Or: How to Lose an Argument While Thinking You Have Won It
Almost all creationist arguments against evolution follow the same well worn path. It does not happen broadly or loosely, but with an almost mechanical precision. Different authors, on different platforms, reach for the very same manoeuvres, repeat the very same misunderstandings, and arrive at the very same end point. Once you have learned to recognise the pattern, you genuinely cannot unsee it. The argument stops looking like reasoning and starts to look like carefully rehearsed choreography.
None of this is because creationists lack intelligence, and it would be a mistake to assume that they do. It is because, once evidence is no longer allowed to act as the referee, the range of available moves collapses dramatically. What remains, in the end, is a script that can be followed by anyone, regardless of how much they understand the science they are attacking. Here it is, set out step by step, so that the next time you meet it you will know exactly what you are looking at.
Step 1: Find a Gap and Call It a Failure
The opening move is always to locate something that science does not yet explain exhaustively. Usually it is one of a small handful of perennial favourites:
- The origin of life itself.
- The nature of consciousness.
- Some especially intricate biological structure.
- A sudden, rapid diversification event in the fossil record.
This gap is never presented honestly. It is not described as an active research question or as a genuine frontier problem still being worked on. Instead it is framed as a scandal, an embarrassment, and a supposedly fatal wound to the whole theory. The familiar phrases do the heavy lifting here, and they tend to recur word for word from one article to the next:
- “Science simply cannot explain…”
- “Evolution completely fails to account for…”
- “No one has ever once shown…”
In every case, ordinary ignorance is quietly rebranded as outright defeat. But science has never once claimed omniscience for itself. What it has claimed, all along, is a method. Unanswered questions are not bugs in that method; they are the very engine that drives it forward. As Richard Feynman put it, with his characteristic clarity:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
Creationism does precisely the opposite. It treats every unanswered question as intolerable and rushes to slam it shut with borrowed certainty.
Step 2: Inflate the Gap Until It Looks Impossible
Once the gap has been identified, it must be made to look completely insurmountable. The honest phrase “not yet fully explained” is steadily inflated into something far more dramatic:
- “Statistically impossible”
- “Far too complex to arise naturally“
- “Essentially equivalent to magic”
This is the point at which probability abuse enters the argument. Huge numbers are waved about with no context whatsoever. The vast timescales involved are conveniently ignored. Incremental change quietly disappears from the picture altogether. Evolution is then misrepresented as a single, blind leap in the dark, rather than the slow cumulative process that it actually is, filtered relentlessly at every stage by natural selection. Richard Dawkins addressed exactly 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 rather like complaining that erosion relies on randomness while carefully ignoring the steady pull of gravity. The objection only ever works if evolution has first been caricatured well beyond recognition.
Step 3: Freeze Science in Time
Now science itself must be immobilised. If it cannot explain absolutely everything right now, it is declared invalid on the spot. Current research is ignored, partial explanations are casually dismissed, and competing hypotheses are portrayed as confusion rather than as healthy progress. Science is treated as though it once made a single, one time promise of final answers and then shamefully failed to deliver on it. Sam Harris cut straight to the underlying asymmetry:
“Science is willing to let evidence change its mind. Faith is not.”
Science improves precisely because it is corrigible, always open to correction. Religion, by contrast, survives by being carefully insulated from any such correction. That is exactly why science has to be frozen in this argument, because a moving target cannot be conveniently executed.
Step 4: Smuggle in God Through the Gap
This is the central sleight of hand, and it is almost never announced openly. Once the gap has been inflated and science has been paralysed, God simply appears in the space that has been cleared, quietly and without ceremony, as if the invitation were somehow obvious to everyone. What is striking is everything that fails to accompany this appearance:
- No proposed mechanism of any kind.
- No constraints on what could happen.
- No testable predictions whatsoever.
- No conceivable way to put it to the test.
There is nothing on offer here beyond bare assertion. Christopher Hitchens dismantled exactly this move in a single famous sentence:
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Calling our ignorance “God” does not actually explain anything at all. It merely slaps a label on the mystery and then declares it resolved. The question has not been answered in any real sense; it has simply been shut down and ushered out of the room. The move is also entirely arbitrary. Replace God with Zeus, with Vishnu, with Odin, with helpful aliens, or with a bored cosmic simulator, and nothing whatever in the argument changes. The conclusion does no genuine explanatory work, and that should worry anyone who actually cares about getting at the truth.
Step 5: Declare Evolution a Faith Position
Finally comes the retreat, cleverly disguised as a famous victory. Evolution is suddenly reframed as something far less solid than it is:
- “Just another kind of belief”
- “A form of materialist faith”
- “Merely a worldview choice”
This is the stage at which standards are not raised at all, but quietly annihilated. Provisional models supported by mountains of converging evidence are casually equated with unfalsifiable metaphysical commitments. The crucial difference between “this holds until shown otherwise” and “this must be true regardless of anything” is simply erased. Dawkins put the contrast again, without any cushioning:
“Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
If absolutely everything counts as faith, then nothing whatever has to answer to reality. The debate ends not with a hard won conclusion, but with a comfortable and meaningless shrug.
Why the Script Never Changes
The script never changes for the simple reason that it cannot. If a single creationist article were ever to admit the following honestly, the whole structure would fall apart at once:
- What the theory of evolution actually claims.
- How cumulative natural selection genuinely works.
- Why gaps are entirely expected in any unfinished science.
- How often such gaps have quietly closed in the past.
The argument would collapse the moment it made contact with any of that. And so, instead, the same tired gaps are recycled, the same misunderstandings are faithfully repeated, and the same conclusion is loaded in well before the discussion has even begun. This is not an accident or an oversight on anyone’s part. It is straightforward self preservation, dressed up as careful inquiry.
The Ultimate Irony
Creationists love to accuse evolution of being unfalsifiable, which is a remarkable charge given their own position. Their God, after all, manages to explain every conceivable outcome equally well:
- Complexity supposedly proves design.
- Simplicity supposedly proves elegance.
- Order supposedly proves intention.
- Chaos supposedly proves mystery.
- Evidence is said to confirm God.
- A total lack of evidence somehow confirms God as well.
Karl Popper warned us exactly where this kind of thinking leads, and the warning has aged extremely well:
“A theory that explains everything explains nothing.”
A claim that simply cannot lose, under any circumstances, is not powerful at all. On closer inspection it turns out to be completely empty.
The Real Divide
This is precisely why so many debates between atheists and theists go absolutely nowhere. The two sides are not really answering the same question at all. One side keeps asking what actually follows from the available evidence. The other side keeps asking how best to protect a conclusion that was fixed long in advance. These are not two opposing answers to a shared question; they are two entirely different games, played by different rules on different planets.
The Bottom Line
Science does not promise certainty, whereas religion positively demands it. Science does not fear ignorance in the slightest, whereas religion cannot tolerate it for long. Science quietly keeps working away at the problem, whereas religion mostly keeps repeating itself. When every article walks through the same five predictable steps to reach the same convenient conclusion, the real problem is not evolution at all. The problem is a script that has mistaken sheer repetition for truth.
Familiarity, in the end, is not the same thing as evidence. Confidence is not the same thing as a sound argument. And convenience is most certainly not the same thing as a real explanation. If any of those things were genuinely true, the universe would be a very much smaller and duller place than it actually is.