Zarinus wrote:That is an assumption. It is a theory. It is not an observable phenomenon in nature.
Zarinus wrote:Maybe it is those who offer a different explanation are the ones who are misusing the term “theory” in reference to a “scientific theory”.
Nope, the failure is all yours. Have you ever heard of the theory of relativity? Have you ever heard of the theory of gravity? Have you ever heard of quantum theory? How about game theory? or statistical theory? How about the metabolic theory of pulmonary arterial hypertension? Your prophet and seer Russel M. Nelson has heard about that last one I'll bet.
There is a hell of a lot of observing in nature that goes along with theory. You don't have a post-secondary education. right? You only research something if you need to get out of an apologetics predicament, right? Your understanding of evolution comes straight from creationist websites, right?
There is a sense in which some people, most likely creationists, understand theory, that is different from the term's standard use, to mean conjecture or hypothesis without enough experimental evidence to establish it as a fact. Interestingly, this stems from bad information actually found in real science textbooks and possibly from informative segments on children's network television shows like Sesame Street. I certainly recall from grade school that a theory is a tentative supposition that can become a fact. Why this is so wrong is really a somewhat complex phenomena that you are likely not capable of comprehending. You have a team of real scientists who know biology or archaeology or whatnot, but by conventions inherited in textbook composition, there are obligatory references to the "scientific method," and boilerplate dealing with these tangent topics gets recycled over and over again.
It's almost as if nature laid a trap for pseudoscientists such as creationsists -- yourself being counted among these ranks.
Here is a biology or earth science text written for middle school or lower, and it clearly makes this theory/fact distinction. Barefoot southern Christian creationists go back to texts written for elementary students and discover that a) there is a "theory of evolution" and b) that according to the scientific method (that gets less than 200 words) a theory can be proven with observation to become a fact. They then reason that evolution is not a fact. Further, let's not confuse all scientific inquiry with experimental science. Controlled experiments are great when the option is available -- and let's not confuse your stupid Moroni 10 challenge with a real controlled experiment -- but it's not always possible to perform an experiment. Dr. W. brought up genetics, and this kind of reasoning is no different than counting the rings on a tree trunk. You can figure out what 139 tree rings mean without planting a tree in a lab and cutting it down after 139 years.
The typical education deficit creationist actually does take a cursory look at what science has to say, but having little to know experience gets hung up in tangent areas such as the so-called scientific method, and latches on to badly transmitted information. This gets recycled and from there its an extrapolation festival and no one ever does some basic fact checking -- including you. So certain ideas such as a "theory becoming fact" make great markers (like tree rings and genes) for assessing how a person has come into the supposed knowledge that they have. Makes for dead giveaway when the person has no real education and is passing around recycled pseudoscience.
