Creationism then...

Even though it's denied, you can see that intelligent design is based from creationism. This view is pretty widely accepted as far as I know. Intelligent design was basically a concept put forth so creationism would be accepted more easily. Creationism started to be seen as being representing a particular religious belief, so intelligent design was made to be the new face. With this change, explicit references to God were removed, and a veil of using the scientific method were introduced to attempt to make the idea more accepted.


But what is creationism?


I'm going to take some notes from the National Centre for Science Education website (http://ncse.com/) as they have very nice information on creation and intelligent design. They're basically (as their tag line says) about keeping evolution in schools.


NCSE's definition of creationism goes something like this:

"Creationism" refers to the religious belief in a supernatural deity or force that intervenes, or has intervened, directly in the physical world. Within that broad scope, there are many varieties of creationist belief. Some forms of creationism hold that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth.

This definition is good in terms of arguing about evolution and is how creationism is most often used now, but it doesn't fully cover creation. 


Creationism is a religious belief that takes a literal interpretation of the bible and says a supernatural being, often the Christian God, created the universe and everything in it.