You forgot the conclusion. The prevailing opinion about the world's age is not 6000 years. I think some fundamentalist Christians might try for 4004 BC so 6000 years ... ish but I don't even know anyone who subscribes to that nonsense. I'm sure there are some who do but they are not my mates. They are certainly not general population.
Regardless I think the comment was about applying current "solutions" to prior times and seeing if agrees with what we'd call a good solution in retrospective, not what people believe currently.
I have some pretty odd ideas myself and I trained as a Civ Engr, run an IT company and have subscribed to New Scientist for about 30 years.
Sometimes I notice aspects of my own woolly thinking and sort them out but I've no doubt that many remain. The funny thing is that "woolly" is in the eye of the beholder or something.
I'm not daft enough to have misplaced 85% of the entire universe unlike the entirety of physicists and their "science" 8)
He believes the Earth is 6000 years old, though. He rationalizes the science he works on as (the biblical) God testing his faith. My father, who works at his C-14 company, also believes this. I will never understand.
In this moral framework, I wonder what the right ethical thing to do when another creationist is the customer? Do they both accept the lie^H^H^Htest of faith?
It depends on how they interpret the results to the customer. They might show the data and say that "it seems that this rock is million years old". They don't have to believe it themselves.
If the customer is another creationist, they probably marvel the perfection of God's creation and how impeccably he has been able to fake the age of the universe. You know, they probably see it as an evidence of God's omnipotence.
Whether you ever get to the bottom of this, keep loving them both. That is something that does not need a god or science or even a capital letter - I'll assert: Love is the fundamental thing that transcends any ideology.
I'm going by anecdote to denote the general population's opinion, ie what people have said to me.
I do agree with you that people attenuate their espoused beliefs based on perceived popularity and that is why I put the comment in [] above. Sometimes I think we need to affirm our own beliefs sometimes and that is what I've done by asking for dialogue and not downvotes.
It wasn't really a controversy or dogmatic issue to average Christians until the early 20th century. Trying to argue with a Young Earth Creationist on scientific grounds is super pointless - literally everything can be either dismissed because you weren't present, or reinterpreted to fit the viewpoint. I would know because that used to be me.
It's also highly unlikely that you'll successfully argue with them from a theological/hermeneutical perspective either. If you'll forgive me entering into a major time controversy here: a young earth creationist, and many evangelicals, place the original Biblical text as penned by the human author at a nearly deified level. Unless the text is blatantly poetic, even in translation, or explicitly labelled a parable the text is assumed to be literal.
The human author of scripture is basically assumed to be, more-or-less, possessed by the deity lending only their authorial voice to the literally word-for-word transcript given to them by God. (For support they quote scripture, of course, "All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness" (II Timothy 3:16). Believing that, the stakes become incredibly high for a biblical literalist, many/most of whom are also YEC. If any scripture is found to be "false" by modern standards, it basically invalidates the whole thing.
I say this having believed this version of Biblical inspiration and knowing I'd have been given permission to teach it in church once upon a time.
The tricky bit is that modern standards aren't an appropriate measure to hold an ancient document with different goals, but that's literally a books worth of argument and background to dive into.