Vox Oculi
Puritan Board Freshman
I'm not sure how YEC/OEC fits into these.
What has been created now only comes before our observation as a "product." The act of creation as a "process" is beyond human investigation. We only come to understand the process by divine testimony. On the other hand, the sciences are observing processes.
Well, empirical sciences do this. But historical/forensic science, which involves both Creation and Evolution as origins theories, do not observe the processes being investigated. Experiments can be performed, sure, but not on the process in question, only on a process one substitutes as being (one thinks) quite like the one in question, and then extrapolating the results. You're quite right that the only way to be fully confident about what happened in the past is if someone told us. History does an adequate job of this through human writers. But before there were any humans alive to record what happened (Day 1-5), another witness is necessary--and only God satisfies this for us, giving us unquestionable hard data that can be used to formulate further hypotheses and investigate how subsequent events may have unfolded and yielded the tangible evidences we observe today.
In either case, whether young earth or old earth is the hypothesis, the attempt is to convert the "process" into a "product" which cannot itself be investigated. Hence the "ism." The young earther is beginning with the "process" as he understands it from special revelation, and trying to reduce it down to smaller pieces of evidence. The old earther is beginning with the smaller piece of evidence and building up to a larger process without any evidence that the larger process could take place naturally.
I would say that this is only really the case for nonChristians without a witness, and practically speaking, the OECs who don't take God's Word seriously and therefore can't appeal to His witness to bolster their hypotheses. Given what I said above.