One-third of Americans reject evolution, poll shows

[Farsight001]

Stay on topic please. Fears about what “creationists” or “IDers” are doing appear to be relevant only on a personal level to a few people. The topic is 'one-third of Americans reject evolution." There is no mixing aloud? That is patently false. For those who believe in theistic evolution, where does the theistic part fit in? It’s like cutting a car in half and telling the buyer: “Make sure you recognize that these two parts are separate and distinct from each other.”

By this definition, theistic evolution is false.

No. By invoking theology, that makes theistic evolution not science. The evolution part is science. The theology part, obviously, not. Something not being science does not automatically make it false. Now if it CLAIMED to be science, but was not, as is the case of ID, then that makes it false. But theistic evolution does not claim to be science.

 

[Tenofovir]

No. By invoking theology, that makes theistic evolution not science. The evolution part is science. The theology part, obviously, not. Something not being science does not automatically make it false. Now if it CLAIMED to be science, but was not, as is the case of ID, then that makes it false. But theistic evolution does not claim to be science.

Is it scientific to say evolution is unguided?

 

[Tenofovir]

No. By invoking theology, that makes theistic evolution not science. The evolution part is science. The theology part, obviously, not. Something not being science does not automatically make it false. Now if it CLAIMED to be science, but was not, as is the case of ID, then that makes it false. But theistic evolution does not claim to be science.

Theology only? What about philosophy?

You do know that God talk need not be theology. Right…? riiiiight?

 

[Judas_Thaddeus]

Stay on topic please. Fears about what “creationists” or “IDers” are doing appear to be relevant only on a personal level to a few people. The topic is 'one-third of Americans reject evolution." There is no mixing aloud? That is patently false. For those who believe in theistic evolution, where does the theistic part fit in? It’s like cutting a car in half and telling the buyer: “Make sure you recognize that these two parts are separate and distinct from each other.”

By this definition, theistic evolution is false.

Uh, HELLO, you started it!

  			Originally Posted by **edwest2** 					[forums.catholic-questions.org/images/buttons_khaki/viewpost.gif](http://forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=11582611#post11582611) 				
  		*On the contrary, both Catholics and  non-Catholics, as evidenced in this thread, are mixing God and science.  For some, that is just wrong because the sacred entrance to the science  classroom must be guarded at all times so that the temple might not be  defiled. That is why some scientists are so riled up about Christians,  and the Catholic Church in particular. How dare Christians include what  is taught in the science classroom, the holy of holies, into their  beliefs? That's all we're seeing here.

If anyone has a problem with a school board or a particular group then take it up with them.*

Anyway, theistic evolution is a view that accepts that God is the Creator and
that by the evidence which science has to offer, that God clearly used evolu-
tion. It doesn’t pretend to be a science like Intelligent Design does.

So essentially, here’s the difference:
Theistic Evolution says, "There is a God, this God created all things,
and this is what science a says about how God created all species.

Intelligent Design says, "There is a Designer, we won’t say who the
Designer is, even though everybody knows that we mean ‘God,’ and
we can prove this by saying that everything is too complex to have
arisen without God, I WE MEAN “THE…,” um, “A Designer.”

 

[Farsight001]

I think you’re a bit confused. You have a picture of Jesus Christ so I’m going to try to be charitable. First of all, science says nothing about the existence of God. Yet scientists such as Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers are able to generate polemical attacks on religion and faith heads such as yourself.

Sure they are, but it would be more precise to say “anti-theists such as”. Their position as a scientist has nothing to do with it.

These people philosophise and use “neo-darwinian evolution” to strengthen their belief in atheism and own metaphysical world views. Secondly the use of “unguided” is a non-scientific pronouncement.

No they don’t.

There is no scientific test for “guidance”. Often evolution is described so by “scientists”. Yet it is not a scientific statement. It’s an a priori assumption or an assertion not grounded in a scientific view but in one’s a priori worldview.

What are you talking about? It’s the ID advocates who are so sure there is guidance. Guidance does not factor into evolution.

But your biggest mistake above is to think ID = Christian or theistic God did it. Not at all.

