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To: highball

And if you can't answer simple questions, no problem. Free country.


756 posted on 01/05/2006 7:37:13 AM PST by mlc9852
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To: mlc9852
And if you can't answer simple questions, no problem. Free country.

Your questions aren't "simple" - you blend several concepts and conversations together (deliberately?).

But if you're really interested, we can discuss it.

Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"

There are such things as facts. They can be proven. "This dinosaur bone is x number of years old," for example. That's a fact.

Theories, however, cannot be proven. They can only be disproven. That in no way reflects upon a theory - Germ Theory cannot be proven, nor can Gravitational Theory cannot be proven.

In fact, falsifiability (predicting a possible circumstance under which a theory may be disproven) is an important part of what makes a theory a theory. The ToE can be falsified - simply finding a 2M year-old homo sapiens fossil would do the trick nicely. ID cannot be falsified - what possible piece of evidence could be uncovered to refute ID?

Theories require evidence to support them. The fossil record is a fact, and it provides a wealth of evidence to support the Theory of Evolution.

Evolution is both a fact (we observe it happening in populations) and a Theory (describing such changes over periods of time).

The Theory of Evolution is to date the only Theory proposed that fits the evidence. It makes predictions about future discoveries, and as those discoveries are continually made the theory becomes ever stronger. That theory is never "proven," however, because we've established that theories are never proven. Facts supporting the theory, though, can be. And are.

Is that clearer now?

760 posted on 01/05/2006 7:58:33 AM PST by highball ("I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson)
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