Kawamura said:
I didn't make a statement about disproving the the hypothesis. I'm saying that germ theory of disease is a theory. It'll never be a fact because that is a nonsensical movement.
We watch it occur. The observation is fact. How is that nonsensical?
What? You always keep testing in science. You do your damned hardest to disprove the current theories, to find flaws, to fix them, then have someone else do the same.
I think you missed the NAS excerpt in the link. I'm not the only one who disagrees with you.
Ignoring the time issue for one, the matter is
sometimes we have direct and repeated observations of all steps that were theorized. Those observations are facts. No status as theories beforehand changes those observations magically into theory.
We see the change in allele frequency. That is a fact. Why this happens is a theory.
We also see mutations and preferential selection in the fitness of those mutations to breed - natural or artificial. The observations are magically theory, now?
It will always be a theory, because theory is the word you use when you say 'this is how I explain the change'.
We observe that a particle changes velocity when struck. We assign Newton's laws to these.
Common descent is a theory as well because it explains the evidence we see. And what resulting theory?
...it was a joke, I think you missed it.
Why should supernatural tampering be observable?
Because unobservable tampering is just Last Thursdayism. All IDers claim that evidence can be found, so it's not like there's any disagreement with the nuts there.
EDIT: I should have asked this off the bat: what definition of theory are you using? Are you talking about a scientific theory or layman's theory? Because you seem to be weaving back and forth between scientific definitions of things and non, and with my weak understanding of terminology, I'm getting confused.
I'm using the typical scientific definition. Eventually, some theories reach the point where you observe the root causes of the effects that they try to describe.
A hypothesis is something that makes a testable prediction about the Universe, okay.
A theory is a hypothesis that explains all previous observations and has successfully predicted observations on its own.
A fact is a data point - an observation.
A law is a collection of consistent observations with (at least originally) no theory to explain them.
My declaration of germ theory as fact is that we currently watch the underlying mechanism - typically, you might expect a theory to be an imperfect observation of the Universe. You might, for example, find evidence of panspermia mixing with terrestrial life or something that extends relativity under previously unobserved conditions.
You can't really do that with germ theory, or the theory that the Earth orbits the Sun - assuming a sufficiently strict definition of orbit. It's not just that trying to contravene requires some absurd explanation, but it actually requires that our reality not be what it seems and that's not a very useful proposition. We measure the angular acceleration the Earth experiences, for example, as it orbits. Likewise, an alternative to germ theory needs to explain... the exact and entire process described by germ theory.
Relativity is a good case to look at. It did not supplant Newtonian mechanics - it explains that they dominate in most instances. That's why it's called relativity, as it follows that principle. We do not, however, have any understanding of the underlying mechanism.
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