I am grateful to Paul Braterman for helping me to notice just how circular a particular objection to evolution is.
Some science deniers accept microevolution, the sort that can be experimentally studied in laboratories, but will reject macroevolution, saying that macroevolution has never been observed.
The problem with this is that macroevolution is defined as the sort of evolutionary change that occurs over longer periods of time than are observable.
If you define macroevolution as that which occurs over periods too long to observe, and then object that it cannot occur since it has never been observed, you have offered a circular argument.
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