Ha! Now we've gotten on to the McGuffin of whether something is a theory or a fact. That's a fallacious dichotomy, and one that creationists use to claim that Evolution should not be taught without creationism also being taught. The grand ideas of science will always remain theories, not because they're wrong, but because it's always possible to explain observations in more than one way. So Evolution IS a theory, and at the moment the only coherent one that makes any sense of the evidence. Newtonian descriptions of motion, on the other hand, are part of a theory that has been superseded by the theory of relativity. Newtonian laws are still useful, because unless you're moving close to the speed of light they produce the same results as Einsteinian and Lorentzian laws. But most Physicists agree that Newtonian explanations are no longer the best ones we have.

Q, you're precisely right, Paleontologists can make predictions about new digs that can either prove true or false. The final explanation of what it all means, however, will remain a theory, in the non-stigmatized sense of "the best explanation we have at the moment."

BillD, you accuse me of equivocation, and I will agree with you so far as the wording of my critique of scientism goes. Obviously a method canot be arrogant, but the people who apply it promiscuously can. In other words, the Scientific Method is not an arrogant approach to take when you are examining insects, electrons, compounds or fluid dynamics. However, it is arrogant to apply the scientific method to certain things, principally those things that are or may be more intelligent and capable than we are.   THAT's why I said it was arrogant; the presumption being made in applying it to, for example, the Soul, is that a Soul may not wish us to study him/her and may be able to avoid it. If he/she can, then using the Scientific Method to claim, as Bill D did in his original post, that souls do not exist, is arrogant. Doing so is making the tacit assumption that the only reason scientists can't find something is because it's not there, which is based on the potentially false premise that anything that is there can be found by scientists. Those were the flaws I saw in YOUR logic in your original post.

By the way, you engaged in the same sort of cryptic metaphor I did when you said that the "Laws of Physics would end all this." Just as I personified the Scientific Method, you personified our explanations of the universe's development. The laws of physics won't do anything, only bodies and forces will.

So in the end, Bill D...maybe I worded my original critique poorly because I was trying to avoid the impoliteness of saying that YOU were being arrogant. But I shouldn't have, because you are obviously not being personally arrogant, just arrogant on behalf of our common species. seriously, I think the only non-arrogant way to approach questions of powers greater than ours is to say "Until I get evidence, I don't know if we have souls," which is only subtly different from Bill D's "Until I get evidence, I will say we have NO souls."   

Here's another thought: in science, it is standard to posit the existence of things that explain some of our observations, even if we have never seen those things. Many types of particles, such as positrons and neutrinos, were first posited as theoretical explanations of observations, then found in the real world. While they're in the "posited but not found" stages, they're often taught to high school and college students as though they almost certainly exist. But modern science will never posit the existence of souls or demons no matter how well they explain (for example) the cross-cultural occurrence of Mara attacks or out of body experiences. Scientists will for the most part continue to argue (in public) that demons and souls don't exist, or that they have no scientific basis. This is not because the demon is any less likely than the positron, It's because of the ideology of scientific people and especially institutions, which easily accept some forms of speculation but frown upon others.