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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Dissent Becomes Doctrine

How Creationists and Spiritualists Misuse Minority Views in Evolutionary Biology

THE LONG DISPUTE OVER EVOLUTION, Part 1

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction

Evolutionary biology, like all mature sciences, contains internal debates, unresolved questions, and minority viewpoints. These disagreements are signs of intellectual vitality, not crisis. Yet for critics of standard Darwinian evolution—most notably creationists and spiritual evolutionists—such minority views are treated very differently. Rather than engaging them as provisional, technical refinements within a broadly accepted framework, they are seized upon as weapons against Darwinism itself.

Despite profound theological and metaphysical differences, creationists and spiritualists share a strategic common cause: undermining the sufficiency of naturalistic evolution. Both groups selectively amplify dissenting scientific voices, exaggerate their implications, and quietly import metaphysical conclusions that the scientists in question neither endorse nor imply.

This essay examines how that pattern operates, with concrete examples.

1. The Rhetoric of “Darwinism Is in Crisis”

A common trope in anti-Darwinian literature is the claim that evolutionary biology is undergoing a fundamental crisis. Creationists and spiritualists alike compile quotations from scientists expressing doubt about specific mechanisms—natural selection, gradualism, or gene-centric models—and present them as evidence that “Darwinism is failing.”

The key rhetorical move is equivocation:

• Darwinism (a 19th-century theory with known limitations)

• becomes modern evolutionary theory,

• which then becomes naturalism itself.

Internal scientific critique is thus reframed as an existential threat to evolution as such.

In reality, evolutionary biology abandoned “pure Darwinism” long ago, incorporating genetics, population biology, molecular biology, and developmental biology. Critique operates within this framework, not against it.

2. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)

Perhaps the most frequently misused example is the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). Proponents of EES emphasize additional evolutionary factors such as:

• developmental bias

• phenotypic plasticity

• niche construction

• epigenetic inheritance

Creationist and spiritualist readings often claim:

“Even evolutionary biologists now admit Darwinism is incomplete or wrong.”

But EES proponents themselves are explicit: they are extending, not replacing, evolutionary theory.

Kevin Laland, one of the leading EES figures, has repeatedly stated that:

• natural selection remains essential

• no teleology or external intelligence is implied

• the framework remains fully naturalistic

Creationist literature, however, cherry-picks EES language about “agency,” “active organisms,” or “directionality,” while suppressing its explicit rejection of design or purpose. Spiritual evolutionists go one step further, reading these terms as covert admissions of Eros, cosmic intention, or immanent mind—a move wholly foreign to the science.

3. Neutral Theory and “Selection Is Not Central”

Motoo Kimura's Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution is another favorite citation. Kimura argued that most molecular changes are selectively neutral rather than adaptive.

Creationists quickly reframed this as:

“Even Darwinists admit natural selection doesn't explain evolution.”

Yet neutral theory never denied natural selection; it addressed a different explanatory level (molecular variation versus phenotypic adaptation). Kimura himself remained a firm evolutionist and naturalist.

Spiritual writers, meanwhile, interpret neutral drift as evidence that evolution is not driven by blind competition, thereby making conceptual room for “guiding principles” or “intrinsic intelligence.” Again, the metaphysical leap is entirely external to the science.

4. Punctuated Equilibrium and the Myth of Sudden Creation

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's theory of punctuated equilibrium is perhaps the most famous case of systematic misuse.

Creationists notoriously cited Gould's acknowledgment of gaps in the fossil record as proof that:

• transitional forms are missing

• species appear suddenly and fully formed

This interpretation was explicitly rejected by Gould, who spent much of his career correcting creationist distortions of his work.

Spiritual evolutionists similarly recast punctuated equilibrium as evidence of evolutionary leaps of consciousness or vertical interventions, importing mystical narratives into what was a population-level model of speciation under known geological constraints.

5. Information, Complexity, and “Beyond Chance”

Arguments from information theory and irreducible complexity reveal a shared strategy across religious divides.

Creationists invoke figures such as Michael Behe or William Dembski to argue that biological complexity exceeds what chance and necessity can produce. Spiritualists replace the biblical Designer with:

• a cosmic intelligence

• a universal mind

• evolutionary Eros

Both rely on a false dichotomy: either blind randomness or transcendent intelligence.

What they ignore is that evolutionary theory never relied on pure chance. Variation may be stochastic, but selection, constraint, and self-organization are lawful processes. Minority discussions about complexity theory or emergence are treated as admissions of explanatory failure, rather than as refinements within a naturalistic framework.

6. From Scientific Modesty to Metaphysical Overreach

What unites creationist and spiritualist appropriations of minority science is a shared category error:

• scientific openness becomes philosophical concession

• methodological humility becomes metaphysical permission

Where scientists say:

“This mechanism is not yet fully understood,”

anti-Darwinian readers hear:

“Naturalism has failed.”

This is not a misunderstanding—it is a motivated reinterpretation.

7. Why This Strategy Persists

This pattern persists because it is rhetorically powerful:

• It borrows scientific authority without accepting scientific discipline.

• It allows rejection of mainstream consensus without doing original research.

• It reframes belief as bold insight rather than ideological commitment.

Creationists and spiritualists thus become unlikely allies, united less by shared beliefs than by a shared opposition to naturalistic evolution.

Conclusion

Minority views in evolutionary biology are not Trojan horses smuggling metaphysics into science. They are internal attempts to refine explanations within a robust, empirically grounded framework.

When creationists and spiritualists enlist these views to reject “Darwinism,” they are not following the science—they are instrumentalizing it. The resulting arguments tell us far more about pre-existing metaphysical commitments than about the actual state of evolutionary theory.

Scientific dissent is not an invitation to theological or spiritual extrapolation. It is a reminder of how science actually progresses: cautiously, collectively, and without cosmic guarantees.