The 15th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Evolution has never been proved.
It’s still just a theory, not a fact.”
“In this episode of scientific truth journal, we’ll explore the theory of evolution
and we’ll implicitly mock the people who hold opposing viewpoints.”
“Hmph! Evolution, what a crock! Can we change it, please?”
“Evolution is a scientific fact –unless you’re ignorant.”
“If it’s a fact, why is it called a ‘theory’?”
“There are scientific reasons; It’s all very complicated!”
“People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!
Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody ‘knew’ the earth was the center of the universe;
Five hundred years ago, everybody ‘knew’ the earth was flat,
and fifteen minutes ago, you ‘knew’ that people were alone on this planet.
(sigh) Imagine what you’ll ‘know’ tomorrow.”
The mission of religion is to make followers believe. Subjective assumptions unsupported by evidence will almost certainly be wrong at the onset regardless of the source, and without any means of regulation, will only get wronger over time. Sacred dogma once written is forbidden to be changed, so it can’t be rectified either. But science must be amenable to change because its objective is to add to the sum of knowledge and to improve understanding continually. So whatever explanations we ever propose are not to believed, but to be tested and corrected, even rejected if necessary, and our explanations must be refined accordingly.
For example, once upon a time, all the religions of the near east believed the earth was a flat disk divided into four quadraints, and enveloped by a giant crystal dome, which was their sky. The earliest actual scientists described the earth as a sphere and even calculated its size with surprising accuracy. But a hundred years later, the authors of scripture still wrote of a disk-shaped world. As the centuries wore on, some dogmatic believers refused the wisdom of scholars who knew better and even suppressed or destroyed their knowledge, and held to belief in a flat earth even until Columbus provided the final disproof.
“President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach Intelligent Design
alongside the theory of evolution because after all evolution is [quote] “just a theory”.
Then the president renewed his vow to drive the terrorists straight over the edge of the earth.”
Modern creationists oppose evolution and sometimes cosmology the same way flat earthers reject the theory of geosphericity, the same way geocentrists deny the theory of heliocentricity! Rather than swearing in advance to uphold and defend our preconceived notions against all reason, we would do better to suspect and inspect every belief to see if flaws can be found out and our knowledge consequently increased.
“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly alright;
it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.
To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”
Aristotle once proposed that everything was made of earth, air, water, and fire, -here represented by the perfect solids once associated with them- and a fifth element considered to be the substance of life. Based on these long-held yet obviously delusive beliefs, Georg Stahl and other 17th century scientists composed two theories; the theory of vitalism, (which held that life was animated by an infusion with an elemental spirit) and the theory of phlogiston. For decades, European scientists imagined that a nigh-undetectable sort of fiery air called phlogiston was present in everything flammable. A series of experiments ensued and these men began to rationalize how phlogiston could still somehow account for all the inconsistent data. Finally more accurate measurements and more critical thinking eventually challenged the status quo and brought chemical theory out of the realms of alchemy. Neither of Stahl’s theories are valid theories anymore. Phlogiston theory was disproved in 1777. His theory of vitalism was disproved fifty years later. But after a hundred and fifty years, Darwin’s theory is still going stronger than ever.
“Evolution is still a theory. It’s still a theory.
We just had two hundred years of evolutionary theory,
and it’s still a theory.”
“I heard someone ask one day,
‘“Well, you know, *you haven’t disproved the theory of evolution”
[*speaking about Christians]
And my reply was, “um, there’s nothing to disprove;
The theory of evolution has never been proved”.”
You don’t have to prove something before it can be disproved. Nor should we both prove and disprove the same thing. Science doesn’t permit anything to be proven positively. Instead, every hypothesis must be potentially falsifiable in order to count as science. That means there has to be a way to identify errors, to find out what’s wrong with it –and fix it. It’s still possible to falsify evolution too, though it’s now so well-supported it will take more than an unsubstantiated anomoly to do it. So your inability to distinguish dinosaurs from barnyard animals will be insufficient to disprove evolution.
“It’s a pig.”
“Nyah nyah”
“Evolution has not met the test, and deserves only to be treated as theory.”
“Darwin considered it a theory and it is still a theory;
it has never been proven and never will be. Thank you.”
As any internet philologist will readily explain, words may have different meanings at different times or contexts. Creationists exploit the academic meaning of theory as though it were only blind speculation like their own position is. But a scientific theory isn’t a ‘guess’ or ‘conjecture’. Look it up. In most instances, a Theory is a field of academic study. For instance, the high school I went to taught a class called Music Theory. Being an insufferable jerk then as now, I remember bursting in one day and yelling at the class;
“You shouldn’t teach music in school.