That’s not a mistake. Evidence has been given by the bucketloads in this regard.

ID people also consider the possibility that it could be aliens or some other being NOT NECESSARILY the God of the Old/New Testament.

No they don’t. Yes, they have SAID they do. They only started doing that after they got called out on it all really being about God. When they say it’s not necessarily God, it makes them liars, not open to more possibilities. I really suggest you read up on the history of the ID movement. There are records of several of them flat out stating that, basically, they’re just saying it could have been aliens to get people off their case.

BTW Theistic Evolution can be referred to as a type of Creationism. You are a creationist yourself.

Again, incorrect. Creationism and theistic evolution have specific definitions, and they are mutually exclusive.

 

[edwest2]

Uh, HELLO, you started it!

Anyway, theistic evolution is a view that accepts that God is the Creator and
that by the evidence which science has to offer, that God clearly used evolu-
tion. It doesn’t pretend to be a science like Intelligent Design does.

So essentially, here’s the difference:
Theistic Evolution says, "There is a God, this God created all things,
and this is what science a says about how God created all species.

Intelligent Design says, "There is a Designer, we won’t say who the
Designer is, even though everybody knows that we mean ‘God,’ and
we can prove this by saying that everything is too complex to have
arisen without God, I WE MEAN “THE…,” um, “A Designer.”

The artificial construct here needs to be exposed for what it is.

Evolution as taught in schools is the holy of holies and cannot, in any way, shape or form be defiled. For example, students in a public school are taught evolution is true AND that is was guided by God." The keepers of the gate scream bloody murder. “Though shalt never mix the two! Blasphemers!!”

My view is this:

Evolution is kept separate to satisfy non-theists.

"Richard Dawkins replied …

"It is true that Darwin declined to call himself an atheist. But his motive, clearly expressed to the atheist intellectual Edward Aveling (incidentally the common-law husband of Karl Marx's daughter) was that Darwin didn't want to upset people. Atheism, in Darwin's view, was all well and good for the intelligentsia, but ordinary people were not yet "ripe" for atheism. So he called himself an agnostic, largely for diplomatic reasons..

"In any case, what Darwin chose to call himself, as a pillar of his local parish in the nineteenth century, is of less interest than the cogency of the arguments themselves. Before Darwin came along, it was pretty difficult to be an atheist, at least to be an atheist free of nagging doubts. Darwin triumphantly made it EASY to be an intellectually fulfilled and satisfied atheist. That doesn't mean that understanding Darwin drives you inevitably to atheism. But it certainly constitutes a giant step in that direction."

God is kept out of theistic evolution as a causal agent to satisfy non-theists.

How can science say anything about a being it cannot study or know the attributes of? ‘Science says a being it cannot study did something?’ That can’t be true.

Peace,
Ed

 

[Tenofovir]

Intelligent Design says, "There is a Designer, we won’t say who the
Designer is,** even though everybody knows that we mean ‘God,**’ and
we can prove this by saying that everything is too complex to have
arisen without God, I WE MEAN “THE…,” um, “A Designer.”
[/INDENT]

That is most uncharitable. It’s also a strawman and an ad hominem.

I think they say that they can prove it, or at least disprove that life originated and species evolved by pure unguided natural means. God is not necessary for ID. And ID need not posit an alternative. It only need to show that there are ignored and unanswered errors in the concept of neo Darwinian evolution. Please keep the God talk out of this.

 

[HansTrappist]

Once a designer is invoked, all predictability, testability, and falsifiability goes out the window. The answer to any challenge or question can be reduced to, “Because I say it was designed”. Why do we not see modern forms alongside earlier? By design! How is it that other primates look so much like us? Design! Why do humans have vestigal tailbones? Design! Where do we get wisdom teeth from? Design!

It’s not an answer, it’s a cop-out. ID and Creationism are as scientific as those who claim aliens as the cause for every ancient accomplishment.

