[cbfoulds]

Originally posted by NIump50
What is the difference between a scientific fact and theory, surely they are not interchangeable words like you just used in the post.
I'll play:
- a scientific "fact" is objective experimental results or empirical observation: if you drop a hammer, it always falls toward the floor, not the ceiling. It is repeatable, and it is universally and indisputably true: every observer will see the hammer fall toward the floor, every time.
- a "theory" is an explanation of "why" a fact is so; or a prediction of "what" will happen or be observed under certain circumstances; in fact, the true test of a good theory is it's predictive ability - it's capacity to foretell the outcome of experiments or investigations that no-one has made yet, and to be correct in those "prophesies". Einstein made a number of [at the time] outlandish predictions, based on relativity, none of which, to my knowledge, have failed to be demonstrated correct. Gravitational lensing of light by and from distant galaxies is the most spectacular and memorable [for me, at the moment]. A theory can be DIS-proved [by demonstration of a single fact (see above) which cannot be true if the theory is correct; it is the nature of science that NO true "theory" can ever be definitively "proved" to be true, since a genuine scientific mind is always willing to considcer the possibility that there is, somewhere, that single inconsistent fact. Rarely, when a set of principles of a theory has been tested and found to have no observable flaws, it may be called a "law": gravity, thermodynamics, Newtonian mechanics, and so forth: but science remains sufficiently skeptical that the possibility that these "laws" are wrong is left open [you'd just better bring your "A" game and some real GOOD evidence, if you plan to challenge them].

To my knowledge it's impossible to prove the accuracy of carbon dating on something supposedly a million years old.
To know for sure you have to have an item that is irrufatably a million years old, which we don't have and perform the test to see if the test is accurate. It's one thing to carbon test a 200 year old tree, you can match the results up against other measures of time. I think there is a big difference between a 200 yr old tree and a million yr old fossil. I would think there would be a few more variables to consider and some we may not even be aware, consequently without absolute certainty of the age or another form of measurement to help support the result it's still theoritical results. The fact that the results support your theoritical bent does not make it anymore or less a fact.
Nobody tries to carbon date anything a million years old: won't work - too little Carbon 14 left after that long.
CAN carbon date stuff more than 8,000 years old. Been done literally thousands of times. Each one is a scientific "fact" which completely DISproves the "theory" of the "young earth".
There are other scientific methods of dating older items, esp. rocks and such. Suffice it to say that some fossils [which, as my 14 year old son urges me to point out, are traces of prior life where the organic matter has (usually)been replaced by minerals, leaving no Carbon 14 to date: "DUH, Dad", says he] are found in rocks which can be dated by scientifically reliable methods to ages orders of magnitude greater than 8,000 years b.p.

There's no way for you to prove big bang, it's just the best explanation you can come up with to avoid creation.
Big bang is pure theory at best.
The FACT that millions have been duped doesn't make it more or less so.
You and the rest of the scientific world have to work real hard to get from nothing, I said nothing, to the formation of this galaxy to a living organism on this planet to the evolution of this enlightened race.
I don't "seek to avoid creation". On the contrary, I am perfectly comfortable believing that "In the beginning, God created ..." and continues to create, everything that is, was, or ever will be. I do, however, find it almost too funny for words that there are people claiming to be people of faith who refuse to believe that the Almighty was capable of ordaining and setting in motion the mechanisms of creation that we are capable of observing thru science, simply because it offends their pride that He may have chosen to create our species from the elements of the earth thru an intermediate step of "lower" life.

Have to go now, my son needs to e-mail his girlfriend.
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