Creationist code words

This post lists certain words frequently used by creationists and explains what the intended meaning is for those words.

Creation (often "CREATION") means the accounts of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis in the Bible. (“In the beginning…”)

“God the creator” (or the “GOD the CREATOR”) is the God depicted in that same book of Genesis; the one who took six days to create everything, and then rested. That’s the same God who chased Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.

“Science” is anything that contradicts what some say is the Bible’s message.

“Evolutionism” is a belief in evolution. “Darwinism” is a belief in the ideas of Charles Darwin as applied to evolution. Those actually seem to be reasonable definitions for those words. The problem is that creationists add the “ism” to the end of these words for one reason only: they wish to make an acceptance of Darwin’s ideas seem to be nothing but a matter of faith. Note that no one speaks of gravity as “Gravitism” and no one refers to Newton’s ideas about gravity as “Newtonism”. Neither do you hear of “Einsteinism” or “Pastuerism”. Creationists are being more than disingenuous when they start to throw these terms around.

“Assumption”, when used by a creationist, means utter and complete guess; something which is just as likely to be correct as to be wrong. For an example, the Intelligent Design site called “The Discovery Institute” says:

“...the extrapolation from microevolution to macroevolution is still just an assumption.[1]”

The word “just” is generally put in front of “an assumption” thereby clearly implying that people are doing nothing better than guessing.

But, of course, not all assumptions are created equal. I can say that, “I assume that the sun will come up tomorrow”. That would be an “assumption” since there are, I suppose, various things that could prevent that from happening.

But that is an assumption that no one would argue with. Obviously some assumptions are much more likely to be true than they are to be false.

So if a creationist throws out the phrase “just an assumption” they are obligated to explain what is invalid about that assumption and show why it is unlikely to be valid. Simply calling something an assumption really doesn’t say anything at all.

[1] http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/03/whats_in_a_word.html, referenced on June 16, 2008