If the evidence points to design then the evidence points to design. If it points to Chance then it points to Chance. Scientists must follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of the theological implications. Unfortunately, for Darwinists, the best empirical data available on Evolution - the studies of HIV, Malaria and E.coli that Michael Behe summarizes in his book The Edge of Evolution - supports Intelligent Design much more than it supports Blind Chance as the mechanism behind the irreducible complexity that we find in biology and the fine-tuning that we find in the Laws and Events of Cosmology.

The conclusion of Intelligent Design flows from an impartial study of the empirical evidence and standard Logic.

The identity of the Designer is not a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. It is a matter for Theologians to resolve and as Catholics we know the identity of the Designer with absolute certainty.

We must follow the evidence wherever it leads and as Catholics we MUST believe in the Creator so it shouldn’t be that shocking that we would be able to discern the Creator in His Creation. God created Science, by the way.

The question of Design versus Blind Chance is one that must be answered correctly - not just for theoretical reasons but also for practical, technological reasons. Michael Behe highlights this urgency:

"Squabbles about what makes a theory scientific interest mainly philosophers. Does design make any practical difference? If it doesn’t, then why should anyone care?

The question is misbegotten. Although some people value science chiefly for the control it affords us over nature or the technological benefits it brings, that’s not its primary mission. The purpose of science is simply to understand the universe we live in, for its own sake. If that understanding leads to practical benefits, great. If not, that’s okay, too. Science is an intellectual adventure, not a business trip. If at the end of the scientific day we simply know more about the world than at the beginning, our chief goal has been met.

Nonetheless, although a scientific theory doesn’t have to have important practical implications,*** intelligent design does have them***. As we’ve seen, nature plays hardball. A million people a year, mainly small children, die from malaria. Many more die from HIV and other infections. In order to counter such biological threats, we have to use every scrap of knowledge we have. We must understand*** both*** the capabilities*** and*** the limitations of nature.

In recent years, to educate the public about the medical importance of Darwin’s theory, some scientific organizations have emphasized the role of random mutation and natural selection in the development of antibiotic resistance. They are quite right to do so. Tiny, single changes in a target protein can destroy its ability to bind an antibiotic, rendering the antibiotic ineffective. For public health purposes, that’s a critical biological fact to understand.

But antibiotics that require multiple changes are far more resistant to Darwinian processes. That’s a critical fact to understand, too. Malaria requires several mutations to deal with chloroquine, so it’s a far better drug than ones that are stymied by a single mutation. And chloroquine is not the only case. Recently, former University of Rochester microbiologist Barry Hall examined various antibiotics in a class called “carbapenems,” which are chemically similar to penicillin. 26 With unusual clarity of thought on the topic of evolution, Hall wrote, “***Instead of assuming ***that [the chief kind of enzyme that might destroy these antibiotics] will evolve rapidly, it would be highly desirable to accurately predict their evolution in response to carbapenem selection” (emphasis added). Using clever lab techniques he invented, he showed that, although most of the antibiotics quickly failed, one didn’t. The reason is that neither single nor double point mutations to the enzyme allowed it to destroy the certain antibiotic (called “imipenem”). Wrote Hall, “The results predict, with > 99.9% confidence, that even under intense selection the [enzyme] will not evolve to confer increased resistance to imipenem.” In other words, more than two evolutionary steps would have to be skipped to achieve resistance, effectively ruling out Darwinian evolution.

If antibiotics could be found that required a double CCC to counter, they would likely*** never*** lose their effectiveness.

On matters of public health, Darwin counsels despair. A consistent Darwinist must think that random mutation will get around*** any ***antibiotic eventually— after all, look at all that magnificent molecular machinery it built…. But intelligent design says there’s always real hope. If we can find the right monkeywrench, just one degree more difficult to oppose than chloroquine, it could be a showstopper.

In dealing with an often-menacing nature, we can’t afford the luxury of elevating anybody’s dogmas over data. In medical matters, it’s critical that we understand what random mutation can do. And it’s equally critical that we locate the edge of evolution."

 

[Farsight001]

Is it scientific to say evolution is unguided?

Scientifically unguided, assuming we’re working with the same definition of unguided. To make that distinction, I would point out that falling objects are also scientifically unguided, even though they have a clear tendency to all behave the same.

