Comments on Greg Cootsona and ID

[Tim]

[A few points of clarification for Eddie’s response to @Cootsona]

@Eddie

I was merely noting that it avoids something which “creation vs. evolution” discourse commits one to: that either creation or evolution is true, and the two conclusions are therefore at war. I decided, long before I had ever heard of ID, indeed, before Discovery even existed, that “creation vs. evolution” was an unreasonable polarization, and had abandoned it. Yet Creation Science had insisted on that polarization, at most allowing, grudgingly, some “microevolution” (as it calls it).

‘Creationism’ has always been an explicitly anti-evolution movement:

As late as the 1920s antievolutionists chose to dedicate their organizations to "Christian Fundamentals," "Anti-Evolution," and "Anti-False Science," not to creationism. It was not until 1929 that one of George McCready Price’s former students, the Seventh-day Adventist biologist Harold W. Clark, explicitly packaged Price’s new catastrophism as "creationism." In a brief self-published book titled Back to Creationism Clark urged readers to quit simply opposing evolution and to adopt the new "science of creationism," by which he meant Price’s flood geology. For decades to come various Christian groups, from flood geologists to theistic evolutionists, squabbled over which camp most deserved to use the creationist label. However, by the 1980s the flood geologists/scientific creationists had clearly co-opted the term for their distinctive interpretation of earth history.

Ronald L. Numbers, History Topic: Antievolutionists and Creationists

I would further point out that the Creation Science Movement, which lays claim to the title “the oldest creationist movement in the world”, started life (in 1932) as the “Evolution Protest Movement”.

@Eddie

On the other hand, when I picked up my first ID books, what did I find? Behe – accepted common descent. Denton – accepted common descent. In other words, at least as far as our bodies go, we come from primitive ancestors. That’s not creationism or creation science or scientific creationism or anything of the sort.

I think many would consider Behe’s acceptance of Common Descent to be partial or incomplete. He appears to believe that Common Descent ‘stalls’ without frequent interventions by ‘an Intelligent Designer he believes is God’, to install Irreducible Complexity, take Evolution past its purported ‘Edge’, or to forstall “Darwin[ism” from “Devolv[ing]”. This position would appear to be indistinguishable from Progressive Creationism ( Progressive creationism - Wikipedia ).