This is wrong, because the theory of evolution includes other factors such as gene flow, genetic drift, genetic recombination, endosymbiosis, niche construction and the Baldwin effect. It is also claimed that evolution is completely random and cannot produce anything useful. But it is not just "random", even if it does contain an element of chance. Mutations are random, but natural selection, for example, is not.

“Atheists believe that mankind came from rocks and monkeys”, creationists; "they believe that bananas are your cousins and fish are your grandpa!” The claim that evolution asserts that humans evolved directly from monkeys, which is a distortion of the actual theory. It says that humans and modern primates have a common ancestor, not that humans evolved from modern primates.

One way to try and discredit the theory of evolution is to ask for examples of fully formed chemical systems, life forms or organs that have formed before our eyes. “Why can’t we see new life forms “morphing”?” and “Where are the half-formed organisms?” I have been asked. Evolution is based on naturalistic processes, on the accumulation of small changes over time. It does not predict that new life forms will appear out of thin air. This too is an “impossible expectation”, another fallacy. More on this later.

Quote mining is often used in the context of creationists misrepresenting scientists' statements about evolution. Quote mining is a kind of straw man, a misrepresentation in which the meaning of the quoted material is altered by ignoring the surrounding context. In quote mining, you select specific quotes that seem to support your argument while ignoring the larger portion of text that contradicts it. By taking a quote out of context, you construct a distorted version of the original argument that is easier to attack than the actual position..Quote- mining can also abuse the appeal to authority by portraying an authority figure as supporting a position that they do not actually hold when you read their statement in full context. Citation mining treats scientific literature like the Bible: as proof texts.Once the proof text is found, the question is settled.

Creationists are also known for distorting scientific controversies and making them a God/design issue. For example, there is an article titled “Does evolutionary theory of evolution need a rethink?” The article describes a debate among scientists about the adequacy of the current evolutionary framework known as the modern synthesis, which primarily emphasizes genetic inheritance and natural selection. Is a broader framework, such as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, needed to capture the complexity revealed by recent scientific findings? The article is not about scientists harboring the notion of a supernatural being responsible for evolution.

2. Non-sequiturs abound. One such fallacy is the argument "Science has been wrong before, so the theory of evolution is wrong too". It is true that there are many cases in the history of science where scientific models or explanations have been overturned: Geocentrism, phlogiston, miasma, etc. This is part of scientific progress. Some of the published scientific articles are retracted. Despite error control mechanisms such as peer review, science is a human endeavour in which mistakes can be made. However, the conclusion "evolutionary theory of evolution is wrong" does not logically follow from the premise "science has been wrong before". This is pure wishful thinking. Not all scientific explanations are overturned. Just because science has been wrong about other things in the past does not mean that any scientific theory, model or explanation is wrong now. It is still the responsibility of the creationist to show how any model, article, or theory dealing with biological change is wrong.

3. The bumblebee fallacy is a term sometimes used informally to describe a faulty analogy in which someone argues that something must be possible because something else that is seemingly similar but poorly understood exists or is happening. The name goes back to an old (and false) popular belief that bumblebees should not be able to fly according to the laws of physics — and yet they do. "Scientists once thought bumblebees couldn't fly, but they can. Just because scientists say evolution is true doesn't mean they're right." However, these two concepts are not connected.

4. When you criticize creationism, creationists respond with a Tu Quoque fallacy. If you ask them for examples of God’s interactions with the world, they may say, “You evolutionists criticize creationism because it relies on faith and not observable evidence. But evolution is also just a belief system — you believe in invisible processes like macroevolution, the Big Bang and common descent. So you are no different from us.” Or they might say: “Well, evolutionary theory of evolution has gaps too, and scientists disagree on many details of evolution. Therefore, evolution is also based on assumptions and is just as flawed.” Instead of addressing the flaws in their view of creationism, they respond with accusations of hypocrisy (“You Do It Too”) which do not help to solve the problems of creationism.

5. They often invoke a false authority by using the opinion of an authority figure to support an argument, even if that authority is not an expert in the field in question. What does it matter if a computer scientist “renounces” evolution? Many people may be experts in their own field, but have no education to criticise evolution. Furthermore, creationists may present the contrarian view as the definitive truth in a subject area, such as James Tour's contrary view when it comes to abiogenesis. Marvin Lubenow’s views on human evolution are still considered by some to be revealed truth, even though his work (Bones of Contention) has been thoroughly refuted.

6. When they talk about the Big Bang or biological evolution, they may ask, “Were you there?”This thought contains the fallacy of the argument from ignorance (also known as the appeal to ignorance). This fallacy occurs when someone asserts that a statement is true because it has not yet been proven false. In this case, God’s special creation is true because it cannot be proven false by photographing the creation of the universe. In other words, the creationist claims that something that cannot be directly observed is not real, implying that the absence of direct evidence is tantamount to non-existence.

