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To: Blzbba

Actually, there is no scientific evidence that would make evolution a law. Laws are not the result of the finding of an increased amount of evidence for a theory. Laws are a different type of statement than theories. Put most simply, laws describe, theories explain. Laws are a shorthand way of summarizing observed data, as well as a way to predict the result of observations that haven't been made. Think of the law of gravity, for example. It states that there's an attractive force between two bodies that is proportional to the mass of the bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. It therefore does two things. It gives a concise way to summarize a large number of observations, and it gives a way to determine the attrative force between two bodies without actually measuring that force. What it fails to do is explain why there's a force and why that force has the value it has. That job would be accomplished by a theory of gravity. The currently accepted theory of gravity is Einstein's theory of general relativity. In addition to providing an explanation for gravity, it also showed that the law of gravity actually doesn't give the correct answers for certain observations under a small set of circumstances. Thus, we see that a theory has corrected a law, not something you'd expect to happen if laws really were just theories that were bolstered by additional evidence.


168 posted on 01/13/2005 11:56:13 AM PST by stremba
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To: stremba

You're close, but not on target.

A law is a mathematical statement describing a physical property of the universe.

The law of gravity was not changed by Einstein's theories. In fact, one of the prime tests of Einstein's theories is that under classical conditions, his relativity equations on mass and gravity reduce to the mathematical expressions derived by Newton.

Einstein's theories predicted that the law was incompletely expressed, not wrong. In other words, the classic formulas for gravity applied only under certain conditions, but not under all conditions. That's why Einstein called it his GENERAL theory of relativity.


218 posted on 01/13/2005 1:09:41 PM PST by frgoff
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