Non-Christian Websites Rank Highest When Searching for ‘What is Creationism?’

What is Creationism?

This question is one of the top 50 most searched for questions in the category of religion and theology today.

And yet if you search for this phrase on Google, anti-Christian or secular explanations will dominate your search results. I recently searched for this exact phrase and it shocked me to find (on my first attempt) no more than one of the webpages that appeared in the first ten search results originated from an actual Christian webpage.

Many of the first page of search results were blatantly anti-Christian vitriol, or wrong on critical points. For the record, Creationists do not believe that animals “can’t produce new forms”. That just smacks of deliberate misrepresentation (as if I should be surprised).

This is not good. How can we trust Google to offer us unbiased search results, when the majority of top searches for a definition of creationism come from non-creationist websites?

There are several possible reasons for why this is the case.

For starters Wikipedia and other massive online encyclopaedic databases always have massive pulling power. Wikipedia ranks very highly on almost every search imaginable.

Another reason could be that most of the webpages from actual bible based websites that I did find weren’t amazingly straightforward or direct in answering the question, or are just kind of old and not very pretty to look at.

But why then does a blatantly anti-creationist smear campaign like that one from thought(less)co.com make the list? (another ignorant listicle that I’m going to have to get all Ezekiel 25:17 on at some point too I suppose).

Of course another reason is that Google is systematically biasing their search results against Bible believing Christians. OK I’ll admit this feels like a bit of stretch. Despite any left-leaning within big tech organisations in general, Google’s search would almost certainly be way too general to specifically isolate ‘creationists’ from its own search results (or is it?).

But I certainly wouldn’t be the first one to raise the red flag on this issue.

To be fair, if you search for ‘what is biblical creationism?’, you get a marginally better result. This would be because it is a less commonly searched and more specific phrase. It is a much lesser known and used phrase by the general population, even if organisations like Creation Ministries International prefer this term.

Most likely I would suspect that search results reflect what Google is generally designed to do, which is bring up search results based on how well those pages are optimised for search results and ranking.

So if you’re searching for an answer to the question ‘what is Creationism?’ and one of the only first page hits featured on a creation website is copyright circa 2002 (the year after I finished high school!), it probably shouldn’t be surprising that most of the search results you get are from much more popular secular sources.

This needs to change.

Even if there are purely programmatic reasons for why this happens, it’s still not good enough. I don’t think I should have to convince any sensible person that creationists have the right to a say on the definition and elucidation of their own beliefs!

Much more so considering that one of the top search results is a blatant defamatory nonsense.

So it my plan in the near future to publish an introductory, but comprehensive summary and break down of creationism and what creationists believe, with links to further reading where necessary. My plan is to provide a solid, up to date, accurate resource for anyone interested to hear from a creationist, what the basic beliefs of ‘biblical creationists’ are.

Hopefully then Google will have no excuse not to have at least one good word on Creationism from the mouth of an actual creationist that’s not like nearly 20 years old.

So if you’re interested to learn more about this topic, and why it’s important, then make sure you subscribe to my mailing list. I’ll need your help getting this valuable information out there for the world to see!