Do you believe in Evolution?

[DarkTemplarZero]

Mr Pikachu: A scientific theory is different from the conventional meaning of "theory" in that it can't be a guess or speculation. Conjecture, yes, from the evidence given. While I don't disagree with you that theories aren't always correct, just look at Caloric Theory, but they must be proven or disproven scientifically through observation and reasoning, not through skepticism by religious nutcases who have no evidence to back up what they're saying.

LP: Such is the plight of philosophy; lots of argument that gets nowhere. For example, I could argue that the universe was created exactly one second ago by an all powerful being named Tony Montana and made the illusion that the universe was 13.7 billion years old, and, by Schrodinger's Uncertainty Principle, I can't prove it and you can't disprove it because we can't observe anything to support either argument.

[mr_pikachu]

Well, I admit that the latter two definitions I gave are a bit too extreme from a scientific standpoint. I'll go back and edit the bold tags out of that part, because you do make a valid point there.

Nonetheless, theories still have the two limitations that I mentioned previously: logical prowess and available evidence. When new ideas are considered, or when contradictory evidence comes to light, theories are changed. It's the nature of science that nothing can truly be "proven," but that we can only conclude the best explanation for the limited things we have seen. One look at how many theories there have been about the structure of atoms demonstrates that.

[DarkTemplarZero]

Don't invoke Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem here, it's irrelevant. What keeps evolution from being a scientific law (it's universally accepted among biologists, just like Newton's Laws of Motion are universally accepted among physicists for example) is three things: religious extremists, the fact that we haven't been able to observe it anywhere else in the universe because we haven't discovered life anywhere else in the universe (scientific laws must hold everywhere), and the fact that it lacks a nice mathematical model like F=ma or F=G*M1*M2/R^2.

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem? Hah nice point. Unfortunately, most scientists and mathematicians don't want to waste their lives trying to prove axioms. We can sit here and battle on and on about whether 0=0 is true or whether Newton's Third Law of Motion is true or whether every living creature is descended from a common ancestor and not get anywhere and science would become philosophy, but thankfully the question is irrelevant. The question is what can you derive from the axiom, not how you can prove it is true.

And you cannot compare evolution to the models of the atom: none of the theories of the atom were actually scientific theories, they were "models". Even when they were published the discoverers stated that their models had some flaws and failed to explain certain phenomena. Hell, Bohr's original paper stated that, while his model predicted the behavior of the hydrogen atom to the T, it was useless for helium and larger atoms because of electron repulsion, nobody has yet claimed to have an all-encompassing theory of how an atom works. There has never been a shred of scientific evidence that contradicts evolution. Once again, we can sit here and argue Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and whether F really equals ma, but that is irrelevant and there has never been any evidence that says otherwise, so for our purposes it's an axiom.