Calvin Smith, the head of Answers in Genesis Canada, has published the first installment of a new series titled “Evolution Is Running Out of Options.” https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/calvin-smith/2026/03/16/evolution-running-out-options-part-1/ The article covers a lot of ground—from Canadian politics to cave art to iPhones—and it arrives at a conclusion that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the YEC orbit: evolution is not real science, intelligent design is obvious, and the scientific establishment has rigged the game against God. The argument is presented with confidence, and I have no doubt it will resonate with many in our churches who already suspect that secular science is out to undermine their faith.
But as a biologist and a Christian who has spent over a decade reading and responding to the claims of young-earth creationist organizations, I want to take a closer look at what Smith is actually arguing and whether his case holds together on its own terms. Because the problems with this article are not just scientific—they are philosophical, theological, and, most strikingly, self-defeating. Smith’s framework, if applied consistently, undermines the very creation science enterprise that Answers in Genesis depends on. Let’s walk through it.
The Operational/Historical Science Shell Game
The centerpiece of Smith’s argument is a distinction he draws between “empirical science” and what he calls “historical science.” The claim is straightforward: real science involves observation, testing, and repeatability; evolution is a story about the past that can’t be tested; therefore evolution is not real science but rather a kind of faith commitment. To support this, Smith quotes Ernst Mayr, E. O. Wilson, and a passage from Nature magazine, each of which he presents as admissions that evolutionary biology operates outside the rules of proper science.
This operational/historical science distinction has been a staple of AiG’s rhetoric for decades, and I’ve written about it at length before. The term “origins science” was coined by Norman Geisler and Kerby Anderson in 1987 specifically to provide a framework for dismissing conclusions about the past that creationists find inconvenient. It is not a distinction recognized by philosophers of science, and as Carol Cleland of the University of Colorado has demonstrated in a series of rigorous papers, the historical sciences have their own well-established methods of hypothesis testing that are every bit as legitimate as those used in experimental science. Forensic science, geology, archaeology, astronomy—all of these disciplines investigate events that cannot be repeated, and all of them produce knowledge that we rely on every day.
But here is what I find most revealing about Smith’s use of this distinction: he doesn’t seem to realize that it applies to his own position with at least equal force. Consider what Answers in Genesis claims to be true about the history of life on earth. They assert that roughly 4,350 years ago, a global flood destroyed all terrestrial life except for the animals aboard Noah’s Ark. They claim that from perhaps 1,400 original “kinds,” the millions of species we see today diversified through rapid speciation in the millennia following the Flood. They publish papers in the Answers Research Journal proposing specific mechanisms for post-Flood biogeography, for the formation of the fossil record, and for the diversification of everything from horses to whales to lemurs.
Every single one of these claims is a historical claim. None of them can be directly observed, tested, or repeated in the present. By Smith’s own criteria, the entire edifice of creation science falls into the category of “historical narrative” that he has just told us is not real science. If evolutionary biology is just a “tentative reconstruction” of the past, then so is flood geology, baraminology, and post-Flood hyper-speciation. Smith has sawed off the branch he is sitting on, and he doesn’t appear to have noticed.
Misquoting Scientists to Make a Point
Smith’s use of quotations from Mayr and Wilson deserves particular attention, because these are not admissions that evolutionary biology is unscientific. They are descriptions of how the historical sciences differ methodologically from experimental physics and chemistry—which is something every working scientist already knows and which does not in any way diminish the validity of evolutionary conclusions.
When Mayr writes that evolutionary biology is a “historical science” that constructs “historical narratives,” he is not confessing that evolution is made up. He is explaining that the methods appropriate to historical investigation differ from those used in particle physics—just as the methods of a criminal investigator differ from those of a bench chemist, without anyone concluding that forensic science is mere storytelling. Smith even quotes a Nature article comparing evolutionary research to “forensic detective work,” apparently not recognizing that this analogy supports the legitimacy of the enterprise rather than undermining it. Detectives solve real cases. Courts convict real criminals. The fact that they work with evidence from past events does not make their conclusions fictional.
The S. C. Todd quotation that Smith deploys—“Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic”—is doing heavy lifting in this article. Smith presents it as proof that the scientific establishment has arbitrarily excluded God from the conversation. But this reflects a misunderstanding of what methodological naturalism actually is. Science investigates natural causes not because scientists have made a philosophical commitment to atheism, but because natural causes are the only kind that can be tested, predicted, and potentially falsified. A hypothesis that invokes direct supernatural intervention at any point where our understanding is incomplete is not a research program—it is an appeal to mystery that can explain anything and therefore explains nothing. This is, incidentally, precisely the concern that many Reformed theologians have raised about the Intelligent Design movement, and it is one of the reasons I believe ID is ultimately both bad science and bad theology. But I will return to that point.
The Design Argument and Its Unexamined Limits
The bulk of Smith’s article is devoted to arguing that we can detect design in nature using the same logic we use to identify design in human artifacts—cave paintings, boomerangs, iPhones, Mount Rushmore. The formula he proposes is this: if the information in the end product is greater than that of its component parts, the product has been designed. He then suggests (in a cliffhanger for Part 2) that living organisms exhibit this same pattern.
There are multiple problems with this line of reasoning, and I want to address them carefully because they get at something important about how design arguments work and where they fail.
First, every example Smith uses—cave paintings, arrowheads, boomerangs, iPhones, Mount Rushmore—involves a known category of designer (human beings) producing artifacts through known processes (carving, engineering, manufacturing). We recognize these as designed not because we have a general theory of design detection, but because we have extensive experience with human tool-making. When archaeologists find a stone with a suspiciously regular shape in a cave, they evaluate it against a well-documented record of lithic technology. The inference is grounded in specific, empirical knowledge about what human designers actually do.
