The "T" Word

As I'm watching this documentary, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" I heard that beautiful word "theory." We talked about in class how that word in everyday language means "guess." People keep wanting to say that evolution is "just a theory" and that it isn't a "law" or a "fact." This, in my opinion, shows the pretentiousness and absoluteness of scientific language.

In the scientific world "theory" means a "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena." Or in other words: "a hypothesis that explains a group of facts" (my abridged version). What is a hypothesis in scientific language? Well I'm glad you asked! "a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts." Or in other words: "a guess as to why something happens which you than use during an experiment." A "fact" in scientific terms is simply something that happens. "Grass grows," is a fact. Facts really aren't all that important in science, as they are just little bits. The hypothesis and the theory are the important things as they attempt to explain the facts. A "law" is even less important. A law is "a statement of a relation or sequence of phenomena invariable under the same conditions." Or in other words: "something that happens the same way in the same conditions every time." For instance 2+2=4 is a law. It will always work that way.

In everyday language, we put quite a bit of emphasis on the word "fact" and "law." We believe that these are the things that we should look out for because they emphasize something that is real. We take the words "hypothesis" and "theory" as just meaning a guess. As such when average religious people talk about the "theory" of evolution, they really are saying the "guess" of evolution.

This is based in a lack of understanding of scientific language, but there is a worse problem at work here. It has come up several times before in debates and even in the Dennet/Plantiga book. People don't have a common ground from which to argue. They can't even agree as to what the definition of the word they are arguing about means. This happens all to often when people argue over things like religion, morality, or political matters. They are arguing over completely different things as they have different definitions of the same words.