- An article by Marcus R. Ross, Journal of Geoscience Education, v. 53, n. 3, May, 2005, Who Believes What? Clearing up Confusion over Intelligent Design and Young-Earth Creationism
- ABSTRACT
The question of what differentiates young-Earth creationism (YEC) from Intelligent Design (ID) has resulted in inaccurate and confusing terminology, and hinders both understanding and dialogue. Though both YEC and ID groups have drawn distinctions between themselves, previous attempts to classify design-based positions on origins have been unable to adequately resolve their relationships. The Nested Hierarchy of
Design, a multiple-character classification system, categorizes teleological positions according to the strength of claims regarding the reality, detectability, source, method, and timing of design, and results in an accurate and robust classification of numerous positions. This method avoids the philosophical and theological pitfalls of previous methods and enables construction of accurate definitions for a suite of teleological positions. The incorporation of the Nested Hierarchy of Design in classroom discussion could 1) better represent the suite of opinions among students, 2) clarify the many
teleological positions, and 3) help to reduce tensions between educators, students, and the public.
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Interesting ranking, but I would disagree with the characterization of âMaterialist Evolutionistâ in Figure 1 has having âmore scienceâ than the âTheistic Evolutionistâ. In my mind, they both do âscienceâ in the same way, and accept the same evidence. Itâs only that TE scientists hold philosophically to a non-materialist metaphysics. But that has nothing to do with science.
OhâŚalso in Figure 1, I wonder what criteria separate âTheistic Evolutionistâ and âEvolutionary Creationistâ. I thought they were different terms for the same thing?
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There are issues with any term. I now use Christian naturalist and still just have to explain Iâm a Christian who thinks most of it is myths and accept the scientific consensus that the scientific community comes to on most things like the theory of evolution and I donât believe in any form of intelligent design. Anyone who thinks God intervened and upset the natural order of things guiding the process is basically the same to me regardless if itâs young earth creationist or evolutionary creationist who believe in supernatural selection.
Does an âevolutionary creationistâ necessarily believe in âsupernatural selectionââwhatever that means? I donât think that God intervened in evolution (just like you apparently) but still would have called myself an evolutionary creationist/theistic evolutionist (I still donât know the difference between those two terms).
Itâs religious jargon. There is no one definition for them. Some use one, some use the other, some means this and some means that and some use both and some use neither. Itâs more just general terms to get you in the general direction. Itâs like saying Christian. A liberal who rejects intelligent design and believes that god revealed himself as many different gods to different people uses Christian mist like a conservative red hatter who believes humans used dinosaurs to build the pyramids as grain storage few thousand years ago. The people says gays burn in hell forever uses Christian just like the gay Christian universalist uses it.
Theistic evolution and evolutionary creationism is just the same. People use them how they see fit and itâs basically the same thing to some and not to others. Either one just means, within the Christian context, that someone mostly accepts the theory of evolution and believes in god. Pick whichever you like the most and use it in the way you like it the most and youâll typically end up on the ballpark of where you are wanting to head by using them.
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Am I out of line in objecting to the phrase âtheâ theory of evolution. There are many theories of evolution, some more scientifically respectable than others.
Which, btw, contrasts with Intelligent Design, where there is, as far as I know, there is no theory of ID. (Can anyone state what sort of things are ID, and how they differ from those that arenât? Is there anything which is not ID?) Flat Earth & Geocentrism are represented by theories, I think.
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- Ahhh! mystery unraveling âŚ
- The paper is dated 2005 and the author, Marcus R. Ross
(born 1976) is an American young earth creationist and vertebrate paleontologist. Ross was featured in a February 2007 New York Times article about the conflict between his young Earth creationist beliefs (which hold the Earth to be only thousands of years old) and his doctoral dissertation (which involved animals extinct for millions of years). His dissertation was on tracking the diversity, biostratigraphy, and extinction of mosasaurs, an extinct group of marine reptiles whose remains are found in Late Cretaceous period (100â66 [Ma]) deposits around the world. - Clearly, I missed that.
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- Thanks for reminding me of one of the things I was searching for which led me to Rossâ article. I was looking for âYoung Earth Creationism, Bibliolatry, and Flat Earth Theoryâ.
- Falling Flat: A New Book by Dr. Danny Faulkner Refuting the Flat Earth
- Ignoring the Plank: A Young-Earth Apologist Inadvertently Writes a Brilliant Critique of Young-Earth Creationism
- Flat Earth vs Creationism â A Biblical perspective
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- You stumped me. Although Dale was the only person I can remember who identified himself as an evolutionary creationist, I never bothered to ask him the difference. So, for kicks, I asked Chat GPT, which said:
- Ah, great questionâevolutionary creationism and theistic evolution are often used interchangeably, but thereâs a subtle distinction in emphasis and framing. Both accept evolution and believe in God, but they approach the conversation from slightly different starting points.
