Creationism, Creation Science, Intelligent Design, or Evolution: What's the Difference? And Who Cares, Anyway?

Remember the Bible story of Cain and Able? According to the story, Cain killed his brother, Able, and became the world's first murderer. When God asked him where Able was, he had the nerve to retort, "Am I my brother's keeper?" More recently, it may have been the smartest monkey in the zoo who asked, "Am I my keeper's brother?"

This article will briefly address the four related topics in the title. We'll define or describe each of them, discuss the main differences, and show clearly which one is a scientific theory and why the other three are not.

So, to answer the last question first, who cares anyway? More to the point, why should you personally care? You should care because "educators" may be still teaching your children and others religion in their science classes instead of real science. Or they are more likely now to be omitting the subject entirely and depriving their students of a comprehensive science education.

This would be inexcusable, if it were not for the threats some of them get from ignorant parents and other activists when they try to teach real science. This happens so often that I find it difficult to fault good teachers who want to teach science correctly, but who don't want to lose their jobs, get beaten up, or worse. These things must be stopped, and it is up to people like you and me to see that they stop immediately.

Real science is what brought us out of the dark ages and into the 21st century world of modern technology. Real science brought us from the horse and buggy days to the space shuttle and the moon, from the telegraph to the internet, and from surgery by candlelight to modern hospitals in less than a single human lifetime. It gave us antibiotics and other powerful medicines and completely wiped out smallpox. Look around your living room. Nearly everything you see was made possible by science. Real science is what we need in our science classrooms.

Let's see which of these is real science and which ones are not by comparing them with the scientific method. This is the only real test.

Creationism

Creationism is a group of ideas based largely on the first two chapters of Genesis in the Bible, which tell an almost poetic story about God creating "the heaven and the earth" in six days, and resting on the seventh. During that creation week, it tells us, He made the sun, the moon, the stars, plants, animals, and finally humans. (It doesn't seem to mention why an all-powerful God, Who can do anything, didn't just say something like "OK, do it" and have everything come into existence in an instant. Why did He take six whole days? But that's just me. I tend to wonder about things.)

Many people believe the Bible is God's perfect revelation to humankind, and some of them interpret these passages literally. Probably most of these "literalists," though not all, still consider the archaic KJV of the Bible to be God's infallible Word in English. That means it contains no mistakes, and every word in it is true and correct. The Bible is their authority, so they believe God created each "kind" of living thing individually, just as the story seems to imply. (The word "kinds" in this context also comes from Genesis, and is sometimes referred to as a "Genesis kind;" because our modern system of species and higher groupings did not yet exist.)

Grass, fruit trees, and other plants were supposedly created on land on the third day of that first week; sea animals and birds, on the fifth day; and humans and other land animals, on the sixth day. Science has proved this to be totally untrue beyond any reasonable doubt. These life forms and many others came to be gradually over a period of hundreds of millions of years. But creationists either ignore the evidence or try to find gaps in the science that can allow them to maintain their irrational beliefs. There are certainly gaps in our knowledge, but they are not that wide.

I need to note here that not all Bible believers take this story as literally. Many others would point out that it says God made living things, but it really doesn't say how He made them. Many of them believe God took hundreds of millions of years and used evolution to make the wonderful profusion of plants, humans, and other animals on the earth. This is usually because they understand that the scientific evidence completely overwhelms the creationist position.

There are also some differences in what creationists  believe. As I've already said, many believe the whole universe, including all forms of life, were created in six literal, 24-hour days about six thousand years ago. (See How Old Is the Earth? And How Do We Know?.) Some believe the creation is literal but the days are figurative and may have been any amount of time; and there are several other variations.

What creationists do agree about is that God did the creating, and that He created modern humans and other living things in more or less our present form. Their main reason for believing this is because of what the Bible says.

The scientific method never depends on authority or revelation from anywhere, much less an ancient book. It depends on logic and experimental proof. Creationism is clearly not science because it has no use for  The Scientific Method. Creationism is religion, and should never have been taught in any science class.

Despite these simple facts, creationism used to be commonly taught in American public school science classes as if it were genuine science. This was legal in probably every state and generally considered appropriate as late as the 1920's.

Creation Science

From the late 1920's to about 1960, most science classes simply failed to mention anything about how the great diversity of life came to be on earth. Federal courts had forbidden creationism to be taught as science, but evolution was unpopular with many religious people, and therefore generally not taught either. Creation science and Intelligent Design had not yet been invented. A great deal of apathy developed toward the teaching of science generally for about four decades.