And now you want to point out that theistic evolution would say that evolution is guided, which contradicts the science, right? Wrong. Because, again, it is SCIENTIFICALLY unguided. God can sure guide it, but God is supernatural - not part of science.

 

[Tenofovir]

The artificial construct here needs to be exposed for what it is.

Evolution as taught in schools is the holy of holies and cannot, in any way, shape or form be defiled. For example, students in a public schjool are taught evolution is true AND that is was guided by God." The keepers of the gate scream bloody murder. “Though shalt never mix the two! Blasphemers!!”

My view is this:

Evolution is kept separate to satisfy non-theists.

"Richard Dawkins replied …

"It is true that Darwin declined to call himself an atheist. But his motive, clearly expressed to the atheist intellectual Edward Aveling (incidentally the common-law husband of Karl Marx's daughter) was that Darwin didn't want to upset people. Atheism, in Darwin's view, was all well and good for the intelligentsia, but ordinary people were not yet "ripe" for atheism. So he called himself an agnostic, largely for diplomatic reasons..

"In any case, what Darwin chose to call himself, as a pillar of his local parish in the nineteenth century, is of less interest than the cogency of the arguments themselves. Before Darwin came along, it was pretty difficult to be an atheist, at least to be an atheist free of nagging doubts. Darwin triumphantly made it EASY to be an intellectually fulfilled and satisfied atheist. That doesn't mean that understanding Darwin drives you inevitably to atheism. But it certainly constitutes a giant step in that direction."

God is kept out of theistic evolution as a causal agent to satisfy non-theists.

Peace,
Ed

I agree. Evolution’s guidance is not a scientific question. Every course which deals with evolution for school kids should start with that. It should be said that we cannot tell or even begin to test for guidance or design. Those questions are not scientific questions. Then the underlying causes could be posited:

1. God is guiding it somehow.
2. It’s a brute fact.
3. The world is a computer simulation. But those who created the simulation …? Not relevant for the discussion of evo.
4. Aliens, other gods, etc are guiding evolution.
5. Something else.

This prevents indoctrination in school. This way there is no confusion and more kids can take a course in evolution without either doing it for atheism and not science, and more kids can do it not being afraid that the biology teacher teaching it is from some anti-Christian minority worldview or did not like that the Church frowned on his masturbation-to-gerbil-porn habit and so religion is evil and evolution is cool to teach to kids because that will turn them away from Christianity.

 

[HansTrappist]

Theistic evolution is NOT Creationism.

Correct.

Nor is Intelligent Design “creationism.”

Nor is Intelligent Design unscientific:

Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution and that these processes then resulted in the creation of galaxies, our solar system, and life on Earth. This belief, which sometimes is termed “theistic evolution,” is not in disagreement with scientific explanations of evolution. Indeed, it reflects the remarkable and inspiring character of the physical universe revealed by cosmology, paleontology, molecular biology, and many other scientific disciplines. - Science and Creationism, the National Academy of Sciences, 1999.

 

[Peter_Plato]

No, you have that backwards.

Creationism invokes God.
ID IS creationism.
Therefore ID invokes God.

Creationism invokes God.
Theistic evolution is NOT creationism.
End.

I was pointing out that because ID and Creationism are the same, ID necessarily invokes God, not claiming that they are the same because they both invoke God.

You are playing with words.

Any position that makes a claim that God created the universe is, by definition, “creationism.” That is what the word means.

You can’t simultaneously hold that God created the world but “creationism” is untrue because THAT entails he created the world in a different manner than you believe he did.

If I create a piece of art, I “create” a piece of art. If I invent a contraption, whether I invented it in a week or a year does not change that I invented it and that I am the inventor. The manner that I do so is irrelevant.

Do you mean God didn’t actually “create” the universe, but assembled it from pre-existing materials? If you mean he “created” the universe ex nihilo, you must mean he “created” it.

If you think that creating the universe in one second, six days, a billion years or 13.7 billion years makes a difference in terms of “creating” as a descriptive act entailed by “creationism,” you’ll have to explain why, other than it is a convenient way to distance your views from those you find less convincing,

 

[Tenofovir]

Scientifically unguided, assuming we’re working with the same definition of unguided. To make that distinction, I would point out that falling objects are also scientifically unguided, even though they have a clear tendency to all behave the same.

