Engaging theism & engaging Creationism

I happen to personally accept both of these assertions: 1) A scientific world-view entails atheism 2) A scientific world-view contradictions Creationism That being said, as matters of debate & discussion I think the former is an open question, while the latter is not an open question. When it comes to Creationism from where I stand there's nothing to talk about; the facts of the universe manifestly falsify Creationism. Creationism is a rather clear & distinct idea. I know what I'm rejecting, and I know what the Creationists believe. Aside from the Amish and a few other groups the vast majority of Creationists are embedded in a world whose technological apparatus is contingent upon a network of facts which taken together naturally lead to the inference that Creationism is false. When I was younger I did expend marginal time trying to explain to my Creationist friends why their model of the world is problematic, but at this point I have zero interest in personally investing marginal time in this task. The persistence of Creationism in the United States, and to a lesser extent other regions of the developed world, is a functional of historical and sociological processes. For a variety of reasons a subculture has emerged in the United States which rejects the authority of the scientific elite. Authority is very important, because most people who "believe" in evolution doesn't understand it with any plausible detail, rather, they accept that scientists in general tend to know what they're talking about, and they also are signaling their status as a modern educated individual who identifies with the establishment. When it comes to the first proposition I think there are important qualitative differences from the second. Creationism is to me clear & distinct; I know whereof I reject. On the other hand theism is a very broad catchall term; ranging from unsophisticated fundamentalism all the way to Freeman Dyson's latitudinarian sensibilities. A subset of theisms fall into the traps of Creationism; e.g., I think Christian Science is false and its falsity in terms of the specifics of its doctrine are simply not issues which I would waste time debating about. But these are not all theisms. Some of the more advanced theologies are frankly impenetrable to me because of the obscurity of their terminologies and conceptual frameworks. My own assumption is that there isn't much there, and my confusion reflects not only my ignorance but the incoherency of the theologies, but ultimately my confidence in this domain is of a different order than that which I have in regards to Creationist propositions. The latter are wrong. The former are probably wrong, if what I perceive the arguments to be are correct, and possibly incoherent if my impression of the shape of the argument is incorrect. But ultimately a large subset of my opinions regarding theology are contingent upon philosophical reasoning and inferences, while my opinions regarding Creationism are plainly scientific. I want to flesh out this distinction to make clear why I am relatively sanguine when it comes to scientists who believe in God, though I disagree with them on this question, as opposed to the much greater alarm I exhibit toward those self-styled scientists who espouse Creationism. The former concerns disputes over philosophical questions, while the latter concerns disputes over scientific ones (I grant that science can be categorized as a subset of philosophy, but that doesn't change my overall argument here). Operationally I don't think theism has much of an impact on many scientific workers in the former category, while the latter position takes aim square at the edifice of modern science. As a historical matter it seems to me that deep philosophical questions (outside of mathematics) remain indefinitely open (though there may be a consensus in one direction or the other at a given time), while scientific questions eventually close and a subset fade into the background as assumptions held without dispute in contingent networks of inferences. I believe that the battle against Creationism will be won, just as the battle against Geocentrism was won. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be surprised if the same social and psychological forces which gave rise to Creationism as a counter-movement to modern science in the early 20th century serve as the drivers behind other forms of Denialism. I don't have the same confidence or expectation when it comes to theism. Obviously if you've read this far you can infer that I don't consider myself a New Atheist. As a pragmatic matter my own belief is that a distinction between Creationism and theism should be made. But, I hope it is clear now that in terms of a fundamental taxonomy of ideologies I believe that Creationism and theism are qualitatively different. The former is a particular (I believe insidious) subset of the latter, and the purview of the latter is extremely broad and difficult to encapsulate. The New Atheists (and many militant atheists before there was such a self-styled group) have a response to this distinction: at the end of the day they accept that fundamentalists are the most authentic and representative form of religiosity, with non-fundamentalism being a transient marginal state which simply serves to fill in the gap between fundamentalism and atheism. I tend to disagree with this assessment as an empirical matter, I would hold that fundamentalism is a particular strain of religion which emerges during periods of social stress and gives voice to populist sentiments. But I simply do not grant that it is any more authentic as an expression of religious truths, whatever these might be, than non-fundamentalists. I do not even concede that fundamentalists are truly much more fundamental in a substantive sense than non-fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is a style, a pose, a name for a social revolt which uses the language and trappings of religion. I believe to reduce religion to fundamentalism is simply wrong, and will lead to faulty predictions. Notionally fundamentalists believe that their own mode of scriptural interpretation removes ambivalence, ambiguity and subjectivity from the process. I think they're wrong. Similarly, I would have to admit that I think that the conflating questions regarding atheism writ large as opposed to anti-Creationism also remove the element of ambiguity, interpretation and an admission of differences of confidence in regards to the issues at hand. Fundamentalists see the Bible as a unitary text delivering the divine message with minimal mediation. In contrast, non-fundamentalists may see the Bible as a a text produced by a range of historically contingent and contextualized voices with their own unique perspectives. The latter model is messier and requires a great deal of case-by-case analysis of meaning, and an admission that any given interpretation may not be definitive. In the minds of some atheists fundamentalists are the most true to the spirit of religiosity; non-fundamentalist religion is simply deviation in error from what the axioms of belief entail. This sort of model I think does imply that one might engage in a wholesale project of anti-religious argument as a matter of course in the battle against anti-science. By this logic pro-science and anti-religion arguments are perfect substitutes. There is no need for ad hoc case by case analysis when you can inspect the axioms of a religion and their clear & distinct fundamental inferences. As it is, I think reality of how religion and Creationism relate are more complex and not as clean as some might believe, just as I believe the Bible is not to be seen as a monologue from God on high.