Why distinguish intelligent design and theistic evolution?
Although intelligent design is a form of creationism, the same cannot be said for theistic evolution – at least given the ways of using terms I have described here. Creationism, including intelligent design, sees the action of God as something that is contrasted with the action of natural processes. Creationism is incompatible with evolutionary biology, because it is presented as an alterative to evolutionary biology. Theistic evolution, on the other hand, recognizes evolution as a valid description of how living things came to have their currently observed physical forms. Theistic evolution sees God as in some sense responsible to the establishment of the evolutionary process itself; either by setting up initial conditions so as to enable evolution, or else by continuously maintaining the existence of a universe in which evolution can occur. There is no evidence for either proposition; but theistic evolution is not claimed to be a scientific model based on evidence; but rather a nebul