This apathy changed to alarm when the Soviet Union tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in August of 1957 and then tested the second one successfully by using it to launch Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, into orbit just two months later on October 4. The Cold War was in full swing. Practically everybody in the Free World was already afraid of being vaporized by the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. Sputnik's launch on one of their brand new ICBMs demonstrated their ability to deliver nuclear warheads the same way and very quickly. Within a couple of hours from launch, at most. The United States had no similar missile capability for two more years. A sense of extreme urgency quickly developed.

The National Science Foundation responded quickly by funding several programs designed to modernize the teaching of science in the nation's schools. In addition to modernizing chemistry and physics classes and others obviously related to national defense, they also provided new biology textbooks that incorporated the theory of evolution as a major theme.

Several Christian Fundamentalist organizations were formed soon afterward for the sole purpose of opposing the teaching of evolution and trying to provide a scientific basis for creationism, so it could be taught again. Most began calling it "Creation Science" or "Scientific Creationism," and they all tried to discuss it in scientific terms.

Despite fear of the Soviet Union, several states and school boards tried to force Creation Science into the science classes, either alone or as an alternative to evolution. For example, in Act 590 of the Acts of Arkansas of 1981, the state of Arkansas decreed "balanced treatment for creation-science and evolution-science" and defined creation-science as follows:

Creation science means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those evidences. Creation science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate:

1. Sudden creation of the universe, energy and life from nothing.

2. The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism.

3. Changes only with fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals.

4. Separate ancestry for man and apes.

5. Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of worldwide flood.

6. A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

The problem is that there simply is no scientific evidence for any of these points. For this reason, almost no scientists believe them. They are essentially the same religious claims as those of the older creationism.

Let's examine these claims briefly.

1. Sudden creation of the universe, energy and life from nothing.

The universe we know did suddenly spring into being in an incredibly energetic, explosive manner commonly referred to as "the Big Bang;" but there is no evidence that it was "created." We simply don't know yet where it came from or how it came to be; but there are scientists developing hypotheses to be tested, as the Scientific Method calls for. Therefore point 1 is an unscientific claim..

2. The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism.

This may actually be correct, since natural selection is only one of the many forces that cause living species to change. It ignores such other forces as sexual selection, biological arms races, parasitism, genetic drift in isolated populations, etc. While point 2 may be technically correct, it is meaningless because of these many other forces that work with natural selection.

3. Changes only with fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals.

There's that reference to "kinds" again. From Genesis. Many creationists and creation scientists admit that different varieties can appear within a species. This is so obvious to any dog or cat owner or farmer than no halfway reasonable person would deny it. Since the changes that produce these different varieties are relatively small, such people often refer to them as "microevolution."

To produce an entirely new species from one group of animals or plants would require far more change, though. Since individual changes from one generation to the next are nearly always very small, it would require many human lifetimes to accomplish that; so nobody ever sees it happen. They refer to this as macroevolution and claim it is impossible.

However, real scientists who study these principles day after day realize there is no qualitative difference between the two. It is only a matter of time. So-called microevolution is relatively quick and the much greater macroevolution takes far more time. Other than that, they are the same identical process. For this reason, most scientists do not use the two terms.

All the evidence points to number 3 being wrong.

4. Separate ancestry for man and apes.

There is no scientific reason to doubt that humans and apes shared ancestors or most of the history of l. As a matter of fact, the fossil record indicates that humans and chimpanzees descended from the same ancestor species about five to seven million years ago. Now that we can study and compare gene sequences quickly and relatively inexpensively, we know that genetic evidence confirms this. Two or three million years before that, our human/chimpanzee ancestors were the same species as the ancestors of gorillas. Before that we all shared a grandfather species with orangutans, maybe 10 to 11 million years ago.

On the other hand, chimpanzees and bonobos shared an ancestor species as recently as about three million years ago, which is largely the reason they look so much alike.

Point number 4 goes by the wayside.

5. Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of worldwide flood.

Some of the "creation scientists" looked at the Grand Canyon in the Western United States and tried to imagine that the rock more than a mile deep was formed from mud laid down, layer upon layer, in about a year during "Noah's Flood." Then the canyon itself would have to have been carved out later by the river, during the last four or five thousand years.

This is not new. I remember hearing it as early as the 1950s. Neither is it possible for many reasons. In the first place, there has been no worldwide flood during the past few million years. Such a flood would have left massive geologic evidence, which does not exist. There was never a "Noah's Flood," and almost certainly no such man as Noah, who is known only from the Bible and other religious books. Point 5 is a fairy tale.

