What is the most important thing secular people need to know in order to make sense of young-earth creationism? It’s nothing specifically scientific. It’s not even anything directly theological. The vital key to understanding radical creationism is something different. As a recent commentary reminds us, creationism thrives because it has a powerful intellectual defense mechanism.

From Answers In Genesis: Creationist defense mechanisms.

As I finish up my new book about American creationism, I’m struggling with a lot of difficult questions. Perhaps the hardest of all is the durability of radical ideas about science and nature. For those of us who aren’t creationists, it can be difficult to understand how anyone can be educated, aware, and intelligent while still thinking the earth is only about 6,000 years old.

Why don’t they abandon those ideas as soon as they hear how scientifically impossible they are?

As Nelle Smith pointed out recently, radical creationism has a powerful defense mechanism: Satan. Creationists don’t only believe in dissident science. They also are told—over and over again—that their scientific ideas are under attack. The attack has many sources—Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, local science teachers, etc.—but the true source of the attack is always more nefarious.

As Smith puts it,

growing up in many evangelical churches means to be told, repeatedly, that the devil will always seek a foothold, and once you give him one you’re well on the road to hell, to losing your faith, to destroying your witness. That’s scary stuff. To begin to doubt evangelicalism is not simply a mental exercise. For many like me, it’s to feel a void opening, the earth dropping out from beneath you. It’s to face the prospect of invalidating your entire existence.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, naïve anti-creationists have often failed to understand this key part of radical creationism. Like the affable Bill Nye, anti-creationists have assumed that they can convince and convert creationists simply by explaining the outlines of mainstream evolutionary theory. Anti-creationists have assumed that the evidence will be enough to change people’s minds.

What we non-creationists have failed to understand is that creationists are expecting to hear arguments that seem to make sense. They are ready to see evidence that looks convincing. They know what to do when they are presented with so-called facts that purport to poke holes in their worldview.

The central story of radical young-earth creationism isn’t one of science and religion. Rather, it’s a story of faith and doubt, of steadfastness and wavering, of obedience and sin. When arguments for evolution seem convincing, creationists can dismiss them as yet another alluring trick of Satan to fool the unwary.

To be sure, every once in a while, creationists raised to watch for the devil’s scientific snares change their minds. They embrace evolutionary science and abandon their old creationist mindset. But as Nelle Smith writes, to do so requires a wholesale revolution in their ways of thinking about good and evil, right and wrong. It’s not a simple matter of accepting evidence or mulling competing arguments.

For many creationists, the arguments of mainstream evolutionary scientists aren’t attractively modern. They are as ancient and as seductive as the serpent’s whisper to Eve.