Claims, Conspiracies, and the Evidence That Should Exist

What vague claims, missing details, and conspicuous omissions tell me about the strength of an argument

A few weeks ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked what evidence supported his suspicions about fraud in California elections. He had complained that votes were still being counted after Election Day and said the process “stinks to high heaven.” When pressed for evidence, however, he offered something quite different: “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove.”

That answer caught my attention because it revealed far more than Johnson probably intended. He had made a serious claim, but when asked for the evidence that would justify it, he converted the absence of evidence into part of the accusation. The fraud was not merely hidden, he suggested; it was hidden so skillfully that its invisibility should itself make us suspicious.  It was being hidden so well, that even the highest levels of the government he and Trump control could not uncover it!

This is a common move. I hear it in politics, in conspiracy theories, in climate-change denial, and regularly in young-earth creationist arguments. A person begins with a conclusion, presents a story that makes the conclusion feel plausible, and then explains why the evidence we would normally expect cannot be found. The claim becomes self-protecting. Evidence supports it, but a lack of evidence also supports it. At that point, the claim is no longer being tested against reality. It has been insulated from reality.

I have learned to listen closely not only to what people say but also to what they conspicuously do not say. When a person has strong evidence, that evidence usually appears early, specifically, and repeatedly. When the speaker offers outrage, suspicion, anecdotes, enemies, and vague assurances that proof exists somewhere just out of view, I become skeptical. The missing evidence does not automatically prove the claim false, but it tells me something important about how much confidence the claimant has earned.

The Strongest Evidence Should Come First

Suppose I claim that a neighbor repeatedly drove a truck across my lawn during the night. If I have security-camera footage showing the truck, a readable license plate, tire tracks crossing the grass, and several witnesses, I will not begin and end by telling you that my neighbor has always disliked me. I will show you the video.

I may also discuss motive, prior conflicts, and the neighbor’s character, but those considerations are secondary. The direct evidence does the real work. Indeed, even people who are highly skilled at rhetoric understand this. Evidence is persuasive because it constrains the range of reasonable explanations. A clear video is better than a rumor. A financial record is better than an insinuation. A ballot, a name, a date, and a documented chain of custody are better than saying that an election “feels wrong.”

This is why I pay attention to the order of an argument. What does the speaker lead with? Does the speaker identify a specific event, source, document, measurement, or witness that can be independently checked? Or does the speaker first create an atmosphere of suspicion and then invite the audience to interpret every ambiguity within that atmosphere?

Rhetoric is not inherently dishonest. We all use stories, analogies, emotion, and moral language to explain why something matters. But rhetoric cannot substitute for evidence. When it does, the argument often becomes a machine for producing certainty without doing the difficult work required to earn it.

The pattern is especially visible when a claimant attacks the people asking for evidence. Donald Trump might be the all-time best example of this strategy. Instead of answering the question, the speaker says the press is corrupt, scientists are biased, election officials are part of the scheme, courts cannot be trusted, or critics are enemies of faith or country. Some institutions certainly do fail, and experts can be wrong. But discrediting every possible evaluator is another way to protect a claim from testing. Once all contrary evidence is dismissed as corrupt, the claim becomes impossible to correct.

When Absence of Evidence Becomes Evidence

People often repeat the phrase “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Sometimes that is true. If I fail to see a bobcat during a one-hour walk in an Ohio forest, I have not demonstrated that no bobcat lives there. My search was brief, the habitat is large, and bobcats are difficult to detect.

But the phrase is not a universal rule. Absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence when the proposed explanation strongly predicts that the evidence should be present.

I know. That sounds confusing. This is why we use examples.

If I claim that fifty elephants spent the night in my backyard, the absence of tracks, broken branches, dung, noise reports, and damaged fencing matters. I am not merely missing evidence. I am missing evidence that should be nearly impossible to avoid if my claim were true.

Science works this way constantly. A good hypothesis does not merely accommodate observations after the fact; it predicts what we should find and, equally important, what we should not find. When those expected observations fail to appear after careful searching, confidence in the hypothesis should decline. We may not know with absolute certainty that the hypothesis is false, but rational confidence is not an all-or-nothing switch. It rises or falls as evidence accumulates.

That is the key principle I bring to public claims here on this blog or my YouTube channel: What evidence should exist if this were true? How easy would that evidence be to find? Who has looked for it? What did they find? And does the person making the claim appear eager to show the evidence or eager to explain why no evidence can be produced?

Let me apply this principle to some topics that I’ve recently addressed.

Voter Fraud and the Magnitude of Evidence

Election fraud is a useful test case because actual fraud does occur. I do not need to pretend otherwise. Individuals have voted twice, submitted false registration forms, mishandled absentee ballots, forged election documents, or abused positions of trust. In North Carolina’s 2018 Ninth Congressional District election, investigators documented an organized absentee-ballot operation serious enough that the state board unanimously ordered a new election. Real fraud can be investigated, described, and supported with names, documents, testimony, ballot records, charges, and court proceedings.

