Following very belatedly from my last post, a reasonable question is “what is a scientific theory?”, and what constitutes a “scientific fact”?
The question of a scientific fact arose in a brief discussion I had on a creationist blog. The objection by said Creationist was to a BBC web page about science talking about scientific facts. That’s an odd state of affairs for non-Creationists such as myself – a bit like being outraged at naked people on a porn site. But the objection centred on the idea that science – and in particular the theory of human evolution – was being portrayed at “fact”, while misunderstanding the context within which these “facts” appeared.
It is – I find – a common misunderstanding within the Creationist/”Intelligent Design” camp. So let’s recap what a “scientific fact” is, as no doubt I shall refer to such things as this blog develops. Apologies in advance for those that find this basic, but it’s better to be clear on such things!
A scientific fact is one which has been corroborated by reproducible results from experiments that themselves can be repeated – that’s not the same as “proved”. It’s virtually impossible to prove a theory. So it’s true to say that no one has proved that gravity exists – it’s just that all the known experimental data corroborates the theory that it does, and it is referred then as a “scientific fact”.
Evolution is likewise a “scientific fact”, for exactly the same reason that garvity is; and evolutionary theory – aka theory of evolution – explains the fact of evolution.
For a theory to be a theory, one needs to be able to make a prediction – or a hypothesis – based on this theory which can then be tested by experiment. The data either corroborates or disproves the theory. So, with evolution for example, your hypothesis would be that you would expect to see increasing complexity over time. You would not expect to see birds before the existence of land animals, for example. To do so would prove evolution wrong; not to do so corroborates the theory as it falls in line with our hypothesis.
Disproving that theories relating to gravity or evolution exist is only that – proving that that those particular theories are wrong. So if cars and buses and trains tomorrow all start floating, or that daylight in the UK doesn’t appear until 1.30pm, we can say that our theory of gravity is wrong. Likewise, if we found a fossilised rabbit in a strata of rock that was a billion years old, we’d say that the current theory of evolution is wrong.
Saying a theory is wrong is NOT the same as saying that another is right. It is an odd feature of the Creationist debate that an awful lot of energy of Creationists and their ilk is spent on “disproving” the theory of evolution. They have continually failed so far, but even if they were correct in their assertions, that doesn’t prove anything at all about Creationism – they would only have only shown that evolution is wrong.
Likewise, demonstrating or showing that “irreducible complexity” exists (a favourite of the so-called “Intelligent Design” adherents) only proves that such thing appear to exist – it does not prove that there is in fact a Designer or Intelligence or Creator. Separate experimental data would be needed for such a thing to be established in a scientific manner. So far, “irreducible complexity” has not been shown.
But as I’ve pointed out, that would at best only show that evolution is wrong – not that Creationism or Intelligent Design is actually correct in its further claims about Designers and Creators. Here, to the best of my knowledge, no attempt has even been made to even say what kind of experiment could be done or what evidence would be required that corroborates the existence of a single Designer or Intelligence at work somewhere, rather than disproves current scientific theories. And it’s precisely because it fails to produce a testable hypothesis, that Creationist “science” and ID “theory” are not theories or science.
