Pretty simple question: as I understand things, we can’t “prove” that life didn’t begin without a “creator” because we can’t replicate it as an experiment in a lab (not having enough funding for a 4 billion-year study, needing a whole new planet instead of a petri dish, etc.)
Still, we treat the origin of life as a scientifically accepted fact rather than just the most likely hypothesis.
Are there other phenomena which get the same treatment? In other words, what other theories can’t we prove according to the usual scientific method (replication in a controlled setting), but treat as proven?
I’m assuming the Big Bang is one, since I imagine the artificial creation of a new universe would be a pretty big news story…
I’m not sure what you mean by that. Clearly life on Earth originated – though there have been theories that it originated somewhere else and transferred to Earth. However, exactly how life originated is more of an open question.
The origin of our galaxy.
The origin of our solar system.
The origin of our plant.
We can’t replicate the emergence of terrestrial life from aquatic life.
We can’t replicate the origin of mammals.
We can’t replicate the origin of primates.
We can’t replicate the origin of the great apes.
We can’t replicate the origin of the genus Homo.
We can’t replicate the origin of the species Homo sapiens.
We can’t replicate the discovery of fire
We can’t replicate the discovery of the wheel
We can’t replicate the domestication of the dog
We can’t replicate the invention of agriculture
We can’t replicate the waves of disease that followed European contact with the Americas.
We can’t replicate the French Revolution
And on and on. Every historical event is unreplicable, in the sense that we can’t back up and redo the event and see if it happens the same way next time.
If a historian has a theory about the cause of the French Revolution, they can’t replay the French Revolution but change that variable and see what happens.
And if that’s not what you mean, I don’t understand what you mean.
Life on Earth originated in some way. No one really knows why or how, but we have lots of ideas. But there was an origin of life, because otherwise there would be no life on Earth, and then we wouldn’t be here to wonder how life on Earth originated.
Or is the question, why do scientists assume that life on Earth didn’t have a supernatural explanation? Because no other studied phenomenon has required a supernatural explanation. There are plenty of things we can’t explain, and it’s logically possible that the reason we can’t explain some of those things is because they had supernatural causes. But there are all sorts of things that people formerly theorized had supernatural causes, but we’ve discovered their natural causes over the centuries. People once theorized that lightning had a supernatural cause, but now we know that lightning is a gigantic static electrical discharge.
So the track record of those that insisted that various phenomenon had to have supernatural causes isn’t very good. And since the Enlightenment, scientists have pretty much given up on looking for supernatural causes as fruitless, whereas looking for natural causes has proven fruitful.
And so, even though we don’t know the exact cause of the origin of life on Earth, it seems perverse to insist that it didn’t have a natural cause, when every other studied phenomenon that we’ve come to understand has turned out to have a natural cause. But maybe the origin of life will turn out to be the first one, it’s logically possible, it’s just that there’s no reason to believe it will turn out to be the first one.
In layman’s terms, scientific fact is “the most likely hypothesis”.
But this is how scientists talk: Facts are things that you measure. It’s a fact that the temperature is X degrees right now. It’s a fact that the earth revolves around the sun every 24 hours (+/-). Hypotheses and theories are not facts. Evolution isn’t a fact-- it’s a theory. But “theory” is as good as it gets in science. One starts out with a hypothesis (call it an educated guess), then you test and retest that hypothesis, and if it stands up to scrutiny, then it’s accepted as a theory (the best hypothesis we have to explain the facts).
Thus we have the theory of Evolution, the theory of Relativity, and so on. Those are not facts, but they are supported by facts-- lots and lots of facts.
I think the point is that he is in discussion with creationists. They say things like “if life has a natural origin, how come you can’t replicate it in the lab, then ?”
And the OP wants to reply “Ah, but what about XXXXXX, we can’t replicate that in a lab either, but you believe in it, right?”
And the trouble with John Mace’s list is that they are all things that a creationist doesn’t believe in.
You’re kinda-sorta on the right lines, but I’m not in a discussion with anyone.
And yeah, I don’t really consider** Lemur866**'s examples to be quite what I was looking for; an individual revolution or moment in human history isn’t what I would call a scientific phenomenon, but a sociological one. (Yeah, yeah, it’s a science, but hardly anything in sociology can be replicated in a lab, except for extremely simple interactions.)
John Mace pretty much nailed it, but the origin of individual species bit is a little overly specific.
Let me better explain the original question, since only John seems to have sussed it. On one hand, we have easily verifiable hypotheses, which have been tested by experimentation. The results of said experiments have been duplicated, and our hypothesis has been duplicated. Hooke’s Law, for example; the extension is always proportional to the force applied, until you reach the plastic (elastic?) limit.
Then we have the situations I’m asking about, where hypotheses which cannot be verified as easily, because you can’t replicate the conditions specified. Replicating the French Revolution doesn’t count because you aren’t testing anything; even if you did duplicate it, what have you proven? There’s no hypothesis being tested.
