Hi Slevesque,
All I'm saying is that ID and biblical creationism isn't the same thing,
If that is true, then why were the terms "creationists" and "design proponents" used interchangeably by the Discovery Institute in their text
Of Pandas and People?
Judging by the actions of the DI (pretty much the heart of the ID movement), the terms are so interchangeable that they were able use a word program to replace "creationists" with "design proponents" automatically, without changing the surrounding text. (Of course they screwed it up, leaving some drafts reading "cdesign proponentsists". The DI is not very good at covering its tracks.) If the two philosophies are so radically different, why would the very organisation that promotes ID use the term as interchangeable with creationism in its own propaganda?
And theistic evolutionism is, by definition, not creationism.
I disagree. Theistic evolutionism is a form of creationism. Sure, it's a less extreme form than Young Earth creationism, but it still depends upon the actions of God to explain the presence and variety of life. That leaves it with far more in common, from a philosophical standpoint, with creationism than science.
The only difference between TE and YEC is the quantity of scientific knowledge that they dispute. The alternative answers that they offer instead are identical; God did it.
Behe believes in the fact of evolution (nested hierarchy, fossil record, etc.) but not on the Neo-Darwinian mechanism.
He instead proposes directed evolution as the mechanism through which things evolved.
You don,t get any more theist evolutionist then that ...
You most certainly can.
It is common for TEs to believe that the "Neo-Darwinian mechanism" is entirely sufficient to explain the
variety of species. Such TEs simply believe that Neo Darwinian mechanisms are the
means[ that God chose to utilise in creating variety in living things. They need not believe that God is required to intervene at any point in the process. They need not believe that God has taken any active role in the process (after he originally kick-started it that is).
Behe
does believe that God has to intervene. He believes that certain instances of Neo-Darwinian cannot function by themselves. he believes that a designer (that he just happens to think is his favoured version of God...) is needed during the ongoing process of evolution. There are plenty of TEs who do not believe any such thing.
Whether you call Behe a creationist or a theistic evolutionist doesn't matter much to me. the key point, as far as I can see, is that the kind of TE ideology offered by Behe and others is simply a watered down form of creationism. Surely you can see the similarities? Both camps use God as their primary explanation for the origins and variety of life.
Sorry, but putting in some 'outside magic' does not make someone automatically a creationist. It may make an idea none-scientific, but to actually be a creationist you have to think God poofed things out of nothing, not simply changed things incrementally over time.
Sure there are distinctions that can be made between ID and other forms of creationism. But scratch the surface and the creationist roots show through. As they admit in the Wedge Document, the DI's goals are "To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that
nature and human beings are created by God". That sure sounds like creationism to me. Compare and contrast that last bit with the (somewhat narrow) definition of creationism that you cite from Merriam-Webster;
quote:
: a doctrine or theory holding that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by God out of nothing and usually in the way described in Genesis
Is there really that much difference between these two positions? ID is merely - to use the DI's own metaphor - the thin end of the creationist wedge. It is a public veneer designed for political and marketing reasons and what is has to sell is distinctly creationist in tone.
You can't interchangebly use both words to talk about the two.
Please tell that to the editors of
Pandas and People, who did exactly that.
Mutate and Survive
On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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