6. A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

We know the earth itself is 4.55 billion years old (plus or minus a couple of percent) and has supported life for almost four billion years. This doesn't seem to agree with "a  relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds." Number 6 is wrong, too.

.Most creation science arguments consisted of perceived weaknesses in the geological and biological sciences, with no good scientific hypotheses to replace them. What little evidence they tried to claim was quickly demolished by real scientists, who recognize none of these six points as both correct and significant. There is simply no scientific evidence for any kind of creationism, whether referred to as scientific or otherwise.

It quickly became obvious that "creation science" was nothing but the old creationism with a new name and a feeble attempt at respectability. It was never science, except in name only. In 1982, U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton declared this Kansas law in violation of the First Amendment.

One reason for the ruling was because several state senators who had supported the bill stated publicly that they did so because of their religious beliefs. People just can't seem to understand that religion is not science, so I'll say it again. Like the creationism before it, "creation science" is clearly not science because it has no use for  The Scientific Method. It is religion, and should never have been taught in any science class.

Intelligent Design

When "creation science" was shown to be just plain old creationism dressed up to look good, a few of its proponents changed their tactics once again, and came up with something they called "Intelligent Design" (ID).

ID proposes no new scientific principles. It takes several of the old creationism ideas, mixes them with a few ideas from evolution and genetics, and dresses the whole package in scientific language once more to convince people it is now science.

To summarize briefly, ID proponents teach that the earth may be many millions or billions of years old and that evolution by natural selection may account for much of the diversity of life on earth. But it also claims there are many features of life that are too complex to have evolved by natural selection. They call this "irreducible complexity" and claim that an "intelligent designer" must have designed and created it.

There are whole books written by ID proponents describing what they think is irreducible complexity, so I won't attempt to describe it in detail. But here is a very brief summary of the biological argument:

Natural selection works one tiny step (mutation) at a time, and every step has to help the organism and its descendents survive better than others that don't have the mutation. Any organ that would take several steps to evolve, like an eye, for example, must be more beneficial to the organism at every step than it was before. That is, every mutation that survives must make the eye more useful to the particular organism in its own environment.

Then the ID proponents usually ask, "What good is a half-formed eye?" The implication is that a partly evolved eye is useless, therefore it would never have finished evolving. We would all be blind.

The implication is false.

Beginning with a single, light sensitive cell and progressing all the way to a human eye, biologists have found animals with working, useful eyes or "proto-eyes" at essentially every step of evolution. None of these is a "half-formed eye." They provide the amount of vision the particular creature needs and is capable of using. Biologists know of no irreducible complexity in nature.

ID proponents also claim that life itself and even many non-living features of the universe could never have formed by the workings of nature alone. So they claim again that these things could not exist without an intelligent designer. This is a different discussion that we will not get into at this time. What we're discussing here is how different kinds, or species, of life form. All four theories mentioned above pertain to living things and attempt to answer this one question: Where did all the diversity come from? Since this is the one question they all attempt to answer, we'll stick close to that for now and save our discussion of the other things for a future time.

Since the ID proponents want their ideas to be accepted by mainstream scientists and taught in public school science classes, they carefully refrain from calling the "designer" God in public. Some of their leaders have even said it might be an intelligent alien from some other planet with a very advanced technology. Of course, this begs the question of who designed the alien.

Nevertheless, in private, they know who they believe the designer was. And even in public, some of them slip up and refer to the designer as God. This automatically removes ID from the realm of science -- even if it had ever been there -- and proves it to be religion instead.

This should be no surprise, because Phillip Johnson, author of the 1991 book entitled Darwin on Trial, and considered the father of the ID movement, has written that “theistic realism” or “mere creation” are defining concepts of the IDM (Intelligent Design Movement). This means “that God is objectively real as Creator and recorded in the biological evidence . . .” He has also stated that the “Darwinian theory of evolution contradicts not just the Book of Genesis, but every word in the Bible from beginning to end. It contradicts the idea that we are here because a creator brought about our existence for a purpose.”

On his Design Inference Website, Dr. William A. Dembski describes himself as "a mathematician and philosopher, ... Research Professor in Philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth. He is also a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle as well as the executive director of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design."

He continues in the third person, "As interest in intelligent design has grown in the wider culture, Dr. Dembski has assumed the role of public intellectual. In addition to lecturing around the world at colleges and universities, he is frequently interviewed on the radio and television. His work has been cited in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, ..." (See http://www.designinference.com/biosketch.htm.)

