An interesting essay from last month, by Fred Clark: “Phlebotinum, young-Earth creationism and the willing suspension of disbelief” (20 October 2014).

I think this analogy has something to it, but there’s also a point of contrast. A well-written phlebotinium story establishes the limitations of its fictitious technology, the rules by which it operates. Neither deflector shields nor transporters exist outside the story, but it’s well known that you can’t beam through the shields. Warp speed can only get you to the next star system so quickly. Go too fast for too long—warp 9.9 for more than seven minutes, let’s say—and your ship will break, and you will go no farther into space today.

By contrast, creationism flips from one standard to another, rewriting its own rules whenever convenient (or, rather, whenever it’s necessary to avoid an incovenience). Molecular biology is fine as long as it’s making pretty pictures of things “too complicated to evolve by chance!!!”, but as soon as it provides an explanation, out the door it goes. “Academic freedom” is the creationist rallying cry, as long as it’s creationists who are being cruelly un-freedom-ized (perhaps by the hateful demand that they actually get some science done).