Proof vs. Evidence

Question: how many people have been proven guilty in a court of law in the United States.  The answer might be “how in the world could I possibly know that?”, but the answer really is pretty easy: zero.

Now, you might be thinking that it couldn’t be zero; after all, not everyone walks out of court an innocent person; some go to prison immediately in fact.  But the devil’s in the details of course.  Here, the details are pretty subtle, but they are in fact how the scientific method works; they’re also how our legal system works, albeit the legal system is a lot less rigid.  No one is “proven” guilty; they are “found” guilty.  As I said, it’s very subtle.  Let’s take a look at the two words.

“Found” essentially means “as close to the truth as we can come, but there is still some doubt.”  In a court of law, we have to come to “beyond a reasonable doubt” for criminal offenses and “even plus a feather” to be found guilty.  I worked for law firms for twelve years, so I’m pretty familiar with the concepts.

“Proven” means “no doubt about it, this is true.”  Math is the only field of science allowed to have “proof”; everything else is “evidence.”  Think of court again; we have evidence for and against someone.  So we weigh the evidence to find a person innocent or guilty; we can’t prove it.

In science, we work towards p values mathematically, which allows us to mathematically prove that a statement we make is the truth.  Now it may not be the complete truth, there may be more to it, but it’s why we keep doing science.  We want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing less will suffice.  Look at Newton, who worked out the math for gravity.  He was right, as he had proof, but he was missing something.  Along comes Einstein, who added his laws of relativity to Newton’s laws of gravity, proving mathematically that he was correct.  Newton wasn’t wrong, he was simply incomplete.  Happens all the time.

The reason I wanted to blog this is because I hear the word “proof” tossed around when “evidence” is really the best word.  So unless you’re doing math, you don’t say “proof.”  Remember doing proofs in school?  What class was that?  Math.  It was your math class.  And you probably hated it, which I can’t blame you for, I hated it too.

So understand how science works.  We come up with ideas, and we test them.  We break what we find down into math, usually statistics, to prove, mathematically, that we’re correct.  Oftentimes incomplete, but we’ve got proof.  Evidence leads towards the proof, but if we can show what we’ve got leads to proper math, we get to use mathematical proof.

So there’s your differences, in a nutshell.  Also, as an aside, we can briefly talk about the “burden of proof.”  The burden of proof lies with the person making the positive claim, not the one denying it.  So if you say something such as “there is a god”, it is up to you to demonstrate that this statement is true; it is not up to me to show that what you say is not true.  As Christopher Hitchens used to say, what can be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence.

 

Wolford’s Law

I know this won’t actually take off, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway 🙂  I’d like to propose a new eponymous law, Wolford’s Law.  This law states that in any debate over the existence of God, the probability that an argument based on the anthropic principle will be presented increases to one.

It is also assumed that anyone who presents an anthropic argument has already lost the debate.

Texans better step to it

Once again I’ve read about Don McLeroy, idiot at large, subverting Texas state science standards for public schools with his own superstitious beliefs.  For those not in the know, McLeroy is a creationist; he believes that the earth is about 6,000 years old, that snakes can talk, and that all species on the planet were within walking distance of Noah’s house.  Does it get any dumber?

McLeroy is pushing for this “teach the controversy” bullshit regarding evolution; he wants the strengths and weaknesses taught in the classroom.  This is religious-code for “poofgoddidit” as an alternative explanation.  The problem is, of course, that there just aren’t any weaknesses to evolutionary theory as the best explanation for the diversity of life; in fact, the evidence is overwhelming from many fields outside of biology.  According to Richard Dawkin’s site, McLeroy said that he thinks evolution is just an hypothesis; he must have missed that memo from about a century ago, the one that had biologists face-palming themselves with a big, noisy ‘duh!’.

Evolution is a fact; it is observable, can make predictions, and is of course testable.  We use evolutionary theory for the creation of vaccines; we use it to treat cancer and HIV.  Evolution works.  QED.

Texas is a huge purchaser of school books, which is why this is such a big issue (other than the fact that a raving lunatic with no ability to understand science is head of a school board voting on science standards).  Textbook manufacturers are likely to write their books based upon Texas standards, then other states will end up buy books which actually put evolutionary theory on the same level as wishful thinking.  Sickening.

So I’d like to challenge good ol’ Don to cite a few of these weaknesses of evolutionary theory.  Then I’d like to know why we don’t teach the strengths and weaknesses of the Standard Model from physics.  Why not teach the controversy of Heliocentrism?  And those damn Newtonians and their F=MA!

Belief

It seems that at both Badastronomy and Pharyngula over the last few days, the word “belief” has been tossed around a bit, much to the chagrin of some.  This usually comes about as a result of someone saying that they do or do not believe in evolution; the truth is, this is not a valid question, depending upon how you define the word “believe.”

Looking at dictionary dot com, I examined a few of the definitions of the word and found that there is one striking similarity: the word “evidence” is not to be found in them.  This is really the crux of the argument I think; believe seems to imply that there is no evidence.

So if we take the word “believe” to mean that we take something as true based on something other than evidence, then the phrase “believe in evolution” is clearly incorrect as it would imply that one accepted evolution to be true based on a reason other than evidence.  Evolution has mounds of evidence with nothing empirical to refute or even cast doubt on it.

The problem is, however, that this is nothing more than mincing words, “a rose by any other name” if you will.  The denotation of the word may imply a lack of evidence, but the connotative usage may simply not recognize this difference; I’m told many times that I believe in science, and it is no different that belief in a god.  The difference is, of course, that science produces evidence for its claims whereas religion produces only assertions from figures in authority.  People will believe what the church says simply because it is the church.  Scientists will believe what other scientists say, provided they have excellent evidence and can demonstrate their ideas (and they can be replicated and otherwise validated).

So how do we rectify the word “believe” so as to differentiate whether or not we are referring to something based on evidence or authority?  The suggestion given at Pharyngula was to skirt the issue until your position had been stated; this has been my argument for quite a while.  The person asking about evolution doesn’t want a lesson about the dictionary.

When I am asked if I believe in evolution, I respond that I believe that evolutionary theory, supported by over 150 years of evidence and accepted by tens of thousands of scientists all over the world is the best explanation we have for the diversity of life on this planet.  However, I wouldn’t say that I believe in evolution because the word “believe” implies that there is no evidence for evolution, that it is simply a guess, a wild idea put forward by people who just don’t really know.  On the contrary, evolution is supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence with not a single piece offering even a shadow of a doubt as to its legitimacy.  So I would more properly say that I accept evolutionary theory rather than I believe in it.

In other words, we answer the question, then we split hairs.