There are few concepts that can make advocates of the scientific method, astronomy and biology more twitchy than “Creationism.” In its strictest sense, creationism is the belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in their entirety by a supernatural deity or deities (typically God), whose existence is presupposed.* This definition is extremely broad and leaves room for both Descartes’ watchmaker Deity - a God who sets the universe in motion and watches it tick - and a literalist view of the Bible that implies a young Earth - e.g. the view that the Bible tells the factual Judeo-Christian History of the actual creation of the Earth. In today’s rhetoric, it is generally the later form of Creationism that is meant when the word is used. For instance, the Discovery Institute and the Creation Museum both use the word Creationism to describe a cosmology in which dinosaurs and man co-roamed an Earth that was created several thousand years ago.

Let me start by saying I hate vague language (even if I sometimes fall prey to using it).