Yup. I grew up literally believing in the creation of the world and the Flood, et al.
You just turn off (or never develop) your power of questioning.
Believers tell urban legends to each other. There an urban legend that scientists calculated the orbit of the earth and that confirmed that the sun had indeed “stood still” as is told in the Okd Testament.
My uncle, was as a professor of engineering at a respected university, recounted that legend to us. He pooh-hoohed anything non-scientific in other aspects of life, but unquestionably accepted all sorts of nonsense when it came to religion.
My dad told the story about a professor at the University of Utah that would take his students up the local canyons ever year to carbon date the granite in the mountains and one year that was a change of 10s or 100s of thousands of years. That explains why “science” gets the age of the earth wrong.
I was quite young at the time and just completely accepted it.
My biology teacher in high school taught evolution, but also let us know that he didn’t agree with it.
Another possible stimulus for the flood myth may have been the discovery of fossil sea shells at, or near, the tops of mountains. The great flood was a common explanation for such discoveries in medieval times, before the concept of geological upheaval was developed.
Back in 1988 or so, we had a substitute teacher in Geography for a couple of weeks. He would bear down on us with all his adult authority telling that sealife fossils found on the mountains indisputably prove the Biblical flood.
YECs have a habit of calling all radiometric dating “carbon dating” and intentionally not understanding how radiometric dating works.
There’s a history of YECs providing blind samples and requesting the wrong test and when the results come in declaring that the test simply does not work.
Though Austin {geologist Dr. Steve Austin, a YEC} described himself as “an age-dating agnostic”, he was eager to share with us the fact that he alone had radiometrically dated the Mt St Helens lava dome. Using potassium/argon dating, he determined a lava dome age of 350 000 years. His unstated conclusion was that radiometric methods are unreliable and give all sorts of bogus dates. There are, however, several other explanations of his results.
First, Austin sent young, low-potassium rocks to Geochron Laboratories. Such samples are very low in radiogenic argon, which is the isotope responsible for the radioactive decay that is the basis of the dating techniques. Although Geochron specifically stated that it did not want to deal with young, low-potassium samples, Austin sent them anyway and specifically stated in his paper that he did not reveal the origin of the samples. This “omission” can result in potentially large ranges of error in the results and also opens his research to ethical questions.
Very impressive, given that granite isn’t even carboniferous, and even for the rocks that are carboniferous like limestone or marble, carbon-dating still wouldn’t tell you the age of the rock.
That would assume a foreknowledge of the upcoming flood and the tools and skill to build a ship for the uninitiated. Which it would really need to be because if that hypothetical person lived in a sea town of worked in a seaport, it would be a much less impressive story. The whole idea is pretty implausible and if I was a betting man I’d say was made up whole cloth rather than embellished upon.
The flood myth of Atra-Hasis describes a huge ‘cube-shaped’ ship with a roof, which sounds more like a raft than a boat. Atra-Hasis had lots of help, and threw a party before the flood for his helpers, but didn’t enjoy it very much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atra-Hasis#Tablet_III
Floods were common in the ancient Middle East. Someone might plausibly have said to himself “there might be a flood even worse than that one my grandpa told us about; we should be prepared just in case”. And they might have read any number of different sorts of weather omens: Sure, those are unreliable, but sometimes folks guess right from them.
A raft is probably more likely than a ship, though.
Why would I suggest that? It’s an example of a creation myth describing events that happened long before people existed. Which is something Czarcasm said was difficult.