Relativity is a good one. I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to know whether you can prove the theory, but since nobody I’ll assume you can’t.
Hope that helps.
Well, once we accept something as a law, I’d say we can generally be confident that we’ve got it right.
We have a lot of contemporary physical evidence that supports the “French Revolution hypothesis”. However, we must consider the possibility that we are misinterpreting the evidence and the French Revolution never happened. We can’t go back and observe it, can we?
In creationism debates I sometimes point out that there’s more physical evidence for the Theory of Evolution than there is for the Theory of Jesus Being a Real Person … .
How about gravity? Aren’t there a lot of things we can’t determine for sure about gravity? Yet, it’s hard not to believe in.
You know what I’ll never understand about the “competing” theories of Creation and Evolution – why couldn’t the Ineffable have simply created the Big Bang, then sat back to observe what followed? I’m sure it was glorious, terrible, fascinating, and heartbreaking to behold. Sorta like those big expensive fireworks…you set it up, you light the fuse, you run away, and watch what follows. Or, sort of like “The Sims”, but with dinosaurs (temporarily) and big real human brains (eventually) that might come up with anything at all, who knows what. Big fun!
Precisely. There’s no real difference here between claiming that the American Revolution didn’t occur and that complex life didn’t spring up via evolution for this argument. For both cases we have ample, convincing evidence, but neither are necessarily reproducible enough to convince detractors.
For example: Let’s say that I was a brilliant scientist. I’ve created a perfect small scale, working model of Earth in primordial times. While being recorded, with an audience of dozens of the most respected biologists in the world, I manage to generate life out of the cesspool of random chemicals. Even though this seems like convincing evidence, I guarantee you that the religious skeptics will still argue that this doesn’t disprove a direct divine creation of life. And they’d be right.
Proving that it can be done or could have happened this way doesn’t prove that it did. Really and truly, we don’t have a way to prove it. Equally, they don’t have a way to prove that it didn’t. The only way to do that would involve a magical time machine.
Equally, we have ample evidence of the American Revolution. Heck, we have a whole nation called the United States of America! Tons of books about the subject. Artifacts, etc., but can we prove that God didn’t create us all just after 1781? Maybe God created all of the previous history just to confuse us, or to give us a background we’d otherwise be uninteresting without. It’s his damn sandbox, so why not? None of us were alive back then to know.
That’s why arguments about the origin of life are purely hypothetical. History is given the benefit of the doubt because it is specifically the study of the past regarding human activities. That’s what history does. The disconnect here is that science like biology isn’t the study of the past at all, so it doesn’t get the pass to rely upon relatively shaky evidence to establish facts about the past.
That being said, this discrepancy between biology and history isn’t really that important to your request. As such, I’d say it’s a pretty valid comparison if you want to use it.
Other things we laymen take for granted as laws (but are actually theories still being looked at):
Theory of Relativity
Theory of Gravity
Cell Theory (the idea that cells are the basic unit structure of all living things)
Atomic Theory
Kinetic Theory of Gases
Plate Tectonics Theory
Chaos Theory
Heck, we have tons of theories that we use every single day to interact with our world, build towers and bridges, send shuttles to space, and predict the weather. And, as far as I’ve seen, no one considers a natural origin of life or of the universe to be more convincing than any of the above. In other words, who is it that’s been treating such natural origins as “scientifically accepted fact”? Who is treating these theories as “proven” fact?
Well, given that we build all sorts of things based on those theories- spacecraft, hydrogen bombs, fission reactors, and so on- I’d say we can probably assume we were right.
On the other hand, if we’re wrong about the origin of life, for example, we’d still be able to clone a sheep.
That’s the disconnect.
I must admit I had not considered the possibility of proving that historical events actually happened; again, that doesn’t really go with my question, since nobody is actually arguing that [historical event X] didn’t really happen.
There’s no such thing as a scientific law. As as someone you quoted said, theory is as good as it gets.
They used to make scientific laws, back in the 19th century and earlier with their certainty of a clockwork universe. But sometime in the early 20th century scientific philosophers realized that we can never be 100% certain of any scientific discovery. So they changed all the laws to theories. Anything that is called a law, such as Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, is just a linguistic hangover from the 19th century. Those are actually theories.
The unfortunate part of this is that as a result, the scientific word theory means something much different than the everyday meaning of the word. This causes a certain amount of difficulty when debating the validity of evolution.
Absolutely!!! A good chunk of professional science is ALL theory, but the scientists kick it around like fact. I have been in lectures on cosmology and they NEVER use the word “theory” when discussing various well-known concepts. Because they are SO well known, they’ve become fact. If you listen carefully to what is said in those science shows, such as those on the History or Discovery Channels, you will find the same is true. I can only wager if they use the word “theory” too much, they’d lose the funding they compete for. And, they might have to actually admit we know less about the physical world than we profess to know. - Jinx
Everything that happened before “now” was an historical event, including scientific phenomena. They are all events whose occurrence we can justify by our own memory or the memory of trusted others. There’s no difference.
