A biology professor I had in college taught that "a theory is a fact." He was emphatic that evolution is a fact.
Why it isn't a "law" is something someone with a deeper knowledge would have to explain.
How do you make it law, when there is no nonbelievers on highest government council voting on it.
@Castlepaloma referring to the laws of thermodynamics and other scientific laws.
@castlepaloma ummm, not legislated, Demonstrated by actual verifiable/repeatable testing, duuuuuh
@AnneWimsey the point I was getting at was the difference between a scientific law and a theory and perhaps someone could enlighten
@Fletch sorry, replying to @ castlepaloma, i have no idea how that happened.......edited!
Maybe she should put the theory of gravity to a test.
I have mentioned that test to some.
The problem with the religious is that they think that scientific "theory" is simply a wild guess. This is why we get such nonsense out of them.
The latter definition of the word is (6) contemplation or speculation. It is the way many use the term who are not speaking about science.
The religious have also been taught that many of their religions "wild guesses" are as well supported as a theory, so they fail to grasp that actual facts come from observation and experimentaton, and don't just come out of a book - like the Bible.
This is why I changed my language, if I feel the need to hazard a guess I say, "I have a hypothesis" never invoking a "Theory" unless it's an actual theory and when someone says they have a "Theory" I always say "You mean a hypothesis because you're at best making an informed guess, so it hardly qualifies as a Theory."
Atheism in action, I can see an expression of confused wonder in the eyes of my fellow engineers that are in various cults. They're educated enough to know I'm right and it completely salts the earth for arguments like "Evolution is just a theory." Arguments that would happen at work until I started setting up a foundation for how we communicated before they started sharing the "Gospel" but not by attacking them, just educating them about my exclusive way of using language and why they should follow suite.
I have never had any success in getting your target audience to think about language in that way. Even the observation that the word "believe" has at least four different meanings seems to be beyond their ability to understand.
I have to give you a boatload of credit for putting it that way, to them.
Faithfools seem to not understand what a theory in science means.
Or just choose not to.