No. There is no scientific test for guidance. We cannot say evolution is guided or not. There is no peer review scientific work doing experiments to determine this. It’s just asserted by many but it’s not a scientific conclusion, but a PHILOSOPHICAL or METAPHYSICAL one.

And now you want to point out that theistic evolution would say that evolution is guided, which contradicts the science, right? Wrong. Because, again, it is SCIENTIFICALLY unguided. God can sure guide it, but God is supernatural - not part of science.

It contradicts no science because science is silent about the issue of guidance. Science just says this:

1. There are these fossils which look similar and when we date them they seem to change in appearance in successive strata of rock. We can deduce that these creatures are related and share same ancestors. We assume it’s the same line of creatures giving offspring to creatures which change with each generation, to a greater or lesser degree.
2. There is DNA which is common to all life, and this DNA has similarities among different species and families. We can deduce that they originate from one another, or from some common ancestor.

There is no way to know if the development of these species is guided or not though. What is studied is what can be seen however as uncontroversial and plainly obvious, is that adaptations develop in response to certain pressures and mutations occur. There may be other mechanisms too, like epigenetic changes. That’s a pragmatic/practical choice. Philosophically people could argue that this is enough for an explanation, that one need not care whether secondary factors - behaviour of matter or energy are guided or not, but that’s not science anymore.

As for randomness, it is thought that any set of random values could be determined by some formula. You can’t ever know something really is random. A very complex formula can give you values you may think are random but are not.

Finally to say evolution is truly unguided we’d have to have a sure fire example of unguided evolution occurring elsewhere and compare it to our own. That’s not gonna happen in this universe. To say laws of physics are unguided, we’d need the same. But this is philosophy, not science. Science just throws out things like “this sequence of base pairs is the same in species x and y” and someone concludes that the two are related, assuming that this is the only way that DNA can spread to both. Science ends here.

 

[Judas_Thaddeus]

I think you’re a bit confused. You have a picture of Jesus Christ so I’m going to try to be charitable.

It’s actually of Saint Jude Thaddeus, but go on.

First of all, science says nothing about the existence of God. Yet scientists such as Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers are able to generate polemical attacks on religion and faith heads such as yourself. They also attack theistic evolutionists. These people philosophise and use “neo-darwinian evolution” to strengthen their belief in atheism and own metaphysical world views. Secondly the use of “unguided” is a non-scientific pronouncement. There is no scientific test for “guidance”. Often evolution is described so by “scientists”. Yet it is not a scientific statement. It’s an a priori assumption or an assertion not grounded in a scientific view but in one’s a priori worldview.

So some scientists take an atheistic stance on evolution,
but that does not make evolution an atheistic science.

But your biggest mistake above is to think ID = Christian or theistic God did it. Not at all. ID people also consider the possibility that it could be aliens or some other being NOT NECESSARILY the God of the Old/New Testament. Of course there are people in ID who believe it is God. But it need not be. That’s a further metaphysical/philosophical import.

But that has been the position of those who began Intelligent Design from the beginning. It
didn’t all start with some discovery or observation that inspired the idea that there must be
some sort of Designer at work.
The timeline presented in this link makes it so obvious that
Intelligent Design is an invention by Christian Fundamental-
ists who needed something to replace evolution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_intelligent_design

I’d like you to acknowledge at least this point. ID need not be about God. It can be about any designer - alien, future technology, this universe as a computer simulation, gods like Zeus, etc. Maybe the motivations from many of ID people are religion or spirituality, but that does not refute ID. That’s a really, a silly ad hominem. If you’re not making this assumption, I apologise. If you do, the take home message for you is that ID = not Creationism, in the relevant sense that everyone in the West worries over. “God in the clasroom” and other similar nonsense.

The reason the Intelligent Design movement exists in the first place is religiously based.
It isn’t so much the motive but rather the premise of Intelligent Design. The only reason
IDists won’t explicitly identify the Designer is because they want to count as a science.