7. To get back to the “Were you there?” question. You could also ask the creationist, “So evolution isn't real unless you observed it yourself? But the Bible is true, even though you weren’t there to see those events either?” If the answer is “yes”, this is a fallacy called special pleading. You create a special category of objects to which the normal criteria do not apply. It is about applying different rules to different events and processes. Creationists were not present when Jesus supposedly rose from the dead or when Adam and Eve supposedly ate from the tree of knowledge, and yet they believe that these events took place. They believe the Middle Ages took place even though they did not personally experience them.

8. The God of the gaps occurs when gaps in scientific knowledge are used as evidence for a supernatural explanation. Creationists might argue, "We don't fully understand how life originated or how complex biological systems came to be, so God must have done it." Just because science hasn't answered all the questions doesn't mean that God’s special creation is the right answer.

9. The Mystery, therefore magic fallacy occurs when someone argues that because something is mysterious, unexplainable, or currently unknown, it must therefore be caused by a supernatural force such as the personal God of Christianity. No one has seen God interact with the world in any way. So how can God’s supernatural activity be a realistic explanation? Never in the history of science has “God did it” been found to be the correct answer.

They claim that there are no transitional fossils, and conclude that the entire theory of evolution is flawed, even though the fossil record is continually being completed by new discoveries. Another hasty generalization is to point to a handful of “creation scientists” who reject evolution as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on the subject.

12. An ad hominem fallacy means attacking the person making the argument, not the argument itself. An ”evolutionist” is a pejorative term for someone who is too gullible towards scientific materialism and its (imagined) authorities. They also attack the character of Charles Darwin, as if they can discredit his theory by portraying him as a horrible human being.

13. The use of slippery slope argumentation is widespread. The argument is that belief in evolution will inevitably lead to a number of negative consequences. They believe that there is no ethical basis in evolution; if evolution is true, then anything goes: pedophilia, zoophilia, racism, genocide. "There is no morality, no purpose, no meaning in evolution," they may retort. Evolution is seen as equivalent or at least as a bridge to atheism and from there to communism and marxism. The theory of evolution is associated with atrocities and genocides, racism, abortion, euthanasia and all sorts of other “moral failings” in a modern society. So humanity cannot have evolved, because if that were true, it would have very negative consequences for morality and society. On the one hand, this argument is based on the flawed premise that “only pleasant things can be true and real”. On the other hand, countless educated people do accept evolution as part of the way God created the universe. Nor does evolution deny the basis of religious or other ethical guidelines in daily life.

14. Creationists believe that if humanity arose in a “dog-eat-dog” competitive struggle, these biological impulses toward aggressive behavior must become normative in society. This is a theological version of what philosophers call the naturalistic fallacy. Applied to evolution, it means that if humanity has emerged through evolution, then we should develop our ethics on that basis. The observation that evolutionary processes are competitive and sometimes aggressive does not mean that human society should endorse competition or aggression as its fundamental moral values.

15. Creationists pointing out the incompleteness of the fossil record is a red herring, a distraction. Considering how rare fossils are, one would not expect the fossil record to be complete. They may be demanding that the theory of evolution explain the origin of life, even though that is the job of the theory of abiogenesis. By demanding more and more evidence, they are diverting attention from the wealth of evidence by fundamentally misrepresenting what science is and how it works. Not only are they distracting, but they are also a way to derail the discussion, and move the goalposts. This is also known as “whataboutism” – it introduces irrelevant topics into the discussion, distracting from the original topic. For example, when someone criticizes creationism because it lacks empirical evidence, they are not responding to the original criticism by pointing out supposed flaws in the theory of evolution.

17. The fallacy of poisoning the well occurs when creationists claim that “evolutionists” would not consider supernatural explanations in any situation. They claim this is because of their pre-existing refusal to accept theism; evolution is a religion to them! However, the fact is that God has never been observed interacting with the world. So why should he be considered as an explanation? Many scientists do believe in God. But a biologist, biochemist or paleontologist does not need to know in his profession whether life was created by God. That depends on what kind of being or force (if any) caused the Big Bang, which is not the job of a paleontologist, biologist or biochemist.

Another important point is that the creationist cannot offer supernatural explanations for substance. The ID creationists who claim to represent a “scientific alternative” provide no explanation:

-What the designer does when he creates life

-How he created the bacterial flagella

-How he created some other structure that is supposedly “Irreducibly Complex”

-How he caused the Cambrian explosion

-How he caused macroevolution

Creationists deflect from naturalistic explanations but offer none themselves. There are really no explanations that come into question.

