Creationism has explanatory power (Talk.Origins)

Response ArticleThis article (Creationism has explanatory power (Talk.Origins)) is a response to a rebuttal of a creationist claim published by Talk.Origins Archive under the title Index to Creationist Claims.

Index

Claim CH001:

Creationism is explanatory. It can accommodate all the results of evolution, and more. In particular, it can also explain the results of a Designer.

Source: Dembski, William A., 2001. Is intelligent design testable?

CreationWiki response: (Talk Origins quotes in blue)

1 Accommodation is very different from explanation. An explanation tells why something is one way and not another. A theory which accommodates anything explains nothing, because it doesn't rule out any possibilities. Accommodating all possibilities also makes a theory exactly useless. Since creationism accommodates all possibilities, it is not explanatory.

This is a misrepresentation of the source. It is clear that Talk Origins chose the wording they did, so as to be able to jump on the word "accommodate." This reduces it to a straw man argument.

First off, let's be clear that design can accommodate all the results of Darwinism. Intelligent design does not repudiate the Darwinian mechanism. It merely assigns it a lower status than Darwinism does. The Darwinian mechanism does operate in nature and insofar as it does, design can live with its deliverances.

This is simply saying that design does not totally eliminate the evolutionary mechanisms of variation and natural selection—it merely reduces their importance.

Design does explain why organisms work the way they do, in the same way that it explains why a car works the way it does. It also explains why organisms are capable of adapting to changes in environment.