You will regularly hear religious fundamentalists and Inteligent Design supporters abusing the word ‘theory’ for their own ends. They say things like “Evolution is only a theory” to imply that it is a half-baked idea that we’re not really sure of. This invariably really annoys scientists and gets them all agitated because in science, a theory is actually something very strong, well developed, consistent with reality, and well supported by a lot of observational evidence. The weak wishy-washy stuff should be described as conjectures and hypotheses, only the solid well supported stuff should get the honour of being a theory. However, in the public’s mind that distinction is just not there. The average person on the street refers to things that are really conjectures and hypotheses as theories and things that should be theories as accepted facts. Who is to blame for this? Believe it or not, I think the scientists have to take a large share of the blame.

Setting a Bad Example

If, as a scientist, you expect lay people to correctly use a word you must at the very least use it correctly yourself. In recent times however, I’ve seen evidence of scientists abusing the word ‘theory’ in exact the same way as the ID supporters. I was listening to an Astronomy podcast made by professional Astronomers yesterday and they used the phrase “but it’s only a theory” to describe some of the more esoteric ideas in modern cosmology. I certainly don’t disagree with their sentiment, that stuff really is at the very edges of science and IMO a lot of it is as much philosophy and pseudo science as ID itself. However, they abused the word theory by associating it with these conjectures. They used the word ‘theory’ to describe something which most certainly does not meet the criteria to be a real scientific theory like Relativity or Evolution. If professional scientists can abuse the word ‘theory’ like that then no wonder the fundamentalists do it, they’re just copying us!

Indemic Abuse the Word ‘Theory’ Within Sicence

Scientists also abuse the word ‘theory’ for their own ends, to lend undue credibility to far out and un-testable conjectures any hypotheses. My personal favourite example of this is “String Theory”. Putting ‘theory’ in the name implies that this idea is mature, well thought out, that it has made testable predictions and, most importantly, that these predictions have been empirically verified. The truth however, is that there are no testable predictions and hence there is not a single supporting experiment or observation for this concept. The whole field scarcely counts as science IMO. The only reason I consider it to be science at all is that String Theorists are striving to develop their ideas to the point that they can make testable predictions. The bottom line is that this is not a theory by the strict definition of the word that we expect the IDers to uphold, yet the scientific community refer to it as a theory!

It is because this kind of unfinished, unsupported postulating gets called a theory by scientists that IDers CAN abuse the word. They are basically implying that Evolution is on a par with String Theory in terms of empirical support etc. and that it should hence not be confused with fact or even considered probable. Since scientists refer to both as theories you can hardly blame the fundamentalists for equating the two!

Conclusions

If scientists expect the rest of the world to use the word ‘theory’ properly they really need to get their own house in order first. TBH I think we need a new word to describe the genuine theories that have stood the test of time and reality so as to distinguish them from the airy-fairy and undeveloped fields like String Theory, M-Theory and so forth. If we don’t start to clearly make these distinctions there is no way we can legitimately expect the public to realise how dramatically different the theory of Evolution is to the unsupported guess-work that is String Theory.

I have heard some scientists suggest that we should refer to the solid theories like Relativity, Gravitation, Evolution etc. as ‘facts’ to counter the ‘theory’ problem but that seems like madness to me. It makes science even more confusing to lay people who have enough problems grasping the scientific method and the fact that you cannot prove a scientific theory but only support it or disprove it. This is why the word ‘fact’ would be plain wrong as well as being totally misleading. I have no idea what word we should use to mean “strong, well supported theory” but the sooner we get one the better! In the mean time, it’s up to us scientists to keep pointing out the sheer volume of evidence and support to backup theories like Evolution and to be very careful about how we use the word ‘theory’ when talking to the public.