Indeed, even if a theory happened to be completely true, it would still be a theory! You could never be absolutely certain that some future observation might not falsify the theory.
So, for example, dismissing Darwin's theory as "just a theory" as if that were a strike against it is misunderstanding what science is up to. Of course there is some uncertainty; there is with all scientific theories.
Of course there are certain claims the theory makes that might turn out to be false; but the fact that there is evidence we could conceivably get to demonstrate these claims are false is a scientific virtue, not a sign that the theory is unscientific. There's no conceivable evidence we could locate that could demonstrate the claims of these theories are false.
Thus, these theories just aren't scientific. Certainly, their proponents point to all sorts of evidence that fits well with these theories, but they never make any serious efforts to look for evidence that could prove the theories false. Their acceptance of these theories isn't a matter of having proof that the theories are true, or even a matter of these theories having successfully withstood many serious attempts to falsify them.
Rather, it's a matter of faith. None of this means Darwin's theory is necessarily true and "Creation Science" is necessarily false. But it does mean in the Popperian view that most scientists endorse that Darwin's theory is scientific and "Creation Science" is not. If you enjoyed this post, consider contributing a few bucks to a project in my Giving Page in the Science Bloggers for Students challenge. Supporting science education in public school classrooms will help young people get a better handle on what kind of attitude and methodology makes science science -- and on all the cool things science can show us about our world.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Janet D. Her explorations of ethics, scientific knowledge-building, and how they are intertwined are informed by her misspent scientific youth as a physical chemist. Follow Janet D. Stemwedel on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.
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Sir Karl Popper , the scientific philosopher , was interested in the same problem. How do we actually define the scientific process? How do we know which theories can be said to be truly explanatory? He began addressing it in a lecture, which is printed in the book Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge also available online :. When I received the list of participants in this course and realized that I had been asked to speak to philosophical colleagues I thought, after some hesitation and consultation, that you would probably prefer me to speak about those problems which interest me most, and about those developments with which I am most intimately acquainted.
Popper saw a problem with the number of theories he considered non-scientific that, on their surface, seemed to have a lot in common with good, hard, rigorous science. But the question of how we decide which theories are compatible with the scientific method, and those which are not, was harder than it seemed.
It is most common to say that science is done by collecting observations and grinding out theories from them. Charles Darwin once said, after working long and hard on the problem of the Origin of Species ,. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
This is a popularly accepted notion. We observe, observe, and observe, and we look for theories to best explain the mass of facts. Although even this is not really true: Popper points out that we must start with some a priori knowledge to be able to generate new knowledge.
More on that another time. As proof, they might follow up with a host of real-life Leos: World-leaders, celebrities, politicians, and so on. In some sense, the theory would hold up. The observations could be explained by the theory, which is how science works, right? Sir Karl ran into this problem in a concrete way because he lived during a time when psychoanalytic theories were all the rage at just the same time Einstein was laying out a new foundation for the physical sciences with the concept of relativity.
What made Popper uncomfortable were comparisons between the two. Did all three not have vast explanatory power in the world? It was during the summer of that I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with these three theories—the Marxist theory of history, psychoanalysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious about their claims to scientific status.
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