Extending this to biological systems requires a leap that Smith never acknowledges. We have no comparable empirical experience with divine creation. We have never observed a cell being assembled from scratch by a supernatural agent. We have no catalogue of divine manufacturing techniques against which to compare the ribosome or the bacterial flagellum. The analogy between an iPhone and a living cell may feel intuitive, but it is not grounded in the same kind of evidence that makes the cave-painting inference so compelling. As philosophers of science have noted for centuries, the argument from analogy is only as strong as the relevant similarities between the two cases—and the differences between human engineering and biological systems are at least as striking as the similarities.
Second—and this is where I think the theological issues become most pressing—Smith’s design argument assumes that if something was not directly, miraculously assembled by God, then it was not designed by God. This is a false dichotomy that would have troubled many of the great Christian thinkers he claims to admire. The Reformed tradition, in which I stand, has a robust doctrine of divine providence that includes what theologians call secondary causes. God governs all things, including natural processes. When an oak tree grows from an acorn, we do not say that God was absent from that process simply because we can describe the biochemistry of germination. When a snowflake forms, its exquisite structure emerges from the physics of crystal formation—and a Christian can affirm that this, too, is God’s handiwork, accomplished through the natural laws he established and sustains.
The same logic applies to evolution. If God works through natural processes in every other domain—weather, agriculture, embryonic development, the water cycle—then the mere fact that we can describe a natural process for biological diversification does not exclude God from the picture. It only excludes a particular vision of God: one who must intervene miraculously at every step, because the natural order he created is insufficient to accomplish his purposes. That vision, I would argue, is not more reverent—it is less. It diminishes the Creator by diminishing his creation.
About Those “Great Scientists”
Smith includes a long list of historical scientists—Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Linnaeus, Pasteur, Newton, and others—as evidence that great scientists have always recognized design in nature and believed in the God of the Bible. This is true as far as it goes. But what Smith does not mention is that many of these same scientists accepted an ancient earth, and several of them (Owen, Linnaeus, Cuvier) contributed foundational work to the very fields—comparative anatomy, systematics, paleontology—that now provide the strongest evidence for evolution. Georges Cuvier, whom Smith lists, was one of the founders of paleontology and documented the reality of extinction, a concept that was itself controversial among biblical literalists of his day.
More importantly, none of these scientists held the specific set of commitments that defines modern young-earth creationism: a 6,000–10,000-year-old earth, a global flood that deposited the entire geological column, and hyper-rapid post-Flood speciation. Young-earth creationism in its modern form is largely a product of the mid-20th century, catalyzed by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood in 1961. To claim Newton and Galileo as allies in a movement that did not exist in their lifetimes is historically misleading. These were indeed Christians who saw God’s hand in nature. They were not young-earth creationists.
“The Game Is Rigged”—Or Does the Evidence Just Point Somewhere Inconvenient?
Perhaps the most troubling section of Smith’s article is his claim that the scientific establishment has been captured by “humanistic Marxists and atheists” who have “rigged the game” so that no evidence can ever count against evolution. This is conspiracy thinking, and it is worth naming it as such—not to be uncharitable, but because I believe it does real damage to the church.
When we tell our young people that the entire scientific enterprise is controlled by people who are deliberately suppressing the truth about God, we are not preparing them to engage the world with confidence and discernment. We are teaching them to distrust an entire domain of human knowledge on the basis of a narrative about institutional corruption rather than on the basis of evidence. And when those young people go to university and discover that their biology professors are not, in fact, Marxist conspirators—that many of them are thoughtful, honest people following the evidence where it leads, and that some of them are even fellow Christians—the entire framework collapses. I have heard from too many students who lost their faith not because they encountered evolution, but because the adults they trusted told them that evolution and Christianity were incompatible and that anyone who said otherwise was part of the conspiracy. When they discovered that the science was real, they concluded that the faith must not be.
This is what I find so deeply frustrating about articles like this one. The stakes are real. People’s faith is on the line. And the answer Smith offers—that the whole system is rigged, that you can’t trust scientists, that evolution is just a story told by people who hate God—is not only factually wrong, it is pastorally destructive. It builds faith on a foundation that cannot hold, and when that foundation cracks, it takes everything else down with it.
A Better Way Forward
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that science has all the answers or that every claim made in the name of evolution is correct. Science is a human enterprise, and like all human enterprises it is fallible, self-correcting, and sometimes wrong. I am not saying that Christians should uncritically accept whatever the scientific consensus happens to be at any given moment.
What I am saying is that the approach Smith takes in this article—dismissing historical science as storytelling, deploying design arguments that prove less than they claim, attributing the scientific consensus to a conspiracy of atheists, and selectively quoting scientists out of context—is not a faithful way to engage God’s creation. As evangelical Christians, we confess that God has revealed himself in two books: the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. Both are his. Both require careful, humble interpretation. And when our reading of one appears to conflict with our reading of the other, the answer is not to declare one of them corrupt. The answer is to go back to both books and read more carefully.
Smith promises a Part 2 in which he will address the crystal and snowflake objection and, presumably, argue that biological complexity cannot be explained by natural processes. I will be watching for it. But based on what he has presented so far, I expect the argument will continue to rest on a fundamental confusion: the assumption that if we can explain how something works through natural processes, we have somehow eliminated God from the equation. That is not how the Christian tradition has understood the relationship between God and creation, and it is not how we should understand it now. God is not diminished by the elegance of the processes through which he works. He is glorified by them.
Blessings,
Joel
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?