It’s just a theory; it’s never been proven!”
If music theory is a field of study, and as such can never be proved, then neither can the theories of evolution or even economics, and for the same reason; The notion is silly. Even if a theory passes every test forever, we still wouldn’t say it was proved, because positive proof exists only in matters of mathematics or law, wherein evolution actually has been proven. Otherwise, no theory has ever been proved, nor can be. They can only be dis-proved. And when that happens, a theory that doesn’t work must be replaced by one that does. We can’t discard any theory just because we haven’t perfected every part of it yet. You can’t trade something that works for nothing that doesn’t. If the original theory works at all, you’ll still have to use it, and perhaps fix it. But we can’t dismiss it until we can replace it with something better. And Darwin’s theory is actually better-supported than Newton’s theory of gravity.
Let’s look at the facts. Remember that a fact is merely data, a demonstrably accurate observation which is indisputable because it can be objectively verified by either side arguing about it. So let’s demonstrate the fact of gravity. We see that things tend to fall down. What’s that mean? Well, nothing yet; a fact on its own is meaningless. We need to understand it more specifically. When seen on an astronomical scale, we can determine a universal rule; that matter attracts matter. This is the law of gravity; a law being a general statement of nature which is always true under a specific set of circumstances. Now why does matter attract matter? That’s the theory!
Now let’s look at the fact of evolution. Since the dawn of livestock cultivation and agriculture, we’ve seen that species diverge, with new races branching out of older family trees, each with its own distinct traits and features which are in-turn inherited by new variants diverging thereafter. This is a readily evident fact in any lineage one cares to examine, and is implied at every level in taxonomy. Now creationists try to say that this doesn’t count because it’s only “microevolution”. But that isn’t true because we’ve actually witnessed the emergence of new species too. But even if that were true, this would still count because it is still evolution according to the laws of population genetics and descent with inherent modification which is all evolution really is. Opponents say evolution isn’t allelic variance in reproductive populations over successive generations because that doesn’t mean spontaneous generation of something coming from nothing, or dirt coming to life, and fish turning into giraffes, or some other ridiculous thing no scientist could ever endorse. But none of those things are evolution; They’re all strawmen fallacies created to obfuscate what evolution really is by those who refuse to admit that it really happens. So they call it something else instead.
"Darwin observed many things in in nature.
He was a good naturalist, a good observer of information.
What he saw was various plants and animals altering somewhat
through through adaptation, through variation, he saw them change.
We never see one basic type of something changing into something else.
That has never been observed in science or in in genetics.
It just has never been observed. What we see is variety.
Variety happens, adaptation happens. Evolution doesn't happen.”
Evolution DOES happen, and this twit just admitted it. But he also lied about what it is. Evolution never permits one thing to turn into another, fundamentally different type of anything; that would violate the laws of evolution. All of this is vindicated with independent peer-reviewed empirical research. Everything evolutionary science actually demands are things we actually do see throughout biology. Consequently, evolution is a unifying theory explaining virtually everything we can prove to be true of biodiversity.
Such is not the case with gravity. Because not only has the theory of gravity never been proven, it’s demonstrably wrong! One reason is that it incorrectly predicts how Mercury orbits the sun. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, and has even been proven to be more accurate. But it also assumes things about particles that we now know are false, otherwise quantum mechanics wouldn't work.
“Frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact;
It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.”
Would you also say that gravity is not an established scientific fact just because it is called “the theory of gravity?” You see, Huckleberry, that’s why you didn’t get the job!
And frankly, “Darwinism” doesn’t exist. At best, it was a relic of the 19th century and is limited only to Darwin’s own postulation, natural selection of mutations, which were not yet understood. Darwin hypothesized that units of information were passed down from both parents, but he couldn’t imagine what those units were. Gregor Mendel discovered the proof of Darwin’s prediction and tried to alert him to it in a manuscript; But it was written in German. It was discovered in Darwin’s desk after he died. With that discovery, Darwinism was replaced by “the modern synthesis” of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics and the subsequent discovery of an additional mechanism, genetic drift. Evolution is not “Darwinism” anymore and never really was. Some now associate it with cell theory. Would you also say that cells aren’t an established scientific fact because they’re called “theory” too?
