I’ve heard Bible believers say, “The theory of evolution and the big bang theory are just theories.” If you said this to
Job, he might have responded, “Well, your god is just a deity.” What would you think of that? That’s not really an argument against the existence of God, is it? What could
Job be talking about?
You see, the word “theory” has two different definitions, one that
Job uses, and one that you use. When you hear the word, “theory”, you think of the dictionary definition, “a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural and subject to experimentation, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.” [
dictionary.com, 2021] But there’s another sense of “theory” in the dictionary. When
Job uses the word “theory”, he means “a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena.” [
dictionary.com, 2021]
I don’t want you to think that theories are the same as facts, because it’s possible for a theory to be rejected when new evidence is obtained. It doesn’t bother scientists that a theory is sometimes disproven by new evidence. That doesn’t conflict with their definition of “theory”, which only says that it’s widely accepted, not that it is absolutely true. To scientists, there’s no such thing as absolute truth. There is always the possibility that anything they believe might be wrong. (This means that we can hope to convert any scientist, even an atheist.) So if you say, “Scientists cannot prove the theory of evolution and the big bang theory,” you are stating an obvious fact, because, as Stephen Hawking said, “Theories can’t be proved.” [
Hawking, 2005] It’s impossible to prove anything outside of abstract fields like mathematics and logic. Even Bible verses, such as, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” [Genesis 1:3,
NIV] cannot be proven by humans, because it isn’t possible to prove that the Bible is inerrant.