Every hypothesis and every theory is an exercise in speculation.
No it didn't. Aristotle could have had no such evidence because that's not what happens.
>Your points about radioactive dating ignore the fact that in many cases, multiple techniques confirm the same age.
I ignore it, because it isn't true.
Sure it is. This table (from here) shows the dating of some meteorites by multiple methods. Note that the St. Severin metorite was dated by 4 methods that came up with ages from 4.38 to 4.55 billion years.
First, no one accepted Newton's laws without first testing them by repeated experiments on Earth.
What is an experiment on Earth that would test the proposition that gravity is proportional to a body's mass and inversely proportional to the square of its distance?
We can predict that the moon should be at a precise point in space at a precise point if our calculations about gravity are true.
The ancients were predicting the location of the moon, planets, and stars long before Newton formulated the Law of Gravity.
A scientific law is a scientific theory, which is proven to a higher level of certainty than your average theory and which has very broad over-arching application.
Sorry, you're wrong. As explained here
Some scientists will tell you that the difference between them is that a law describes what nature does under certain conditions, and will predict what will happen as long as those conditions are met. A theory explains how nature works. Others delineate law and theory based on mathematics -- Laws are often times mathematically defined (once again, a description of how nature behaves) whereas theories are often non-mathematical. Looking at things this was helps to explain, in part, why physics and chemistry have lots of "laws" whereas biology has few laws (and more theories). In biology, it is very difficult to describe all the complexities of life with "simple" (relatively speaking!) mathematical terms. Regardless of which definitions one uses to distinguish between a law and a theory, scientists would agree that a theory is NOT a "transitory law, a law in waiting". There is NO hierarchy being implied by scientists who use these words. That is, a law is neither "better than" nor "above" a theory.and here
A law generalizes a body of observations. At the time it is made, no exceptions have been found to a law. Scientific laws explain things, but they do not describe them. One way to tell a law and a theory apart is to ask if the description gives you a means to explain 'why'. Example: Consider Newton's Law of Gravity. Newton could use this law to predict the behavior of a dropped object, but he couldn't explain why it happened.and here
Hypotheses cannot become theories and theories cannot become laws. Hypotheses, theories, and laws are all scientific explanations but they differ in breadth, not in level of support. Theories apply to a broader range of phenomena than do hypotheses. The term law is sometimes used to refer to an idea about how observable phenomena are related.