ID advocates love to use the term "Darwinism" rather than "evolution" or "evolutionary theory", a tendency that has always grated on my nerves. We don't do this with any other theory. We don't talk about "Einsteinism" instead of the theory of relativity or "Wegenerism" rather than plate tectonics. Why the focus on "Darwinism"? I submit it is because "Darwinism" is simply a codeword that they can use to mean whatever they want. They know that the average person has so little understanding of the scientific ideas that they don't distinguish between evolution and the big bang, for example. In the public's mind, these are all just one big anti-God theory and the DI likes to exploit that by mixing up cosmology and biology. Here is a perfect example, from a 1999 DI Journal article called The Promise of Better Science and a Better Culture:
Defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy are quarreling among themselves as never before as disturbing evidence against Darwinism appears in such fields as Big Bang cosmology, paleontology (especially in Cambrian era fossils) and molecular biology.
I would argue that if you see this, you are dealing either with an ignorant fool or a demagogue trying to manipulate an ignorant fool. Only the ignorant could believe that any evidence in the field of big bang cosmology could possibly be evidence against "Darwinism" because Darwin didn't write anything at all about the origin of the universe and the evolutionary theory he developed has precisely nothing to do with that subject. Since the DI are not ignorant fools, I dare say they are engaging here in demagoguery. They know this is false, but they also know that the average person does not and cannot distinguish between them. And rather than making a rational statement that distinguishes between these two theories which are clearly distinct to any educated person, they exploit the ignorance of many of their readers in order to unite them in the fight against "Darwinism", which here is just a codeword for atheism.
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