To expand on my earlier point about the sociology of religion, evolution versus creation is not actually a debate about evidence. Imagining that evidence is relevant is why scientists and philosophers find this debate so frustrating and baffling. Part of the cunning trickery of creationist believers and preachers is to pretend that their arguments are based on evidence, so that scientists, whose whole method is about evidence, will wrongly think they have won the argument when they prove the creationist claims about evidence are false. Such scientific proof that evolution is true has not even entered the real zone of battle, but has been completely tricked by a decoy.lehelvandor wrote: the key alternative(s) have been remarkably static over very long period of time and have not accumulated any comparable (in nature, in quality, in quantity) evidence. Somehow this doesn't seem to worry some at all.
Creationists understand that talk of evidence in this political debate is just another rhetorical device, since the broad mass of supporters of creationism don't care about science and have not a clue about standards of evidence. They are swayed by confident moral argument, not by facts. Creationist claims about evidence are just a confidence trick, a decoy to open up a pretend debate. Their claims about eyes and missing links and so on only need to be sufficiently plausible to convince believers that there is a reasonable debate on the status of evolution, even though in fact there is no such thing.
Evolutionists tend to be very naive about the real nature of a political debate whose goal is persuasion of a mass audience with simple myths rather than discovery of facts. Proving facts is largely irrelevant to social influence, at least in the short term. What is important is how people think, especially those who are sympathetic to creationism, and what debating methods actually affect their views. Hostile mockery of their faith is likely to be counter-productive, leading their pastors to bring out big guns such as 2 Peter 3:3 “Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.”
The logic here is that belief in evolution is regarded by church goers as just a way to avoid the moral lessons of the Bible. Those who promote evolution are simply seen as dangerous and deluded evil scoffers who mock the truth of God. Once the terrain of debate has been framed in this way as faith versus scoffing, it becomes a set matter of good versus evil, and no amount of scientific evidence will even be heard. Many atheist writers play into this scoffing trap, since they find it emotionally comforting to abuse creationists as idiots. Such abuse needs to be used with great care, since it only reinforces peoples' already existing prejudices.