JustAsking
Sexy Member
Ironically, I have seen them play this very "maverick" card to bolster their claims: their "research" is not peer-reviewed because the scientific community is monolithic and exerts a lot of pressure to conform to the established order.
I have seen them use the very example of Einstein, who as you pointed out was largely brushed aside in the beginning.
Creation "scientists", very much like those who challenge the climate change consensus, cannot have their "work" reviewed, for any sympathizer would risk his or her career and grant money.
Yes, that is the irony. The Einstein example is used by Creationists because they know the public's ignorance on how science works will cause them to draw the opposite lesson from it.
They know that notion that fundamental science can be challenged is a sign of weakness for science in the public's eyes, rather than a sign that science is the ultimate sceptical process.
Since Americans especially lean towards being anti-institutional the notion of the lone persecuted scientific maverick challenging the establishment from the outside resonates readily with their cognitive frames of reference. It is the classic American internal narrative.
What they ignore is that scientific theories and findings are challenged daily from the inside and the outside by legitimate claims and pure crackpots. It is the very business of science to constantly challenge and refine scientific theories. What survives in the end are those challenges that are independently verified and applied by other workers in the field such that the new claims show superior utility to the existing theories.
The most useful theory wins, and that usefulness must be documented in the professional journals in full view of all the experts. The documentation needs to be complete enough such that others can duplicate the work and verify it. There is no other process in human intellectual life that is more objective and more sceptical than this.
So the answer to the Creationist's cry that "they laughed at Einstein", is the counter cry, "yes, and they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Your last point about the dogmatic scientific community rejecting challenges is now called "The Ben Stein Defense" after the idiot Ben Stein's participation in the shamefully dishonest movie, Expelled.
The ridiculousness of this is that if you had a legitimate bit of evidence for the speed of light varying widely, for example, (thus bolstering your YEC claims) you would simply submit an article to the professional physics journals demonstrating discrepancies in the speed of light in such a way that other workers in the field could reproduce it. You don't actually have to preface your article with "I am a Young Earth Creationist and I am here to discredit the established science."
In fact all scientists want to discredit the established science and work hard every day to publish something new, novel, or critical about established science. This is how careers are made and prizes are won.
If you manage to actually publish verifiable proof that the speed of light varies or did vary in the past then you are looking at a Nobel Prize, not dogmatic rejection.
Real scientists hold that all theories are provisional and will ultimately be replaced by better ones. And by better ones, they mean ones that work better. Anyone who thinks this is a weakness needs to ask themselves how it is that their great grandfathers read by gas lamp while only 150 years later people are posting in forums on the Internet using high speed computers the size of a book. The rate at which science reinvents itself while maintaing its astonishing usefulness makes all other fields of human intellectual pursuit appear to be standing still.