“Natural Selection” of Ideas. How Arguments in the Debate on the Origin of Life and the Universe Are Framed

The aim of this paper is to present how the participants in a debate between a representative of new atheism (and evolutionism) and a representative of Christianity frame their arguments by the metaphor of struggle for survival. In order to do so a debate Has Science Buried God? has been analysed. It is shown that arguments are thought to compete for the status of “the truth” in the eyes of the general public, in a way that “better” ones push out “worse” ones, especially with a view to how scientific discoveries make explanations considered valid in the past no longer valid.