My 3rd though 6th grade education was at a private Christian school. We were explicitly taught that the Earth is ~6,000 years old and that fossils are a test of faith in that belief. Fundamentalist creationists exist.
This isn't my field so forgive me if this is a little confusing, but consider the big bang's origin. We have empirical data that suggests that the universe is expanding. To be clear, the interpretation of the data is that it's expanding, but it's non-controversial since virtually everyone accepts that almost all galaxies are moving away from each other. It's also not controversial to suggest the idea to creationists that everything could have come from one point, and that point expanded in all 3 dimentions (time, space) then matter.
The belief on the creationist side is that this original event must have a cause, because everything else in the universe that we can empirically study obeys that principle.
The belief on the atheist side, for lack of a better label, is that the universe was/got created out of nothing. It must be possible for it to occur without God, in the purest sense of the word atheist.
But whether God created it or it created itself, there are only interpretations and no direct empirical evidence.
That doesn't help with the direction from my Seventh-day Adventist teachers that I should ignore empirical evidence. They specifically taught that any evidence found which would falsify their calculated age of the Earth should be ignored.
Yes, one can be a creationist and choose to believe that God created the universe with a big bang. But some creationists literally believe that the Earth was created in six days.
https://enki.org/2018/07/30/things-i-learned-in-elementary-s...