18, 19, 20 In their effort to disprove evolution, creationists constantly express personal incredulity: “I don’t see how this or that complex structure could have come about gradually and naturally; therefore, it didn’t.” Personal incredulity asserts that a statement must be false because it contradicts one's expectations, assumptions or beliefs or is difficult to understand. The fallacy of invincible ignorance, also known as argument by pigheadedness, is closely related. The creationist simply ignores all the evidence in favour of evolution.They may simply explain it away or pooh-pooh it. This is another similar fallacy in informal logic, which is to dismiss an argument as not worthy of serious consideration. The fallacy is a rhetorical device in which the speaker ridicules an argument (reductio ad ridiculum) without responding to the content of the argument with a logical refutation.

Another way of pooh-poohing evolution is to claim that evolution is just an "atheistic religion" and just as faithful as one's own beliefs, which are based on ancient myths. This too can be seen as a straw man. Creationists are usually religious themselves, so it is unclear what they mean by the claim that evolution is a religion. Isn’t it a good thing to have a religion if they are practicing one themselves?

Similarly, creationists portray Darwin as a prophet of atheism. Creationists believe that atheists rely on their scientific authorities as much as they rely on their religious prophets and texts. That's why they preach against Darwin and Dawkins, as if there weren't thousands of scientists behind the modern theory of evolution. Besides, Darwin believed in God.

21. Some creationists have claimed that there is a waiting time problem with human evolution. Beneficial mutations would not occur often enough to explain human evolution. The problem is that we have masses of concrete fossil and artifactual evidence that humans evolved. When this fossil, genetic and artifactual evidence is presented, they move the goalposts, and shift the burden back onto the mathematical models and claim that they must be disproven, even though the original claim (that evolution was too slow) has already been disproven by concrete evidence. Mathematical calculations cannot make the concrete evidence disappear! The mathematical calculations must account for the tangible evidence, not the other way around. We know that the fossils and cultural artefacts do exist, so the mathematical calculations of mutation frequency must be wrong if they show that humanity has not evolved.

22. They claim that Lucy was just an ape. It's obvious that Lucy was an ape – that's what the word “pithecus" means in Australopithecus Afarensis! But that does not mean that Lucy could not have been an ancestor of man. So this argument presents a false dilemma: “either Lucy was an ape or she was not a human ancestor” - both of which could be true. Furthermore, the term “ape" can refer to a broad category of primates that includes humans and our close evolutionary relatives, or it can be used in a narrower sense to exclude humans and refer only to non-human primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. There are also hundreds of fossils of australopithecines. Everything indicates that humans have been evolving on this planet for millions of years. See the article on human evolution on this website.

The claim that a naturalistic change in an organism is "adaptation, not evolution" reflects a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the relationship between adaptation and evolution in biological terms. Adaptation refers to changes in an organism that increase its fitness in a particular environment. These changes often result from natural selection acting on genetic variation. So this claim is a false dilemma – adaptation is evolution.

The whole “creation vs. evolution” debate, as it is usually framed, is based on a false dilemma. It presents only two options, when in fact there are more. Creationists often seem to think that if evolution can be proven untrue, this means that their creation story must be true: “If it's not one, it must be the other!”. Proving that evolution is false does not make a religious creation story true. It remains to be proven that the creation story is true. In any case, the scope of the theory of evolution is overestimated here. Topics such as Big Bang cosmology, abiogenesis, star formation or supernatural forces are not dealt with. All it really says is that biological man arose through naturalistic processes. Evolution is not an answer to the question “What caused the Big Bang to happen?”. And that is the central and most important question in these debates. The answer determines whether something is created. The Big Bang represents the earliest event in the universe, when matter began to form into more complex structures: Hydrogen and helium, which later condensed into galaxies, stars and planets. If scientists could prove conclusively that life originated in physics and chemistry and that life forms developed naturally through biological evolution, this would not mean that life was not designed. It would merely say that no divine intervention was required along the way.

Creationists continue to proclaim the "fall of evolution" as they have for decades.But their proclamations are similar to the promises of Christ's return, which never seems to materialise. They can provide no tangible proof that God was directly involved in the creation of life. They muddy the waters with their fallacy-driven arguments based on religious emotion: they introduce confusion, irrelevant information, distractions, half-truths, technical details or excessive complexity into a discussion to obscure the truth. At best, they succeed in saying that it cannot be ruled out that a personal God has tampered with living beings somewhere in the deep history of the earth. Of course, we cannot rule this out, just as we cannot rule out the genetic tampering of life by extraterrestrials, either.

In 18th-century England, smoked red herrings (which have a strong, pungent smell) were said to be used to distract hunting dogs from the scent they were supposed to follow. A herring would be dragged across the trail to test whether the dogs would stay focused or get misled.