"EducationCreationism, roughly, is the belief that the earth and all life was created by the Judeo-Christian god in ***literal accordance with the Genesis description***.
There are also Islamic creationists and Hindu creationists (and probably others as well), but they do not factor into the American political sphere.
It is a common misconception that creationists can be lumped under one heading. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are flat earth creationists, young earth creationists (who believe the earth is 6000 years old), old earth creationists (who accept the scientific evidence that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but do not believe evolution happened), and Intelligent Design creationists, to name a few.
As creationism has been soundly rejected by the court system for being overtly religious in nature, our focus for the future should be upon Intelligent Design Creationism.
Intelligent Design is the idea that one can, using science, detect the presence of a Designer in nature. Like William Paley’s Watch argument, which asserts that if you find a watch in the forest you know it had a designer because it shows characteristics of design, IDists claim that evolution is inadequate to explain the origins of cellular machinery, which is clearly designed. They do not go so far as to publicly suggest that “God” is the designer; instead they publicly state that aliens could just as well have been responsible for design in nature; thus, ID presents a clear danger in the courts because it attempts to circumvent 1st Amendment principles, unlike other forms of creationism which are clearly religious in nature.
However, the ID movement is the brainchild of Christian lawyer Philip Johnson, a member of the Discovery Institute and Center for Renewal of Science and Culture. Mr. Johnson is the author of the infamous Wedge Document, a strategic 5 year plan to undermine what IDists see as a subversive “culture of materialism” brought upon us by the forces of Darwin, Marx, etc.
The focus of the ID movement is on convincing legislators and school boards that there is a controversy in science, that increasingly large numbers of people advocate the teaching of ID. However, to date they have no peer-reviewed scientific endeavors published, no experimental models, and no data. Instead, ID arguments consist almost entirely upon a few ill-defined terms such as “irreducible complexity” and “complex specified information” which do not actually reflect what happens in nature. ID is primarily an argument from ignorance; a claim that there is no way certain structures could have evolved, therefore evolution is lacking. Even if this were true, no positive argument or evidence for ID is presented."
--- From: Alliance for Science at:
http://www.allianceforscience.org/understanding_creationism