Robert Esland brought up the Creation/Evolution debate of the late 19th century in a recent post.
I was trying to understand the shift in discourse that occurred at that time. I think this is what has happened:
When asserting an idea, we are much more willing to speak of accuracy and precision than truth. We usually only speak of truth when we're trying to discover wrongdoing.
Instead of encouraging frank honesty about our limitations, these new ideas about things that are correct have allowed us to perpetrate a lot more falsehood than we're willing to admit. We still strongly assert suspect conclusions; only now, they're wrapped in more equivocation.
Note: I like many parts of the focus on accuracy and precision. One benefit is our ability to separate the descriptive from the prescriptive, which seems to have been quite a muddle for people of earlier times.