Being Fair to Creationists

It bugs me that defenders of evolution regularly misunderstand what it is that creationists do and don't believe in. So they say things like this:

If on the other hand the word “evolution” in the statement “I believe in/accept evolution” refers to the observable data on whether evolution ever happens, this is also a conflation of the workings of faith with those of science. You can take a colony of drosophilia and let them fly through a maze, putting sugar at the end of a right fork in the maze and nothing at the left. In a few days, the flies who tend to turn right and get the sugar will be outbreeding those who tend to turn left and pretty soon you will have a colony of right-turning flies. At that point, you don’t “believe” that natural selection can happen, you have directly observed it as a fact. You don’t have faith in this context any more than you have faith that water turns to steam if you heat it to 100 degrees Celsius.

But most creationists have no problem with the scenario described. They accept, for example, that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics. They prefer to call this "adaptation" rather than "evolution," but they accept that species can change in response to changing circumstances.

What they deny is that this process can change an amoeba into an eagle. They accept change within "kinds" -- this is apparently the Biblical term of art -- but deny that one kind of animal can change into another kind. Some think that species are immutable, while others go farther up the taxonomic ladder and think maybe one kind of mammal could change into another kind, but not into a slime mold.

So if you want to attack creationism, evidence that right-turning flies can turn into left-turning flies won't help you. The kind of change that creationists don't believe in cannot be directly observed. So you have to do the work of marshaling the evidence for profound, long-term change, and for the non-reality of categories like species and genus, and so on.