Reddit reviews The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition
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Here's my reading list on Reformed Perspectives on Creation. I don't agree with everything written by all of the authors, but they are all worth reading. The also aren't all written from a Reformed perspective, but many of them are. If you are looking more for a Scientific perspective I'd particularly recommend Collins, Jelsma, and Haarsma since those are the ones written by scientists instead of theologians. If you didn't see it already, I also listed a number of other resources by Collins yesterday in the post about his AMA.
Alright, finally responding about the young-earth creationism. Sorry this is kind of long, because the whole story requires a bit of a history lesson.
First, if you want to learn about YEC as a movement, the best book I can recommend is this giant tome by historian Ronald Numbers.
Second, the thing most people don't understand about YEC is that it's super modern. This will be relevant, I promise.
A short history: For most of the church's history, the date of creation was an interesting calculation for bored monks, but virtually nobody cared. Augustine even wrote in the 4th century that we'd be fools to insist that the stories are literal if our best science tells us something different. There were various debates about it, but they were always sort of an academic sidenote.
In the second half of the 19th century, a bunch of academic things happened at once that led a subset group of Christians to freak the hell out. Evolutionary theory, the historical critical method, and a few other social developments led some to believe that the church's historic views would be abandoned. One of those groups were the Seventh Day Adventists, a "grown up" offshoot of an apocalyptic cult from the 1840s. SDA has always been viewed with a small amount of suspicion by mainstream Christians.
Anyway, in the 1920s, a Canadian SDA member named George McCready Price proposed something he called "flood geology", where the flood of Noah (and perhaps a few smaller floods) could be used as a basis to explain the findings of geology.
This was new. He wasn't saying that we should ignore science for faith or that science should help us interpret our scriptures. He was saying that we should use our faith to interpret our evidence. In other words, starting with the knowledge (via scripture) that there was a Flood, we would work to figure out how the evidence that we see could be consistent with that. The evidence, properly understood, he argued, will agree with the Biblical story. If we can't figure it out, that's also fine - we would just trust that eventually new evidence would come to light or a new geological mechanism would be discovered, since we already know there was a Flood.
For forty years or so, this was just a weird SDA view. Then something happened that led the US to push hard for more science education in schools. A second Christian freakout happened and a petroleum engineer named Henry Morris rediscovered Price's work. In 1961, he published a book called The Genesis Flood, which spread like wildfire. This was the start of the "scientific creationism" movement.
The reason we call it "scientific creationism" is because of the insistence that there is a mechanism by which the evidence can fit the Biblical stories. In other words, creationists insist that their views are, or can be, scientific, and that it's only the short-sightedness or atheism of non-creationists that makes them refuse to view the evidence the "right" way.
This is a powerful concept, and it's the concept that keeps most people in the YEC movement, including me. There's a lot of "research" by YECs on how, for example, the latest science on DNA or population genetics or astronomy might allow for a young universe or for repopulation of the Earth after a great Flood. They've got whole textbooks on the latter subject, in which they propose things like rapid tectonic plate movement and ultra-fast evolution constrained to "created kinds". You can learn a lot about these subjects without having to stray outside of the YEC bubble.
Where it falls apart is when you try to put it all together. Any given piece of evidence can be squeezed into one of the YEC models, but all of the pieces of evidence together cannot. It has a lot in common with conspiracy theories.
Ultimately what changed my mind is a series of books that came out in the 2008-ish timeframe. Some of them were about the Biblical text, like The Lost World of Genesis One, arguing that it was never intended to be read as a history. Some of them were from scientists like Francis Collins who argued that evolutionary theory was obviously true but was not a threat to Christianity. And, of course, finding out that the Roman Catholics (who are more than half of all the Christians in the world) have never opposed evolution because they weren't trying to read the stories literally in the first place.
It was a long process, multiple years. Most people who are coming out of YEC but remain Christians go through negotiation phases. Ok fine, so maybe the Earth isn't young but... Ok fine, so maybe the Genesis text isn't a literal history but... Ok fine, so maybe some things evolved but... Etc. Intelligent design is a common stopping point, the idea that while evolution is a real phenomenon, it's being actively guided by God in some/all instances. I was also a youth pastor at the time, and most of my students (and their parents) were YECs themselves. That was a fun minefield to navigate.
Anyway, for me and others who have remained Christians, my biggest concern is the way that obviously false ideas like YEC are welded onto the faith. If the Earth isn't young then Jesus doesn't love you and you will die in your sin and life is meaningless. That sort of thing. The problem is that it sets up your faith as a house of cards with weird mythologies as the base, and as soon as you come across a photo of one building from 8000 BC, the whole thing comes crashing down. That's tragic.
Tagging people who wanted to read this: /u/bigbearboy144 /u/Respect_The_Mouse
Edit: Sidenote - I was recently cleaning out my church's library and came across a Henry Morris book. That one virtually teleported into the discard pile.
I've not read it, but if you want to research the subject, you absolutely MUST read this. It is not religious in nature, but more like a documentary/history of the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Creationists-Scientific-Creationism-Intelligent-Expanded/dp/0674023390/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418686796&sr=1-1&keywords=The+creationists
I remember reading about the Great Deluge in some of the creationists 'textbooks' my mom had lying around when I was little. Their ideas don't actually seem to change all that much. The bulk of creationist arguments I've run into all have a direct lineage to early creationist thinkers.
There's a pretty good book called The Creationists which goes into their history and their ideas. Reading this was a revelation for me. I could recognize almost all of the beliefs I'd been bombarded with growing up.