They both agree:
- God is real and active.
- Evolution is the scientifically accurate way life developed.
- Thereâs no conflict between faith and science.
- The Genesis creation story is not meant to be read as literal science or history.
Key Differences:
| Theistic Evolution | Evolutionary Creationism | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary identity | Starts from science; adds theology | Starts from theology; embraces science |
| Framing | âGod used evolutionâ | âGod created through evolutionâ |
| Audience | More common in academic or scientific circles (including some agnostics or deists) | More common among evangelical or devout Christians trying to reconcile faith with science |
| Tone | Philosophical/scientific | Theological/biblical |
| Scriptureâs role | Secondary to scientific explanation | Scripture is central, but interpreted non-literally |
| Name suggests⌠| A philosophical model of how God and evolution can coexist | A faith-based creation model that uses evolutionary science |
Simple Summary:
- Theistic evolution is often more science-forward: âI believe in evolution, and I also believe in God.â
- Evolutionary creationism is more faith-forward: âI believe God is the Creator, and evolution is the method He used.â
Some people use the terms interchangeably, and many definitions overlap. But if someone calls themselves an evolutionary creationist, theyâre probably signaling a stronger biblical faith commitment than someone using the more academic-sounding theistic evolutionist label.
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- Now that I know that the author is a Young Earth Creationist, I am not as content with his charts.
- I agree.
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I have recently come to the view that this issue stems from a deist conception of God. From a classical perspective, asking if God intervened in evolution can be seen as approaching the issue from the wrong direction. If we accept creation ex nihilo and cum tempore (God creates from nothing and with time) then there is no part of nature that God does not create and uphold at every instant. Here is a snippet from a Powerpoint I recently led a small group on:
I do believe in miracles but they donât violate nature nor are they God intervening in some nature completely distinct or untethered from himself. Miracles go beyond nature. There is no process of evolution or any other part of material existence that God does not sustain and uphold from nothing every instant. As Jesus said, âMy Father has been working until now.â
As far as the question of this topic goes. Labels can be misleading. If asked if I believe in intelligent design I would say yes. Not because I think we canât explain the eye or that evolution has problems. I accept evolution and basics of descent with modification. Whether or not science can work out the exact origin of biological life is an open question to me. I don 't think its necessarily true that it will nor do I have problem if it does. But in terms of design, I see teleology in nature, in the mind, and the underlying constants of the universe being very specific values to a lot of decimal places leads me to this view. I am sympathetic to, even if not 100 convinced by rare earth type thinking. But I also donât think brain science can ever fully explain the mind and this requires belief in an intelligence that transcends the material world. Iâm no philosopher but a thing explaining itself is probably quite circular in some way. As Peter Kreeft said:
A second argument is from the existence of our minds. Our minds canât be explained by matter alone. Matter has intelligibility but not intelligence; it is a thinkable object but not a thinking subject. The mind is more than the physical brain. For we can think about the brainâindeed, cybernetics is a highly detailed scienceâand thinking about x has to transcend x, has to be more than x. (I should say âknowingâ rather than just âthinkingâ because I mean âtrue thinking.â) Therefore, the mind is more than the brain.
I think the comprehensibility of the universe, our minds, truth, the apparent fine tuning and so on all suggest (or are more consistent with) what I would call a Designer. Edward Feser wrote a paper in 2025 (LIFE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE PARADOX OF EVOLUTION) arguing that even evolution may require a teleology of sorts (whether Platonic or Aristotelian is left open):
A third and yet more detailed statement of the argument is developed by biologist Stephen Rothman in his book The Paradox of Evolution. Though he does not cite Geach or Haldane, Rothman makes the same basic point they do, to the effect that natural selection presupposes reproduction and thus cannot explain it, so that at least in this connection Darwinism has not entirely succeeded in eliminating teleology from biology. But he also argues that there are additional problems in principle with the notion of a Darwinian explanation of reproduction. In order for natural selection to favor a trait, that trait must confer some survival advantage on the individual organisms that possess it. But reproduction, Rothman argues, confers no such advantage, and indeed if anything works against the survival of the individual. For example, at the level of the cell, Rothman notes:
As new cells are produced, the progenitor or parent cell is destroyed. In asexual reproduction it is cut up, and in sexual reproduction it is made a part of something else (the fused cell). Either way the original object no longer exists; it is gone. And naturally a process that destroys something cannot be of value to it.
