Follow up: The Spectrum of Belief

My last post sparked a lively discussion...on Facebook, not on here. Two friends of mine, Kris and Allison, provided some interesting insight.

Creationism and Non-Christian Faiths
Allison noted that what I had written in my last post reflected the spectrum of Christian belief, and didn't encompass other religions. Kris was so kind as to refine my spectrum to include other faiths:

"Yeah there are all kinds of other categories one could come up with including exo-transportists (my word) that think that some combination of people, microbes or animals were brought to the earth by some other being or on a comet or something. This works out to be a variant on the "2001 - A Space Odyssey" story where life has been manipulated at various stages by an alien intelligence with the goal of increasing peaceful intelligent species in the universe.

If you were to add in all the other creation stories from the world's religions, old and new, you would be left with too much granularity and not much of a spectrum per se.

While I appreciate that you are coming at this from a Christian viewpoint, it would be possible to rewrite your spectrum in a more general sense to include Hundus or Zoroastrians or Ancestor Worship or Muslims or followers of Zeus and the Olympians as such:

Literal creationists - believe a creation story literally as presented in one of the world's faiths (be it religion, magic, tribal spirituality, modern religions such as Scientology, whatever).

Old Earth creationists - believe that their chosen creation stories are essentially true but the details and timelines are metaphoric. Microevolution may occur but species differentiation on a broad scale was the work of a Creator or Creation Force as dictated by their sytsem of belief.

Creationary Evolutionists - as written, substitute God for whatever manages the universe in their system of belief.

Deism - as written but also includes "spiritualists" of the new age variety and other groups such as Buddhists who consider the creation issue separately from issues of the soul, rather than just strict Deists in the Judeo-Christian sense.

Atheism - as written though there are those who haven't thought much about it, those who have thought about it and decided that a lack of evidence in a Creator is evidence of a lack of a Creator (Active Atheists) and those who believe that a lack of evidence predicts the probability that there is no Creator (Scientific Atheists).

Dicks - There are those folks in all the above categories, especially in the atheist liberal left :-)"

The above is published with Kris' permission. From what he's written, I think the positions on the spectrum remain the same even including non-Christian religions, just the basic definitions change slightly to accommodate non-Christian beliefs.

My completely unresearched understanding of non-Christian creationism is that it is infrequent. But as I said, this is completely unresearched, and would make a good topic for a future post.

The Term 'Evolutionism'
Allison also made an excellent point: The term 'evolutionism' is not used in scientific circles. It is only used in discussions such as the one on this blog; but within the scientific community there are no 'evolutionists' per se, as there are no 'atomic theorists' or 'plate tectonists': a scientific theory is not a belief one subscribes to, but an explain and predict of a multitude of phenomena. This is very different from the use of the word 'theory' in common parlance, where it implies a hunch or an idea.