Fluffy said:
That which has been demonstrated to be absolutely true (ie that which is indubitable)
There is no such thing, there are no absolute truths, no scientific experiment can be replicated and recreate the exact same results, there are always anomalies.
Fluffy said:
That which has been demonstrated to be reliably or reasonably true (ie fact or belief)
If something is reliably or reasonable true, then to a scientist it is a good working theory. A good scientist should not have the word fact in their vocabulary.
Fluffy said:
That about which no demonstration of truth has been made
This is a belief.
Fluffy said:
A fact is a belief because it is not a certainty.
Fact is the laymans term for what a scientist would call 'a conclusion drawn from statistically significant evidence' or 'a working theory that has yet to be proven fallible'.
Fact in the common tongue implies something that is undeniable, to science nothing is undeniable, their are only varying degrees of likelihood.
In science the challenge is never closed, there are no certainties or truths, people are always welcome to try and prove current theories wrong, and sometimes they succeed. Scientific theories that have survived for decades and seemed to work in every scenario have been proven fallible and replaced. For an example look up steady-state theory vs the big bang theory.
Fluffy said:
Evolution is a belief that strongly coheres with the basics accepted by science. Therefore, it is a scientific fact.
There is no such thing as scientific fact. Microevolution or adaptation is a very good
working theory, its source sciences of genetics and population dynamics have yielded good
evidence to suggest how organisms adapt to changing environmental (both biotic and abiotic) conditions. There are statistical anomalies, and sometimes experiments give inconclusive results, but as a whole microevolution is a good working theory.
Macroevolution is the extrapolation of adaptation to take into account paleontological
evidence for the existance of extinct species.
The study of evolution at work within living populations and paleontology are two separate and distinct sciences. Without genetic samples or observations of the population dynamics of these extinct species, the two largest aspects of the grand evolutionary theory can never be totally fused to a level that will satisy the most stubborn of disbelievers.
However, the evidence in the fossil record is good enough that it can be
reasonably concluded that the mechanics of adaptation are what caused the variation of biological forms witnessed in the fossil record. A conclusion is not a fact, it is
A conclusion not
THE ONLY conclusion.
Evolutionary science is not a single subject, it is the combination of many different biological and geological sciences. It is the combination of many theories which have been logically linked to form a greater whole that makes good scientific sense.
To say "evolution is a scientific fact" displays a lack of knowledge of evolutionary science.