whether another person is a Mormon by looking at characteristics that correlate with that person being healthy.

If that's your idea of what beliefs are about it just makes sense to trust what your church says and not seek for evidence for empirical evidence. If you are operating in that frame Young Earth Creationism might make sense if your Church preaches it.

*I'm a German and I have never meet a Young Earth Creationist to argue with him about his beliefs, so I might be wrong about what their frame actually entails. In particular Young Earth Creationism isn't a old framework but a modern one.

My computer crashed before I finished my post. When I reloaded it was grayed out and disappeared after being clicked on. Is there anyway I can retrieve posts like that?