My reading is proving interesting. I had not realised how very young YEC is. I thought it arose in answer to Darwin's work in the 19th century, but apparently, from then until the 1950's, the opponents were Old Earth Creationists, and at the turn of the 20th century there were only about 100,000 YEC's, within the Seventh Day Adventists.

On the other hand, and to be fair with regard to Augustine, here he is on the actual subject.

"In vain, then, do some babble with most empty presumption, saying that Egypt has understood the reckoning of the stars for more than a hundred thousand years. For in what books have they collected that number who learned letters from Isis their mistress, not much more than two thousand years ago? Varro, who has declared this, is no small authority in history, and it does not disagree with the truth of the divine books. For as it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth? For what historian of the past should we credit more than him who has also predicted things to come which we now see fulfilled? And the very disagreement of the historians among themselves furnishes a good reason why we ought rather to believe him who does not contradict the divine history which we hold. But, on the other hand, the citizens of the impious city, scattered everywhere through the earth, when they read the most learned writers, none of whom seems to be of contemptible authority, and find them disagreeing among themselves about affairs most remote from the memory of our age, cannot find out whom they ought to trust. But we, being sustained by divine authority in the history of our religion, have no doubt that whatever is opposed to it is most false, whatever may be the case regarding other things in secular books, which, whether true or false, yield nothing of moment to our living rightly and happily."

He has looked at evidence of long-standing Egyptian understanding of astronomy, and found it wanting, which, for a historian looking for documents, it is. As is the understanding of history in other places he had access to. He was not in a position to argue about the convincing evidence of geology, cosmology and so on, which modern YECs do, so where he would stand now is a moot point. His arguments had failed to keep the majority of creationists in the YE camp once physical evidence to contrary was available. He believed, based on the Bible, in a younger Earth than some at the time, but I'm not convinced that makes him what we would now call a YEC, or a good foundation for those beliefs now.

What he was chiefly concerned about is in the last sentence: "whatever may be the case regarding other things in secular books, which, whether true or false, yield nothing of moment to our living rightly and happily."

I have seen no evidence that believing secular science leads to any more wrong and unhappy living than believing in scripture has over the last 2000 years. Nor that it cannot lead to right and happy living.

To blame Darwin's work for the awfulness of the last century one would have to strip out the parallel effects of rapid communications, both private and public, developments in weaponry, and other industrial processes with the changes in where and how people lived and all the other changes following the Industrial Revolution.

All of these would have been contributory to that century having politics worse than those of Genghis Khan, the Aztecs, Torquemada, Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Bathory, Ancient Rome, the Christian Saxons in Essex who covered a church door with the skin of a Viking, various Chinese Emperors, all those leaders who thought it a good idea to have their households killed and buried with them; who are, thankfully, spread out fairly thinly over history. Unless there are far more others we can't know about.

You don't have to be taught to despise others as sub-human if that's what you want to believe. It wasn't Darwin, but the Bible that was cited as a reason for my Granny to be taught see those folk in carriages as her superiors. It almost caertainly wasn't Darwin that caused the Duff-Gordons to have themselves rowed away from the Titanic in a lifeboat with spaces in it because it did not enter their heads to save those they heard wailing, while regretting the loss of the their secretary's nightie. (That's the fairest assumption - Lady D-G was in the lingerie business. But she may have ordered the crew not to return according to some sources.)

Penny