The Argument Clinic

So what? We weren’t talking about the attributes of ID in relation to the attributes of creationism. We were talking about ID in relation to creationism. Your attempt to try to shift the discussion to “attributes” is an illegitimate sleight-of-hand.

ID, crudely put, is the view that nature is designed, with no specification of the designer or of the process through which the design was embodied in nature; creationism (as commonly used in American popular discussions of origins from about the 1920s on) is the view that nature is designed by the God of Christian faith and that the process through which the design was embodied is given in Genesis. It’s quite evident that ID’s claim is more generic and creationism’s claim is more specific. With respect to the question of design, creationism is a form of ID, not the other way around.

If one wants to claim that the current American incarnation of intelligent design is historically inspired by Christian creationism, that’s arguably true (though only with caveats, since Behe does not come from the creationist tradition), but I have made clear for about five years here now that I am not talking about the historical question or the sociological question but the conceptual question, and conceptually, intelligent design is not a form of creationism (“as the term creationism has been commonly used in etc.”). Within the framework which I have consistently and clearly set forth, intelligent design does not equal creationism, nor is it intellectually dependent on creationism. And of course that’s exactly what it says on the Discovery website, but no one here is willing to read the statements specifically addressing the relation between ID and creationism there, statements to which I’ve provided the links on many occasions.

Serious thinkers on the question of intelligent design, such as Ratzsch and Kojonen, understand that it’s logically separable from belief in creationism.