Is it a Theory? Is it a Law? No, it’s a fact.

I once tried to persuade an American atheist conference that the slogan,  “In God We Trust”, on evidence that America was founded in Christianity.
banknotes was a cosmetic trivium. We should stop bellyaching  about it and concentrate our fire on more substantive issues such as the tax free status of churches. I was kicked around the room by the admirable Edwin Kagin, unfortunately now dead. It really matters, he said, not only because it’s unconstitutional but because many Americans, ignorant of history (the phrase was added as late as 1957) actually point to “In God We Trust” as

Our habit of referring to the “theory” of evolution is similarly used to mislead. Huge numbers of people are bamboozled by the phrase “Only a Theory.” This essay is designed to remove confusion by abandoning the word theory altogether, when talking to creationists.

Today the dominant reply to the creationist “only a theory” bleat is to explain that the meaning of “theory” in science is different from everyday usage, which is synonymous with “hypothesis”. In The Greatest Show on Earth I quoted two definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Theory, Sense 1: A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.
Theory, Sense 2: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.

The party line among scientists arguing for evolution is to promote Sense 1, and I have followed it until today. But now I want to depart from the party line. I now think that trying to clear up this terminological point about the meaning of “theory” is a losing battle. We should stop using “theory” altogether for the case of evolution and insist, instead, that evolution is a fact.

Read the full essay here:
Is it a Theory? Is it a Law? No, it’s a fact. | Richard Dawkins Foundation