Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

jessiehl
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:03:46 +0000

And finally, as for evolution, I would hope that any school worth its beans taught multiple theories, just like my very religious Bio teacher taught intelligent design as a theory, and evolution as a theory, and creationism as a theory, etc. presenting all cases fairly and accurately.



I think you are conflating the scientific and colloquial meanings of “theory”. Evolution is a scientific theory, like quantum, general relativity, or universal gravitation. To use Wikipedia’s definition, which is more eloquent than I would be likely to come up with on my own, a scientific theory is a “testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation.” ID/creationism are about faith. That’s their point. They are conjectures (theories in the colloquial sense) that you believe in or don’t.