Quote (chiefwiggum654 @ Sun, 14 Dec 2008, 21:13)
Well, there is both a theory of gravity and a law of gravity, where the theory tries to explain the phenomenon and the law is the physical representation of it.
There are kinks in how we think gravity works but it's worth saying that we understand exactly how it works as a force. It's not mysterious, but there are some questions about why it's so weak. Whereas evolution is a theory mainly because we only know how it works on earth. It's actually expected to be a law, and I think we have enough evidence that evolution isn't just theoretical, because we could extend it to suggest that evolution should include all the stuff that's caught up with the arrow of time in space-time, and not just life. That might be a cheap trick because it would bastardize what we mean by evolution, but I think it's something that would be neat to see. It wouldn't be a simple quantification, so a formula for a theory of general evolution would yield a rather wild formula.
In way this topic prompts us to think about whether we think science and religion are just theories in the big picture. And in the very, very big picture we have no idea.
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