Re: Professor vs. student: Discussion on God
Your aspect in bold is all well and good. But what is the underlying basis for empirical discovery? What evidence do we have for Einstein's theory? After all no experiments could be undertaken on space and time 100 years ago. They can't be taken now. So what you would suggest this empirical evidence is?
Remember the definition of a theory. Unless proven with unquestionable evidence it is by all means a simple idea which can be false. Simply put in 50 years the theory of relativity could be proven false. At that stage what is it? Is it a theory, a belief - because it certainly isn't fact.
You are right in that General Relativity was not proven in Einstein's time, and is an active area of study. But first we have to clarify the meaning of "theory". It has two meanings:
1) The general meaning, which is that the ideas are a hypothesis, and may or may not be true.
2) The scientific meaning, which is referring to a *framework of ideas. *This framework is usually borne out of independent empirical experiments, and is used to structure the theory, i.e. we connect the different experiments, and use their results, to come up with an acceptable set of rules.
So when scientists refer to "theory", they are not referring to a hypothesis, but rather, to a set of rules that have empirical grounding. That said, many aspects of general relativity have been proven since Einstein's time. At that time however, **it was perfectly acceptable to doubt Einstein. **This is different from religion as you can never doubt scripture. Since that time, many different experiments proving General Relativity have been conducted, and there are different explanations for these observations.
To wrap it up, experiments proving aspects of general relativity have been conducted. Please see Wiki. At the time it was proposed, Einstein was trying to relate gravity to quantum mechanics, and it was okay to doubt General Relativity because the "theory", i.e. the "rules", was a work in progress. And people did doubt it, because they didn't accept Einstein's word without proof. That's the opposite of faith. Since that time, experiments have confirmed Einstein's predictions, so now, no one questions the parts that have been proven, and people believe those aspects **because of empirical evidence. **You have to remember that, unlike scripture, scientific ideas aren't simply accepted. It takes years to conduct multiple, independent experiments in order to build consensus.