Feser goes on:
Their âparadox of evolutionâ argument thus has the following implications for the nature of life, if reproduction is indeed partly definitive of life. First, if reproduction is essential to life and natural selection cannot explain the origin of reproduction, then natural selection cannot explain the origin of life. Second, if reproduction is essential to life and reproduction is irreducibly teleological in character, then life is irreducibly teleological in character.
This does not by itself strictly entail that reproduction and life are in fact irreducibly teleological, at least if there turns out to be some means other than appeal to natural selection to banish teleology from biology. But in the absence of some such alternative, it does put the biological anti-teleologist back to square one. Nor, as I have said, do these results by themselves entail that life cannot be given an evolutionary explanation of some sort, and neither do they by themselves vindicate âintelligent designâ or the like. What they do provide is further support for Jerry Fodorâs judgment that natural selection cannot do the job evolutionists think it does, and for Thomas Nagelâs judgment that evolutionists need to consider the possibility that something like teleology as Aristotle understood it may really be intrinsic to the natural world after all.
I think many of us have swung too far past a very useful methodological naturalism into philosophical naturalism and even into deist type thinking. Some of us have a tendency to approach all questions from a scientific perspective even if we have no business doing so. Itâs a wonderful tool, but itâs not fit for every job.
So yes, I would put myself in a design camp but I probably wouldnât fit in very well with most of the people around me.
Vinnie
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I donât have issues with the term myself.
I comment on this citation from Feser/Rothman because I have recently discussed (argued) with YEC people about a claim that sexual reproduction is detrimental to the long-term survival of species. Cumulating mutations together with reproduction that spreads the harmful mutations wider in the population was claimed to lead species to extinction - the current high extinction rate was claimed to be caused by deteriorating genomes, not by the impact of humans on the ecosystems. The deteriorating genomes with the increasing rate of extinctions of species were used as an argument supporting the short history of life on earth.
If we focus on the individual cell that divides or is fused with another cell, it may seem to stop existing as the original cell. That is a misleading viewpoint. Evolution is not about the fate of a cell or even an individual, it is about heritable changes from one generation to the following ones. To have offspring and grandoffspring, there is a need for multiplication. If the original cell is not eternal, reproduction is needed for continuing existence of the heritage (genes).
Multiplication may happen without sex or it may happen through sexual reproduction. Parthenogenetic reproduction is more effective and can produce more viable offspring with a given amount of resources, even from a single individual. The problem is that the offspring are all clones and vulnerable to similar environmental threats, like a disease that kills. If such a disease hits to the population, all individuals (clones) die.
Sexual reproduction is less effective but leads to a diverse bunch of offspring. Some may be less viable than clones but the diversity is an insurance against catastrophic events. If a fatal disease hits the population or if the environment changes radically, some offspring can survive, even if most die. For that reason, sexually reproducing populations tend to exist longer than populations of clones.
The increasing number of mutations is countered by the filtering of natural selection. Those individuals that have many harmful mutations have low fitness and the mutations tend to be filtered away from the population.
There is at least one exception. In humans, heritable harmful mutations may continue to accumulate because modern healthcare keeps the individuals suffering from these mutations alive so that they can reproduce. Without the modern healthcare, many of these individuals would die before reproduction, which would filter these mutations away.
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Feserâs response:
Rothman offers several further illustrations of the thesis that reproduction confers no survival advantage.12 In many species, one or both parents are absent when fertilization
occurs, and a process cannot confer an advantage on an organism that is not present when it occurs. In some insects, the male does not survive the sexual act. The female mammal
is put at a disadvantage by having to bear and give birth to offspring. Though offspring can, once mature, contribute to the survival of their parents, this is not usually true, and where it is true it is true only up to a point. For offspring are also new competitors for scarce resources. Some will suggest that reproduction confers an advantage to groups of organisms rather than on individuals, or on parts of organisms such as DNA. But groups of organisms and parts of organisms reproduce only insofar as the individual organisms that make up the groups and possess the parts reproduce, which brings us back to square one.13
I also tracked down Rothmanâs book:
âThe second option is that natural selection acts on groups of cells. In this case, destruction of the parent cell is irrelevant as long as the collective is advantaged by the generation of new cells. Reproduction is of value to the community of cells, not individual cells. And this is certainly the case. Reproduction is, as we have said, critical for the groupâs survival, for its continuation. The individual cell is sacrificed on the altar of the group, and this can be said to be the consequence of natural selection. In this case, the adaptation produced by natural selection would be reproduction itself, an adaptive property not of individual cells but of communities of cells.
