Science does not and can not produce absolute and unquestionable truth. Understanding is understood as simply the best fit to the data under current instrumental and philosophical limits of thinking. A scientific theory is merely a way of organizing tested and retested ideas to describe the behavior of natural phenomena.
But scientific theories are not the same as “hunches” or “gut feelings”, which is the context in which the nonscientist uses the word theory. Scientists place a much higher standard on the word theory. To them a theory is a powerful statement about the working of nature, a strong explanation that ties together many reproducible facts from many different sources into an overall, unifying concept.
A scientific theory is always open to falsification, if new evidence is presented. Theories should change, as new discoveries are made, and old theories are updated to account for new data, which is exactly the progress toward better understanding that science seeks. But to say “scientific theory” is not to imply “scientific uncertainty”, a clever term employed by religious and political operatives to cast doubt in the public mind when a scientific theory challenges a traditional way of thinking.
Too often the public sees science only after it passes through the prism of politics, despite that science is by its very nature nonpolitical. And when scientists counter public ignorance and misinformation about science with science-intensive responses, neither the public nor the cause of science is helped. Much of the public tunes out such technical messages.
We must nevertheless pay attention when science has something to tell us. As that most famous of all modern scientists, Albert Einstein, once counseled, “You must learn to distinguish between what is true, and what is real.”
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