That case also illustrates what evidence looks like. Investigators did not say that something “felt wrong.” They identified the people involved, the methods they used, the counties in which they operated, the ballots and request forms affected, and the relationship between the number of potentially affected ballots and the election margin.

The national claims made about recent presidential elections are of a very different scale. My review of documented election-fraud cases since 2000 found a consistent pattern: allegations are abundant, investigations are fewer, charges fewer still, convictions and proven fraudulent ballots are rarer, and examples shown to have changed election outcomes are rarest of all. The strongest documented cases are generally isolated acts or localized schemes, not national operations involving millions of ballots.

This matters because a massive fraud claim predicts massive evidence. A coordinated operation capable of changing a presidential election would require ballots, people, communications, money, transportation, access to voting systems, falsified records, or some combination of these. It would also require extraordinary silence among large numbers of participants and observers. Yet after recounts, audits, court cases, investigations, testimony from Republican and Democratic election officials, and years of intense efforts to find fraud, the promised mountain of evidence has not appeared. In November 2020, federal and state election-security officials reported no evidence that voting systems had deleted, lost, or changed votes.

The honest conclusion is not that fraud is impossible. The honest conclusion is that the evidence does not support claims of massive, systemic, outcome-changing fraud in recent presidential elections. If such fraud were rampant, the most effective way to persuade the public would be obvious: present the fraudulent ballots, the verified identities, the records, the communications, and the convictions. Show the work.

Instead, we often hear that the fraud is “impossible to prove,” that everyone knows it “instinctively,” or that the length of a vote count is itself suspicious. California’s slow count is not mysterious. State law allows mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive for seven days afterward, and election officials must verify signatures, process provisional ballots, and allow some voters to correct signature problems. One may reasonably argue that California should count faster. But slowness is not evidence of fraud. It is evidence of a slow process.

The Reflecting Pool and the Scale of a Claim

The recent controversy over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool provides another useful example. After a costly renovation, the pool developed an algae bloom and portions of its new blue coating began peeling. President Trump attributed the problems to vandals, at various times suggesting that people had poured corrosive chemicals into the water, cut a gash hundreds of feet long, or perhaps added fertilizer to promote algae growth. He repeatedly said proof would emerge.

There is now evidence supporting a much narrower claim. A grand jury indicted one man for allegedly ripping a piece of the newly installed sealant on June 19. He denies that he caused the original damage, and an indictment is an accusation rather than a conviction. Still, it would be wrong to say there is no evidence of any vandalism.

But notice the difference between evidence for a discrete act and evidence for the broader explanation. An allegation that one person damaged a small area does not demonstrate that vandalism caused a 300- or 350-foot gash, widespread peeling, or an algae bloom. Those are separate claims requiring separate evidence. The National Park Service had already described residual algae from reactivated supply lines, and the pool’s coating was visibly peeling shortly after renovation.

This is another question I ask: Is the evidence proportional to the claim? Evidence that someone tugged at a loose piece of coating may support a charge involving that piece. It cannot simply be expanded to explain every failure of the project. When a broad claim is defended by a narrow incident, the audience must resist the temptation to let one confirmed detail validate the entire narrative.

Young-Earth Creationists Know That Evidence Matters

I see the same dynamic in young-earth creationism. Young-earth creationist organizations often tell their audiences that Scripture, not evidence, is the final authority. Yet they devote enormous resources to finding scientific evidence for a young Earth and universe. They publish journals, fund laboratories, send teams into the field, and highlight claims involving dinosaur soft tissues, carbon-14, magnetic fields, human footprints, or pollen in supposedly ancient rocks.

I find this effort revealing. They know evidence matters. They know their audiences want more than the assertion that a particular interpretation of Genesis must be correct. They want observations that appear to point in the same direction.

The problem is not that they look for evidence. They should. The problem is what often happens when the evidence does not support the model. A rare anomaly is elevated above the overwhelming pattern. A contested result is repeated for decades after better explanations emerge. A single study is treated as decisive while hundreds of contrary observations disappear from view.

Pollen provides a particularly clear example (I recently wrote about pollen here: https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2026/06/25/the-roraima-pollen-paradox-what-a-1966-report-actually-shows/ and here: https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2026/06/27/flat-contacts-missing-pollen-and-desert-dunes-the-grand-canyons-case-against-flood-geology/. Flowering plants produce enormous quantities of pollen, and pollen preserves readily. If flowering plants covered the pre-Flood world and most of the geological column formed during one global flood, flowering-plant pollen should be found throughout those flood deposits. It should be extraordinarily difficult for a turbulent global catastrophe to sort flowering-plant pollen away from spores and gymnosperm pollen across continents and through thousands of feet of sediment.

Yet flowering-plant pollen is absent from vast lower portions of the geological column where spores and gymnosperm pollen are abundant. The pattern is ordered and reproducible. In my 2008 paper on this subject (Flood Geologies Abominable Mystery), I described how a famous creationist claim of flowering-plant pollen in Precambrian Grand Canyon rocks was reexamined by a young-earth creationist researcher, Arthur Chadwick, who concluded that the result was caused by contamination with modern pollen.

