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Thank you for all the thoughtful comments. Ebbie, as usual, asks an interesting and insightful question. I was raised as an Ancient Earth Creationist, believing that Genesis is true and also holding that the universe is billions of years old. So, yes, the idea that the universe is thousands of years old does seem strange to me. That says something about my raising, and it says something about my psychology but, of course, it says nothing about which view is correct. Einstein's theory seems strange to me. I believe it is true in spite of how strange it seems.   

Here is another belief common to both AEN and YEC:

4. All living humans share a common paternal ancestor and a common maternal ancestor. These common ancestors lived thousands of years ago (not millions of years ago), and therefore all humanity is one species, one "kind", one "blood".

For several generations, Ancient Earth Naturalists have been slowly moving toward the YEC position on this matter.   Some early Darwinists (though not Darwin himself) held to a polygenetic view of humanity; they thought that the races were actually different species. By the time of my childhood, in the 1960s, polygeneticism had mostly died out, but the mainstream view then was that the most recent common ancestor of humanity had lived well over a million years ago. Currently, many Ancient Earth Naturalists believe, based on mitochondrial DNA studies, that the most recent common maternal ancestor of humanity lived about 200,000 years ago. Many Ancient Earth Naturalists believe, based on studies of the Y chromosome, that the most recent common paternal ancestor of humanity lived about 60,000 years ago. Young Earth Creationists, as you know, generally believe that we are all children of Noah.

Kent
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