But how can this be? Communities of cells would have to be invested with properties beyond the composite properties of their individual members. There would have to be communal properties on which natural selection acts. We will consider this possibility later, but for the moment, even if such properties exist, they are irrelevant to cellular reproduction. This is because it takes place and only takes place within individual cells or between pairs of cells. The properties of reproduction are those of individual cells. Though communities of cells are affected, cellular reproduction is not a community property. Simply, communities of cells do not reproduce.â
Excerpt From The Paradox of Evolution by Stephen Rothman
I agree. Itâs like separating Materialist Meteorology and Theistic Meteorology.
Theistic evolutionist is a large group of varied beliefs and can include more deistic beliefs where God initiates the creation and then lets things play out without any further intervention. Evolutionary creationism is more narrowly defined and has God as an active and ongoing participant in nature. At least that is what I have picked up on during my time here.
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I lean more towards a Venn diagram with most of the overlap happening in the ID circle. If we use the Discovery Institute (DI), the most prominent ID organization, as our model we can see this overlap in practice. Paul Nelson is a YEC, and he is on staff at DI. Ann Gauger is also on staff, and she accepts an old Earth, but doesnât accept shared ancestry between humans and other apes, so more of an OEC. The DI is also very careful not to distance itself from YEC because they know they need their monetary and vocal support.
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I havenât read Rothmanâs book myself, but several claims in the excerpt that you clipped and quoted strike me as incorrectâŚor very odd (e.g. that survival of individuals is what is crucial, not reproduction). I was curious about reviews of the book and found this one which articulated my own befuddlement:
Editorial Reviews
01/11/2016
In dense and repetitive text, Rothman (Life Beyond Molecules and Genes), a retired physiologist from the University of California, San Francisco, attempts to point out a major flaw in evolutionary theory and offer an alternative perspective. Unfortunately, the flaw he refers to is of his own making and is not recognized by other biologists, while his âfixâ provides no meaningful mechanism for action and flies in the face of much of modern population genetics. Rothman simplistically and idiosyncratically defines evolution, claiming that ânatural selection is about survival,â that it is distinct from change in a populationâs genetic composition, and that it âprogresses toward some optimum incarnation of a particular trait.â However, most biologists recognize that survival is important only because dead individuals canât reproduce, that changes in allele frequencies is exactly how evolution is measured, and that evolution has no end goal. Given his definition, Rothman separates reproduction from natural selection, stating that its purpose is âto help ensure the continuance of our reproducing group, our species, the population of organisms which we are but an impersonal part.â But Rothman offers no mechanism for such action and ignores the point that his perspective is at odds with virtually every aspect of evolutionary theory that has been proposed for the past 40 years. (Dec.)Publishers Weekly
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For many here who identify as EC or TE, they are the same thing, but the EC term has been favored because âTEâ puts âevolutionistâ in the role of being an identifier. Like ⌠we identify as some sort of philosophical âEvolutionistsâ, which isnât [necessarily] accurate. Weâre creationists, and as believers we might want that as more of our philosophical identity; we just happen to accept scientific evolution as a great descriptor/theory to explain all the variations of life. So itâs just a preference to put the âevolutionaryâ more in the modifier spot and not the identifier spot.
All that said - all such nuance is lost in the popular press among those who only take a glancing interest in these topics. Theyâve only heard of âTEâ (if even that) - and so thatâs the one weâre stuck still using because nobody knows what weâre talking about otherwise.
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Not out of line, just not very interesting.
When 99.99% of scientists agree on ONE theory of evolution, then this talk of many theories is simply a waste of the effort to even read such at thing.
That is not a scientific theory. It is not even a scientific hypothesis, for that requires a way of testing it. To the degree it can be tested, like other God of the gaps approaches, it has been proven false. So it is really just pseudoscientific rhetoric â an excuse to stubbornly ignore the evidence.
Having worked in biology for nearly 30 years, I see nothing wrong with âthe theory of evolutionâ. As a comparison, there is the Germ Theory of Disease that covers all infectious diseases. There arenât separate theories for viruses, bacteria, and fungi. The Germ Theory of Disease is a catch-all for all infectious diseases. In the same way, the Theory of Evolution is the model for all changes in lifeâs history and the current changes occurring in living populations. The models differ for different species, such as asexual v. sexually reproducing populations, but they are all lumped together into the same theory.
Agreed. ID proponents canât even agree on the age of the Earth, much less which species are related to one another, how differences in genomes were produced, etc.
They at least try to come up with predictions for their models instead of solely relying on disproving consensus science (i.e. God of the Gaps). If we removed all of the arguments against evolution from the ID playbook, what would they be left with?
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