Although he is not a biologist in any sense, Dr. Dembski has the credentials to make ID seem legitimate. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), he makes it look like a conspiracy by writing that ID is a “ground clearing operation” to allow Christianity to receive serious consideration, and “Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always a completion.”

Dr. Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, is a biochemist at Lehigh University, and possibly the only qualified biological scientist in the movement who ever did any actual research and published a few papers in a peer reviewed journal. He has written that by ID he means “not designed by the laws of nature,” and that it is “implausible that the designer is a natural entity.” Remember, science studies nature. The study of anything that is “not designed by the laws of nature” is not science. It is religion.

Their own statements make it clear that ID is not science. It is a religious belief. They actually want to change the definition of science so their religion will qualify as a science by the new definition. These guys are sneaky! 

I'm very tempted to quote here several things Judge Jones said in his ruling in Dover, Pennsylvania; about how the proponents of ID had given deceptive testimonies and contradicted themselves repeatedly, and how several school board members admitted they did not even know what ID was when they voted to require it taught in science classes. But this is already longer than I intended. Download a copy of the ruling in PDF format from here and read it for yourself.

Judge Jones was absolutely right. "Intelligent Design" is not science. It is religion because it depends on an "intelligent designer" which they admit privately is God. It is definitely not science because the designer has nothing to do with the scientific method.

Evolution

We have determined that creationism, "Creation Science," and "Intelligent Design" are not science. They are all closely related versions of the same religious philosophy. The main difference is that the proponents of each new version have become more sophisticated and use more convincing language. This does not make the ideas true, and it certainly does not make them science. This leaves evolution as the only  remaining explanation for the abundance of different kinds of life on earth to be considered here.

.

Four different species of fossil hominid skulls. These species are just a few of our many non-human ancestors.

Evolution is biological change from one generation to the next, which works largely by natural selection, and which often creates new species through the accumulated changes of many generations. An individual does not evolve; a species does.

In its simplest definition, a species is a kind of living thing that can only breed among its own kind to produce viable offspring. In other words, it cannot crossbreed with a similar species and produce offspring that can also produce live offspring. For example, female horses and male donkeys are two similar but different species. They can breed and produce offspring we call mules; but nearly all mules are sterile. The only way to get another mule is by breeding horses to donkeys again. Since their offspring are sterile, they fit the definition of different species.

The definition of a species gets more complicated and less clear if we discuss bacteria, fungi, or various kinds of asexual plants and animals; but this definition is complete enough for this article. The fact is that both natural selection and the evolution of the many different species it produces are indeed science and not religion. Why? Because they meet the requirements of the Scientific Method.

Many religious people in the United States have tried to claim that evolution itself is religion, and so should not be taught in science classes. This is not true. Evolution has been tested many times since Darwin made his observations and wrote his hypothesis. As it turns out, he didn't get it all right. He could not possibly have described evolution perfectly, since he knew nothing of genetics, which was not accepted by the scientific community for another 40 years or so.

Now evolution, genetics, and other related theories have been combined into the modern evolutionary synthesis and comprise what is usually just known as evolution. This is true science, and we'll discuss it in detail (but a little bit at a time) over the next few months.

For More Information

For more information now, check out the following links:

What is Creationism?

Coming Soon

Over the next few months, I plan to write a follow-up series of articles on the topic of evolution. The next article, which should come out in about a month, will discuss how the theory originated at least a century before Darwin and why he usually gets credit for it anyway. We'll provide enough information to show how evolution differs from the other three ideas we discussed here and more specifically why it is real science. After that we'll discuss how it works, beginning with natural selection and descent with modification.

Evolution is one of those things that can be as simple or as complex as you want. The principle is so simple it's almost unbelievable. The details, on the other hand, can be so complex we may never understand them all. In this series of articles, we'll keep it simple, but with enough detail to be interesting.

No Bull Update

If you haven't already given us your email address, be sure to use the link in the left column of any page. Then we'll send you our free No Bull Update by email whenever we add a new major article.

This page was last updated 02/06/08 11:21 PM.

Home | Bible Contradictions | Dictionary | Einstein | Evolution | FAQ | From the Net | From Readers | Giggles | Home Page Archive | How Old Is Earth? | Is Science Just Another Religion? | Links | Questions for God | Religion: What Others Say  | Saved | Skepticism or Cynicism? | Terms | Scientific Method | Things I'm Skeptical Of | To Save a Mockingbird | What Can I Believe? | Update Archive | What Does a Believer Lose? | Who is Bill Dearmore?