Creationism
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, many Christians (both Protestant and Catholic) as well as scientists object strongly both to traditional creationism and to the more recent intelligent design theory. Both Christians and scientists deny vehemently that being a methodological naturalist at once tips you into being a metaphysical naturalist. In addition, Christians assert, as they always have, that creationism in any form is a distortion of real traditional Christianity. There is absolutely no warrant for literalistic readings of Genesis, whether or not they are dressed up as science. In like fashion, scientists object that traditional creationism (the kind to be found in Genesis Flood) is simply wrong in every respect, and that intelligent design is little better. It simply is not true to say that there are examples of irreducible complexity that could never be explained through evolution. Even if all the parts are now necessary for proper functioning, it may well have been the case that the parts were assembled in ways that allowed for incomplete (or completely different) functioning before they reached their present interconnected forms.
Yet, whether or not creationism is good or bad religion, and whether or not creationism is good or bad science, it would be foolish to deny its ongoing appeal. In the early twenty-first century, opinion polls regularly found that 50 percent of Americans supported some form of creationism, and most of the others thought that blind law could never, unaided, have led to the production of the higher animals, especially humans. It would therefore be unwise to pretend that creationism is about to go away or will never raise its political head. It still has the potential to force us back to the 1920s and to attempt to legislate the contents of the science curricula of publicly funded schools.
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Michael Ruse
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Cosine to Cyano groupCreationism - History Of Creationism, Toward The Present, Phillip Johnson And Naturalism, Irreducible Complexity, The Explanatory Filter