Creationism, Creation Science, Intelligent Design, or Evolution: What's the Difference? And Why Should You Care, 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?" Well, that's what I heard, anyway.

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

I don't want to just tell you the answers; I want you to understand why the answers are true. That's why I go into so much detail in some of these articles about what's wrong before I tell you what's right. It should help you understand the difference between science and superstition, and how we learn the truth.

So, let me answer the last question first, "Why should you personally care?" You should care because many "educators" are still teaching religion in their science classes instead of teaching real science. They may be teaching your children and others complete nonsense right now. Today. More likely, they may be omitting subjects related to biological origins entirely, and depriving your children of a comprehensive science education.

This happens right now in American public schools, and it's inexcusable that we let it continue. The teachers themselves may be forgiven in some cases, because of the threats they often 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 real science, but who don't want to lose their jobs or get sued or beaten up. Or even worse. This kind of thing happens every year in classes scattered across the country.

Who would have ever thought these things could be happening right now in the United States of America? In the mighty nation founded by men and women who fled the terrible religious persecutions in Europe? Who would imagine that we would hire educated men and women to teach science to our children, and then let ignoramuses abuse them for doing their jobs?

These things must be stopped, and it is up to people like you and me to see that they stop quickly. Very quickly. Our teachers must first be trained not to bring religion into the classroom inappropriately. Our science teachers -- especially those who will be teaching biology -- must be taught how life on earth changes in response to its changing environments, and given the tools to teach this science well. Then we must protect them from threats, lawsuits, or violence by those who don't want it taught.

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 a single human lifetime. It gave us antibiotics, vaccines, and other powerful medicines and completely wiped out smallpox. Now, science is on the verge of wiping out polio and several other devastating diseases, if people can understand and cooperate.

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. No matter how many millions of people might think something is science, if it doesn't meet the test of the scientific method, it is not science.

Creationism

Creationism is a collection of ideas based largely on the first two chapters of Genesis in the Bible, which tell a story of God creating "the heaven and the earth" in six days, and resting on the seventh day. Surely this was never meant to be believed. It is nothing but an interesting story; one of many fairy tales in the Bible.

Nevertheless, a very large number of Americans and a few people of other nationalities believe it and want it taught in school as science.

The scientific method never depends on authority or revelation, much less an ancient book with between about 40 to 100 individual authors, written in several languages, edited and translated and re-edited and retranslated so many times over a period of 3,500 years or so that only a very few scholars can even have much idea what it originally said. That would be ridiculous! The scientific method depends on logic and experimental evidence.

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.

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, in its present form, 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 even more so when they tested the second ICBM 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 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 discussing "Creation Science" or "Scientific Creationism," and they all tried to use scientific terms to gain respectability.

Despite fear of the Soviet Union, several states and school boards tried to force Creation Science into the science classes, either alone or side-by-side with evolution. For one example, Act 590 of the Acts of Arkansas of 1981, 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.

Our universe actually sprang 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, or what was before it; but there are scientists developing hypotheses to be tested, as the Scientific Method calls for. 

Point 1 is an unscientific claim, since scientific claims must be based on evidence.

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 in a limited sense, since mutation and natural selection are only two of the many forces that cause living species to change. This point 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 known forces that work with mutation and 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 or genus. This is so obvious to any dog or cat breeder 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 usually require far more change. Since individual changes from one generation to the next are nearly always very small, it would usually -- but not always -- require many human lifetimes to accomplish that; so nobody sees it happen very often. 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 and circumstances. So-called microevolution is relatively quick and the much greater macroevolution takes far more time and (sometimes) a more extreme environment. Other than that, they are the same identical process. For this reason, most scientists do not use the two terms.

All the evidence indicates that number 3 being wrong. It is definitely not scientific.

4. Separate ancestry for man and apes.

There is no scientific reason to doubt that humans and apes shared ancestors for most of the history of life on earth. As a matter of fact, the fossil record indicates that humans and chimpanzees descended from the same ancestral 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.

From this, it becomes obvious that we are more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas.

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 less than a year during "Noah's Flood." Then the canyon itself was carved out by the flood water before it was gone, according to them..

This is not new. I remember hearing it as early as the 1950s.

But it's simply not true. We know this 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 worldwide "Noah's Flood."

Point 5 is an obvious 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, if not longer. 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 came from the Bible and consisted of perceived weaknesses in the geological and biological sciences. They present no scientific hypotheses to replace the supposedly weak ones. What little evidence they tried to claim was quickly demolished by real scientists, who recognize none of these six points. 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 real science. In 1982, U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton declared this Kansas law in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

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 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 ID argument:

Natural selection works one tiny step (mutation) at a time, and every step has to help the organism and its descendents survive and reproduce 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.

This implication is false.

Beginning with a single, light sensitive cell and progressing all the way to the complexity of 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. Absolutely none.

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, come into existence. 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.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, who heard the Dover, PA, case on teaching ID in public school science classes in 2006, ruled that "Intelligent Design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism."

"No serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of (ID), including defendants' expert witnesses," he added. Later he noted, "Not one defense expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition."

He referred to ID as "a cynical attempt by religious groups to sneak theology into the public schools" and commented on their "breathtaking inanity."

His ruling continued: "Dembski (one of the defense experts) has written 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.'” In other words, ID in biology classes is not all they want. It's just a stepping stone toward getting Christianity taught in public schools and teaching all science according to Biblical principles.

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 for ID, 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 set of religious beliefs. 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! 

Judge Jones said in his ruling in the Dover case that the proponents of ID had given deceptive testimonies and contradicted themselves repeatedly, and that several school board members admitted they did not even know what ID was when they voted to require it taught in science classes. You can download a copy of the ruling in PDF format 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 it has nothing to do with the scientific method.

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.

Evolution

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.

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

Among sexual organisms, a species is a kind of organism 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, horses and 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 mules are sterile, horses and donkeys fit the definition of different species.

The definition of a species gets more complicated and less clear if we discuss bacteria, fungi, or various other kinds of asexual organisms; but the definition above is sccurate 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. They are mistaken. 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," which is still 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 series of articles on topics related evolution. I'll discuss how the theory originated long before Darwin and why he usually gets credit for it anyway. I'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 basic principle is unbelievably simple. The details 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.

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This page was last updated 08/21/09 06:14 PM.

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