BTW Theistic Evolution can be referred to as a type of Creationism. You are a creationist yourself. If God did it by manipulating matter and energy, the people you may want to be impress are not going to be happy with you. That’s still Creationism, albeit some form of crypto variety.

In that broadest sense of the term, I can agree with you, but it is not the most common
usage of the term. “Creationist” was first used by Charles Darwin in 1856 to describe a
proponent of Creationism. In the 1920s, the term became mostly applied to Fundamen-
talist Christians who insisted on a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative
and likewise opposed the idea of human evolution. In 1975, Creationism still yet was a
religious position against evolution. At Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, ruling concluded that
“Intelligent Design,” as it was called, is not science and contravenes the constitutional
restriction on teaching RELIGION in public school science classes.

Today, it still means the same thing.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Is it scientific to say evolution is unguided?

This is a very good point!

How would science determine that mutations are unguided or truly random? What “testing” or observation could ever be invoked?

A bird dropping hits me from the sky. If I say, “Well that was random!” what observation with any “scientific” meaning have I made? None, whatsoever. It just means I have no idea what brought that about and the antecedent conditions are largely unknown to me. That does not entail they could not have been planned, designed or, in some sense, “pre-ordained.” I just don’t know. That would be the scientific conclusion.

For a scientist to say mutations are “random” means what exactly? That scientists have determined the causes of all mutations and have found all of them to have been the result of indeterminable or “could have been anything” governance, that none could possibly have been the result of some predeterminable cause that might have, at some point, been established with an end in view? How could that ever be known?

Nor can scientists argue that these possibly indeterminable causes COULD NOT be guided nor have some determinable cause that is not “random.” Until science does that, it can’t make claims about “random” mutations.

It’s unscientific, at best. And squirreling in anti-theism at worst.

 

[Tenofovir]

It’s actually of Saint Jude Thaddeus, but go on.

Point still stands.

So some scientists take an atheistic stance on evolution,
but that does not make evolution an atheistic science.

I agree. But it’s how it’s presented and why it’s fought over so hard. Evolution for science’ sake is not an issue. Few people really love science that much. Most just attack ID and defend an unguided form of evolution, because for them “religion sucks”.

But that has been the position of those who began Intelligent Design from the beginning. It
didn’t all start with some discovery or observation that inspired the idea that there must be
some sort of Designer at work.
The timeline presented in this link makes it so obvious that
Intelligent Design is an invention by Christian Fundamental-
ists who needed something to replace evolution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_intelligent_design

It’s not the position of all. I think there is at least one atheist philosopher (or maybe 2 = Fodor and Monton) who give credence to ID. And Berlinski is an agnostic and not religious at all. Some would call him an atheist. But that’s entirely IRRELEVANT. Because that’s still an ad hominem fallacy. And the arguments these guys make can apply to aliens. One has to show why they are wrong and not that they’re wrong because they’re doing this for God.

The reason the Intelligent Design movement exists in the first place is religiously based.
It isn’t so much the motive but rather the premise of Intelligent Design. The only reason
IDists won’t explicitly identify the Designer is because they want to count as a science.

Ad hominem.

In that broadest sense of the term, I can agree with you, but it is not the most common
usage of the term. “Creationist” was first used by Charles Darwin in 1856 to describe a
proponent of Creationism. In the 1920s, the term became mostly applied to Fundamen-
talist Christians who insisted on a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative
and likewise opposed the idea of human evolution. In 1975, Creationism still yet was a
religious position against evolution. At Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, ruling concluded that
“Intelligent Design,” as it was called, is not science and contravenes the constitutional
restriction on teaching RELIGION in public school science classes.

Someone else answered this point.

Thanks. You’re doing yourself a terrible disservice by repeating atheist talking points based on ad homimem, genetic fallacies, caricatures.

 

[Judas_Thaddeus]

Correct.

Nor is Intelligent Design “creationism.”

