By dead end controversies, I mean controversies where hundreds of theories contend but no consensus emerges—except one—which I’ll get to in a minute.

Here are some examples pulled from a recent page at our sister publication, Science & Culture Today:

Why misrepresent cosmology’s conventional views?

On the 20th anniversary of celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins’s iconic God Delusion (2006), philosopher Stephen Meyer wrote an article in Britain’s Telegraph, “Science is proving Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists wrong.” In Meyer’s view, “scientific discoveries are prompting fresh arguments for belief in God.”

Physicist Bruce Gordon tells us that happened among nearly 2000 comments, a claim emerged that “no cosmologists have ever claimed that the universe came from nothing.” Really?

Gordon replies at S&CT:

Some notable counterexamples come to mind. First, Alexander Vilenkin titled his 1982 paper on quantum cosmological origins “Creation of Universes from Nothing.” That seems to qualify. Then there was Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s problematic remark in their bestseller The Grand Design that “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” On this view, the universe would have to exist before it exists in order to create itself. And we shouldn’t forget Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing. It would seem that “nothing” has its champions among cosmologists.

…“nothing,” in physics and cosmology, is always something. It is some sort of physical structure that is described by some kind of mathematical “law.” But laws, as just noted, are merely descriptive. They do not cause anything; they just give a description of what happens.

“So, You Say that No Cosmologists Have Ever Claimed the Universe Came from Nothing?”, September 23, 2026

But it also came out recently that most physicists don’t even agree on much of the bedrock of their discipline anyway. And remember, this is fundamental physics we are taking about.

Origin of life is lost in the mists of speculation

Some of us are old enough to remember when origin of life was a question that science would answer—some time soon. But that was hundreds of promising theories ago. Brian Miller summarizes,

The claim that “progress has been made” rests more on philosophical commitments than on compelling empirical evidence. A more objective assessment of the field is that its principal achievement has been to clarify, in ever greater detail, why intelligent agency is required to direct chemistry toward life.

“On Origin of Life, Scientific American Starts Sober, Quickly Relapses into Speculation,” September 24, 2026

Miller cautions us about media that continue to advance one theory after another as to how life could originate by chance. Pointing to a summary article in Scientific American by science writer Sarah Scoles, he writes,

Scoles was acting in good faith in reporting on what she read in the scientific literature and was told in interviews. What she failed to appreciate was how researchers’ philosophical bias distorts their interpretation of experimental results and their assessment of proposed scenarios. What investigators often describe as plausible hypothesis are, in fact, little more than fanciful storytelling founded on voodoo science. “Relapses into Speculation,” September 24, 2026

They seem rather like this season’s models strutting down a catwalk.

And then there’s the rise and fall of junk DNA

Junk DNA was the vast sunken mess of outdated, useless information in our genes, a slam dunk for Darwinian evolution. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Michael Shermer, to name just a few, dined out on it. But that was then. Today, as Casey Luskin notes,

… a recently published scientific paper in Cell, one of the world’s most prestigious biology journals, declares a “paradigm shift” against the idea that huge portions of the human genome are merely “junk DNA.”e1

Unsurprisingly, evolutionary biologists weren’t going to take this sitting down. One biologist, Dan Graur at the University of Houston, worried that “If ENCODE is right, then Evolution is wrong.” He shifted the goalposts by proposing that if most of our genome is producing RNA, then that “transcription is … stochastic” — i.e., it’s just randomly produced junk RNA!

“Intelligent Design Bears Good Scientific Fruit in the Study of ‘Junk DNA’,” Townhall, September 20, 2026

But research did not turn up vast reams of junk RNA either, Luskin says. Rather, “the more we study genetics, the more function we discover.” That sounds far more like a design for survival of life forms than chance survival. But such a finding would be very difficult to acknowledge in a discipline where science means finding out how chance did it.

Also, 326 theories of consciousness jostle for journal space…

Never mind the lizard brain of pop media. Three hundred and twenty-six official models have been published in journals. As with origin of life, huge numbers of models is a sign that none are compelling.

The only thing that disciplines generally agree on, as readers have doubtless guessed by now, is that chance, not design, governs the universe. Perhaps the endless theorizing with so little result reflects what chance can produce. If researchers ever felt they could risk trying design, we could see if more insight follows.