Why did the original claim attract so much attention? Because young-earth creationists understood that genuinely ancient flowering-plant pollen would be important evidence for their model. But the more revealing observation is what their model predicts is that pollen should be common. If the flood model were correct, out-of-place pollen should not be an occasional disputed curiosity. It should be everywhere.

This is where what is not said becomes crucial. Creationist presentations often focus on one possible anomaly but do not tell the audience about the millions of pollen grains examined in hundreds of formations that appear in a consistent order. They point to the one grain they hope is out of place while ignoring the vast pattern that is exactly where conventional geology predicts it should be.

Cherry-Picking a Warming World

Climate arguments often use the same strategy. A person selects a cold winter, a short time interval, one weather station, or a starting year chosen because it was unusually warm, and then declares that global warming has stopped. The selected data may be real. The deception lies in presenting a fragment as though it represents the whole.

Global climate is not measured by the temperature outside my house this morning. It is evaluated through long-term records from thousands of land stations, ocean measurements, satellites, glaciers, sea ice, ocean heat content, and other independent indicators. NASA and NOAA report that 2023, 2024, and 2025 were the three warmest years in their global records, with 2024 remaining the warmest. A cooler month, season, or year can occur within a long-term warming trend. Variation around a trend is not evidence that the trend does not exist.

When someone argues that Earth is not warming, I therefore listen for what is missing. Do they show the full record or only a selected interval? Do they explain why multiple independent datasets converge? Do they distinguish local weather from global climate? Do they make a prediction that could prove their claim wrong? Or do they simply accuse climate scientists of corruption and treat every adjustment to a dataset as evidence of manipulation?

Again, the demonization of experts often arrives precisely where the evidence should have been. If the data clearly demonstrated long-term cooling, one would not need a theory involving thousands of conspiring scientists across competing institutions and nations. One could show the cooling.

What I Listen for When I Hear a Claim

I do not reject a claim merely because it is controversial, politically inconvenient, or offered by someone I distrust. Nor do I accept a claim merely because it comes from an expert, a favored political party, or a Christian organization. I try to ask the same questions regardless of who is speaking.

Yes, I am a human being who will gravitate to claims that appeal to me first. Importantly it’s because I know I have biases that I need some method for correcting myself and it’s the strategies that I am suggesting here that hopefully can correct me when I travel down a wrong path.

First, what exactly is being claimed? Vague claims escape testing. “There are problems with elections” may be true in many ordinary ways. “Millions of fraudulent votes changed the presidential result” is a much more specific claim and carries a much larger evidentiary burden.

Second, what evidence would I expect if the claim were true? A large conspiracy should leave a large evidentiary footprint. A global flood should leave globally consistent geological evidence. A claim that Earth is cooling should appear in complete temperature records rather than a carefully selected segment.

Third, is the evidence independent, specific, and proportional? Ten people repeating the same unsupported story do not provide ten independent lines of evidence. One small case of fraud does not demonstrate millions of fraudulent votes. One damaged patch of sealant does not explain an entire renovation failure.

Fourth, what evidence would count against the claim? If the answer is “nothing,” then the claim is not functioning as an explanation. It is functioning as a commitment. A belief that explains every possible outcome explains none of them.

Finally, what happens when the claimant is asked for details? Strong claims become more specific under questioning. Weak claims often become more emotional. Names disappear. Dates become uncertain. The promised documents are always about to be released. Critics become villains. The conspiracy expands to include anyone who asks for verification.

Evidence Is Not Everything, but It Is Not Optional

Evidence does not automatically persuade everyone. I know this from years of engaging young-earth creationists. A person can be deeply committed to a conclusion for theological, political, social, or personal reasons. Clear evidence may be reinterpreted, minimized, or rejected because accepting it would carry unacceptable costs.

But even the most committed movements continue searching for evidence because everyone recognizes, at some level, that a claim supported by evidence stands on firmer ground than a claim supported only by assertion. That is why the absence of offered evidence is so revealing. The claimant knows evidence would help. The claimant has every incentive to provide it. The claimant has been asked directly. Mike Johnson knows he is going to be asked for evidence to support his claims and even then he doesn’t come with that evidence in hand. That surely says a lot about his claims. Yet what arrives is a story about why the evidence cannot be shown.

I do not claim that every unproven allegation is false. Investigations take time. Some evidence is legitimately confidential. Witnesses can be mistaken, records incomplete, and institutions imperfect. Intellectual honesty requires room for uncertainty.

But uncertainty is not permission to believe whatever story best serves our fears or loyalties. The burden remains with the person making the claim, especially when the claim accuses others of crimes, corruption, or conspiracy.

As a scientist and as a Christian, I want to be the kind of person who does not fear that burden. Truth does not require me to manufacture evidence, conceal contrary observations, or demonize everyone who asks a difficult question. Following the evidence honestly sometimes means revising what I hoped was true. That is not weakness. It is what trustworthy knowledge does.

The next time someone makes a dramatic claim, listen carefully to the evidence they present. Then listen even more carefully to the evidence they should have presented but did not. Very often, that silence is the most informative part of the argument.

If a claimant provides no evidence or the evidence is very week. Buyer beware.

Blessings,

Joel