Nor is Intelligent Design unscientific:
Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution and that these processes then resulted in the creation of galaxies, our solar system, and life on Earth. This belief, which sometimes is termed “theistic evolution,” is not in disagreement with scientific explanations of evolution. Indeed, it reflects the remarkable and inspiring character of the physical universe revealed by cosmology, paleontology, molecular biology, and many other scientific disciplines. - Science and Creationism, the National Academy of Sciences, 1999.

No no, Intelligent Design is Creationism dressed up in scientific language.

Now why did you cite what you did from the NAS?
Here’s what else the National Academy of Sciences says,

• “…the claims of intelligent design creationists are disproven by the findings of modern biology.”
• “Science requires testable evidence for a hypothesis, not just challenges against one’s opponent. Intelligent design is not a scientific concept because it cannot be empirically tested.”
• “The arguments of creationists reverse the scientific process. They begin with an explanation that they are unwilling to alter - that supernatural forces have shaped biological or Earth systems - rejecting the basic requirements of science that hypotheses must be restricted to testable natural explanations. Their beliefs cannot be tested, modified, or rejected by scientific means and thus cannot be a part of the processes of science.”

 

[Peter_Plato]

It’s actually of Saint Jude Thaddeus, but go on.

So some scientists take an atheistic stance on evolution,
but that does not make evolution an atheistic science.

But that has been the position of those who began Intelligent Design from the beginning. It
didn’t all start with some discovery or observation that inspired the idea that there must be
some sort of Designer at work.
The timeline presented in this link makes it so obvious that
Intelligent Design is an invention by Christian Fundamental-
ists who needed something to replace evolution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_intelligent_design

The reason the Intelligent Design movement exists in the first place is religiously based.
It isn’t so much the motive but rather the premise of Intelligent Design. The only reason
IDists won’t explicitly identify the Designer is because they want to count as a science.

In that broadest sense of the term, I can agree with you, but it is not the most common
usage of the term. “Creationist” was first used by Charles Darwin in 1856 to describe a
proponent of Creationism. In the 1920s, the term became mostly applied to Fundamen-
talist Christians who insisted on a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative
and likewise opposed the idea of human evolution. In 1975, Creationism still yet was a
religious position against evolution. At Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, ruling concluded that
“Intelligent Design,” as it was called, is not science and contravenes the constitutional
restriction on teaching RELIGION in public school science classes.

Today, it still means the same thing.

Look, if you want to insist that “Creationism” entails a belief that God created the universe as depicted by a literalistic interpretation of Genesis, fine.

Young Earth creationists espouse “Creationism” and are Creationists.

Meyer, Behe, Berlinski, et al, do not accept that the Genesis account is to be taken in such a literalistic manner so they CANNOT be Creationists in YOUR sense of the word. You want to tar them with the same brush by unilaterally telling them what THEY believe.

That’s like me saying YOU must be a literal Creationist because YOU believe in God creating the world. It traffics in ambiguity merely to insist that someone YOU disagree with is in error.

It simply is not a fair-minded approach to the issue to tell others who disagree with you what they MUST believe without actually listening to what it is that they actually do. That is dishonest. We wait to hear what THEIR views actually are, not TELL them what they believe. Unacceptable.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Science just throws out things like “this sequence of base pairs is the same in species x and y” and someone concludes that the two are related, assuming that this is the only way that DNA can spread to both. Science ends here.

In another context, this would be considered “circumstantial” evidence, not conclusive.

 

[Judas_Thaddeus]

Thanks. You’re doing yourself a terrible disservice by repeating atheist talking points based on ad homimem, genetic fallacies, caricatures.

What ad hominem? I am not attacking anyone’s personal character as an argument against
Intelligent Design. Does anyone know what an ad hominem is? Here is a far better example
of an ad hominem: The Full Title of Darwin’s book on evolution is “On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of **Favoured Races **in the Struggle for
Life,” so Darwin was a racist and Evolution is a Racist Doctrine, and ought to be avoided.
Oh and by the way, “Race” did not always have to apply to skin color, and in the context
Darwin was using, “Race” was the equivalent of “Species.”

And what genetic fallacies? Talking about the meaning of the word Creationism?
I just showed you that the classic meaning of the meanings of Creationism and
Creationist have been generally consistent since their first usage.