neologist wrote:One thing seems true; Hypotheses, theories, and laws all lack absolutism. By that I mean they can be proved false or unworkable and be discarded. Is this the same for a fact? I mean, it is a fact that Dubya is president of the US. (I challenge anyone to disprove it, no matter how they might wish otherwise.) Is the theory of evolution to be considered a fact in the same sense?
Why should facts be absolute?
At one point in time it was fact that the sun went round the Earth. It was fact that the body contained four humours. It was fact that diseases were caused by bad air.
Let's take a more modern example. Here's a fact. The Earth has only one moon. At some point this was fact and held to be true. Then scientists went and discovered Cruithne, which cannot be seen by the naked eye and follows a bizarre horse-shoe shaped orbit around the Earth. So the fact that Earth has only one moon is false (or true, depending on whether you wish to consider Cruithne a true moon or not).
Quote:I'm not making an argument for creation here, just defining terms.
Which can at times become indistinguishable for arguing for Creationism, or at least, it's what RL usually does in place of arguing for Creationism.
Facts can be falsified, but here's the point I was trying to make.
Evolution has enough evidence and facts supporting it that it is in essence a truth. To argue against it, would be like arguing against the existence of gravity. The overwhelming scientific evidence supports it. No real scientific evidence contradicts it, or at least, not to the extent that Creationists and ID proponents would have you believe. To be a good science teacher, you must realise this and must realise that Creationism and ID are not scientific alternatives, because they don't even fit the definition of proper science let alone provide evidence for their veracity.
If you want to be a maverick and argue against dogma, you must come up with a real alternative that can be falsifiable.
That's what Barry Marshall did. Most people used to believe that ulcers were caused by stress. Barry Marshall went against tradition and said, "No, I believe it is caused by bacteria." He'd managed to isolate bacteria from ulcer patients, you see. And to prove his point, he gave himself an ulcer from ulcerous tissue he got from a patient, then cured himself with antibiotics.
Many of the teachers who teach Creationism and ID as if they were valid scientific alternatives are not like Barry Marshall. They haven't scrutinised the evidence and found something that genuinely proves Creationism and ID right. Instead, they point to holes in Evolution and say, "It's wrong!" So? Why don't they point to holes in Gravity Theory and say, "It's wrong!"?
. It really is largely due to the terrible science education in our countries. I was taught that old fallacy as well: hypothesis -> theory -> law. In fact I would bet I was taught it again and again over multiple years. It wasn't until college-level biology that I received any formal education concerning the scientific method - the chemistry and physics I had taken covered concepts and facts alone (take that, snobs!) and I wasn't surprised to find that most of my classmates in those classes didn't seem to get the basic hypothesis -> prediction -> test idea, which doesn't even need to be formalized to make sense.
