Or: How to Lose an Argument While Thinking You’ve Won It
Every attack on evolution from a religious standpoint follows the same path.
Not broadly. Not loosely. Mechanically.
Different authors, different platforms, same manoeuvres. Same misunderstandings. Same end point. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The argument ceases to look like reasoning and starts to look like choreography.
This is not because creationists lack intelligence. It is because once evidence is no longer the referee, the range of possible moves collapses. What remains is a script.
Here it is, step by step.
Step 1: Find a Gap and Call It a Failure
The opening move is always to locate something science does not yet explain exhaustively.
Usually one of the following greatest hits:
- The origin of life.
- Consciousness.
- A complex biological structure.
- A rapid diversification event.
This gap is never presented honestly. It is not described as an active research question or a frontier problem. It is framed as a scandal, an embarrassment, a fatal wound.
Phrases like:
- “Science cannot explain…”
- “Evolution fails to account for…”
- “No one has ever shown…”
Ignorance is rebranded as defeat.
But science has never claimed omniscience. It has claimed method. Unanswered questions are not bugs. They are the engine.
As Feynman put it, with characteristic clarity:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
Creationism does the opposite. It treats unanswered questions as intolerable and rushes to close them with certainty.
Step 2: Inflate the Gap Until It Looks Impossible
Once the gap is identified, it must be made to look insurmountable.
“Not yet fully explained” is inflated into:
- “Statistically impossible”
- “Too complex to arise naturally”
- “Equivalent to magic”
This is where probability abuse enters. Numbers are waved about without context. Timescales are ignored. Incremental change disappears. Evolution is misrepresented as a single blind leap rather than a cumulative process filtered relentlessly by selection.
Dawkins addressed this distortion decades ago:
“Natural selection is not a chance process. Chance is involved only in the mutation. Selection is the opposite of chance.”
Complaining that evolution relies on chance is like complaining that erosion relies on randomness while ignoring gravity.
The argument only works if evolution is caricatured beyond recognition.
Step 3: Freeze Science in Time
Now science must be immobilised.
If it cannot explain everything now, it is declared invalid. Current research is ignored. Partial explanations are dismissed. Competing hypotheses are portrayed as confusion rather than progress.
Science is treated as if it made a one time promise of final answers and failed to deliver.
Sam Harris cut straight to the asymmetry:
“Science is willing to let evidence change its mind. Faith is not.”
Science improves by being corrigible. Religion survives by being insulated. That is why science must be frozen. A moving target cannot be executed.
Step 4: Smuggle in God Through the Gap
This is the central sleight of hand, and it is never announced.
Once the gap is inflated and science paralysed, God appears. Quietly. As if the invitation were obvious.
No mechanism.
No constraints.
No predictions.
No test.
Just assertion.
Christopher Hitchens dismantled this move with one sentence:
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Calling ignorance “God” does not explain anything. It merely labels the mystery and declares it resolved. The question is not answered. It is shut down.
And the move is entirely arbitrary. Replace God with Zeus, Vishnu, Odin, aliens, or a bored simulator and nothing in the argument changes. The conclusion does no explanatory work.
That should worry anyone who cares about truth.
Step 5: Declare Evolution a Faith Position
Finally, the retreat disguised as a victory.
Evolution is reframed as:
- “Just another belief”
- “Materialist faith”
- “A worldview choice”
This is where standards are not raised but annihilated.
Provisional models supported by converging evidence are equated with unfalsifiable metaphysical commitments. The difference between “this works until shown otherwise” and “this must be true regardless” is erased.
Dawkins again, without cushioning:
“Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
If everything is faith, then nothing has to answer to reality. Debate ends not with a conclusion, but with a shrug.
Why the Script Never Changes
Because it cannot.
If a creationist article admitted:
- What evolution actually claims.
- How cumulative selection works.
- Why gaps are expected in an unfinished science.
- How often gaps have closed before.
The argument would collapse on contact.
So the same gaps are recycled.
The same misunderstandings repeated.
The same conclusion preloaded.
This is not accident. It is self preservation.
The Ultimate Irony
Creationists love to accuse evolution of being unfalsifiable.
Yet their God explains every possible outcome:
- Complexity proves design.
- Simplicity proves elegance.
- Order proves intention.
- Chaos proves mystery.
- Evidence confirms God.
- No evidence also confirms God.
Karl Popper warned exactly where this leads:
“A theory that explains everything explains nothing.”
A claim that cannot lose is not powerful. It is empty.
The Real Divide
This is why atheist and theist debates go nowhere.
One side is asking:
“What follows from the evidence?”
The other is asking:
“How do we protect the conclusion?”
These are not opposing answers to the same question. They are different games played on different planets.
The Bottom Line
Science does not promise certainty.
Religion demands it.
Science does not fear ignorance.
Religion cannot tolerate it.
Science keeps working.
Religion keeps repeating.
And when every article walks the same five steps to the same convenient conclusion, the problem is not evolution.
It is a script mistaking repetition for truth.
Familiarity is not evidence.
Confidence is not argument.
And convenience is not explanation.
If it were, the universe would be a much smaller place.