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To: shades who wrote (68330)	9/2/2005 1:50:54 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Shades Re: "evolution" The practice in science of calling logical formulations "Laws" was a product of the classical period, Newtons "Laws" of motion for example. Newton is mathematically coherent and logical, but in the real world there are errors. F=MA is not universally true as it was once thought to be, so how could it be a "Law"? We still call it a "law" out of respect for Newton himself, but with relativity, which predicted and quantified the errors in Newton, we call relativity a "Theory". Of course we still use Newton as for most things the error is unimportant. If we made the mistake of calling relativity a "law" then we are saying that this is the last word, the absolute truth and so no further study is necessary and if there is found to be some mistke or error in the realtivity theory in the future responsible science will not consider it. But we don't do that, we call it the "Theory of Relativity". By this we mean; "go ahead and use it for it is the best tool we have at present, keeping in mind that it could be discovered to be mistaken in the future". Evolution is just like that; it is a "theory" with all the word means. It is NOT a law. Actually I think the only laws accepted now are in abstract fields like mathematics. There is a really big important philosophical difference. It is the difference in saying that "We believe to the best of our ability a certain thing happened in a particular way millions of years ago" and saying that we know with ABSOLUTE CERTITUDE that such a thing happened in a particular way. The latter would be a fools statement. Back in the 1960's lots of emphasis was placed upon this type of thinking and most college physics departments actually taught a set of courses called "Modern Physics" which was really a sort of history of the evolution of the science of physics. You mentioned the dropping of an apple and actually one of the postulations of modern physics was that if you dropped an object a number of time approaching infinity then eventually some day the object, instead of falling, would fly right straight up. In other words, human science can NEVER discover it all so we had best continue to call all our best ideas "theories". Slagle