[quote]pushharder wrote:
Indeed, even Thomas Jefferson’s (the deist and Christianity basher, remember?) definition – exist by virtue of a Creator. The *squirrelly rascal said, “Certain unalienable rights” are “endowed” to men “by their Creator.”
*Yes, he’s our squirrelly rascal and he vexes us so but nonetheless it is universally recognized that natural (unalienable or inalienable) rights are a direct gift by man’s creator to man. A creator clearly implies a creation and in very general terms, creationism (even though I conceded the term is typically used more specifically as you have mentioned.[/quote]
Having thought about it, I guess I should concede that I am a creationist too.
I believe that the heavens and the earth were created by a cataclysmic explosion of all matter 13.8 billion years ago, and that our species was created gradually by natural selection over the past 700 million years.
Glad we got that straightened out. Nice to be on the same side of the issue at last. 
It’s tantalizing to consider that Thomas Jefferson, Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin were all alive at the same time (Darwin and Lincoln having been born on the same day, during the Jefferson administration, and Mendel having been born just four years before Jefferson died).
Jefferson died when Charles Darwin was seventeen years old: five years before Darwin took his fateful voyage on the Beagle; thirty-three years before he published On the Origin of Species; and forty-five years before he published The Descent of Man.
Gregor Mendel, of course, did his experiments to develop his theories of genetics with pea plants, which Thomas Jefferson was fanatical about, as can easily be seen from his journals at Monticello. Jefferson was an avid amateur scientist and plant breeder, and I cannot help but think that the theories of both Darwin and Mendel (which combined form the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection, which people persistently and erroneously refer to as “Darwinism”) would have been devoured by Jefferson with great enthusiasm.
Thomas Jefferson was, of course, tremendously intelligent, extremely inquisitive, and open minded (…or as you would put it, “squirrelly”) enough to embrace new ideas if reason told him they were good ones, while discarding old ideas when reason told him they no longer fit.
I am quite confident that had he only lived long enough to read Darwin and Mendel, he would have wholeheartedly accepted the theories of evolution and genetics, with all their implications, and would have likely considered re-thinking those phrases in the Declaration about all men being “created” equal, and by whom (or by what, rather… the deist god is hardly a “who”) their certain unalienable rights might have been endowed.
Alas, we’ll never know.