Evolutionists often claim that those who don’t believe in Evolution simply don’t understand it. I have several points to make about this, so please forgive the scattered, notebook like way I structured this article.
First off, I’d like to point out that this is what is known as the no true Scotsman fallacy. That is to define X in such a way as to exclude examples of X that would otherwise conflict with your point of view. The classic example is of a Scotsman named Hamish from whom the fallacy gets its name. Hamish reads a news article about an English man who killed 5 people. “Silly English!” He says. “No Scotsman would ever do that.” So the next day he reads the same paper, but the story reads “yesterday, we reported that the murderer was English. It turns out he was Scottish”. So Hamish changes his previous statement to “no true Scotsman would ever do that.”
Evolutionists who claim no one who understands Evolution could possibly reject it are guilty of the identical fallacy. In reality, lots of people who understand Evolution go on to reject it. But in order to maintain their position, they define “understanding” Evolution as accepting Evolution. In reality, this is as daft as claiming those who reject the Bible don’t understand it.
On the topic of those who understand Evolution rejecting it, many Christians actually started out as ardent Evolutionists. During these times, no Evolutionist would have claimed “they don’t understand Evolution!” Instead, they'd cheer them on. Are we to believe that those who understand Evolution quite well suddenly and inexplicably lose their understanding of Evolution? Picture Richard Dawkins or Bill Nye. Both men religiously defend Evolution. Currently, no one claims these two men don’t understand Evolution, but if they suddenly did reject Evolution and accepted the Biblical model of origins, there would be Evolutionists who would claim they don’t understand Evolution.
Unfortunately, neither Bill Nye nor Richard Dawkins currently show any signs of doing this, but many people have taken the journey from Darwin to Jesus. Carl Wieland, for example, started as an ardent Evolutionist, and only interacted with Creationists to refute them. Today, he is the founder of a very popular Creation based ministry, which employs more Phd scientists than any other ministry. Evolutionists want to argue that Carl went from understanding Evolution to suddenly not understanding it, when in reality, he went from understanding it and accepting it to understanding it and rejecting it.
Interestingly, those who make this claim can often be played off against other Evolutionists. You can quote other Evolutionists against them, and they’ll say “you don’t understand Evolution” before you reveal that actually, you just quoted one of their favourite Evolutionists. I call this "silent quoting". Of course, this isn’t too hard to do. Evolution is such an unstable religion that its adherents often contradict each other. For example, if you ask a small number of Evolutionists why there is a significant lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, some of them will try to explain why they aren’t there, whereas others will try to convince you that there are many. Which is it? Are there so many that they cannot be counted, or are there so few that their rarity requires one of the many shoddy excuses out there?
Interestingly, it turns out Creationists tend to know more about Evolution than Evolutionists know about Creation. This isn’t quite the same as the no true Scotsman fallacy. No one here is claiming that understanding Creation requires accepting it. But 9 times out of 10, Evolutionists seem to not understand Creation. For example, if you tell an Evolutionist that Creationists actually believe in natural selection, a lot of them will be shocked. They’ve been taught that Creationism teaches the fixity of species, therefore natural selection is supposed to disprove Creation. In reality, Creationist Edward Blyth wrote about natural selection before Darwin, and Darwin is actually known to have plagiarised Blyth's writings on the topic.
It’s not surprising that Evolutionists tend not to understand Creation. Evolution is taught far more aggressively, whereas Creation is typically not discussed as a possibility, and where it is taught, it is typically mocked. Evolutionist Eugenie Scott even admitted “In my opinion, using creation and evolution as topics for critical-thinking exercises in primary and secondary schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students about evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major themes in science.” (1) To translate the quote into non-PR language: “If we let students think critically about Evolution, they'll realise it's a load of rubbish and might become Creationists”.
I agree with Eugenie Scott on this much: it’s a very good strategy to deny students the ability to critically examine Evolution. If they don’t ask questions, they don’t get answers. When they do ask questions, however, they may well get answers, and when they get those answers, they may well come to the conclusion that Evolution holds about as much water as a sieve.
References
1. Witham, Larry - Where Darwin Meets the Bible, p. 23, Oxford University Press, 2002.