"undermine the theory" is a grammatically correct phrase and can be used in written English.
It means to weaken or challenge the validity or credibility of a theory. Example: The new research findings have undermined the theory that was widely accepted in the scientific community, causing a shift in the way we understand the phenomenon.
"Truth in Science has sent free resources to all secondary heads of science and to school librarians around the country that seek to undermine the theory of evolution and have intelligent design ideas portrayed as credible scientific viewpoints.
Both Dr. Norell and Dr. Erickson emphasized that their findings did not undermine the theory widely held among paleontologists that birds evolved from what are known as theropod dinosaurs.
More than 80 years after the biology teacher John Scopes was tried on charges of illegally teaching evolution in Tennessee, the controversy here has played out with more subtlety, involving political code words and efforts to undermine the theory itself.
Without naming the witnesses, the appeals panel said that one of the captured terrorists had provided a statement that "tends to undermine the theory (which the government may or may not intend to advance at trial) that Moussaoui was to pilot a fifth plane into the White House".
A1 Ministers Celebrate Darwin On the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin, ministers at several hundred churches around the country preached against recent efforts to undermine the theory of evolution, asserting that the opposition many Christians say exists between science and faith is false.
There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to undermine the theory that the crowd can make better decisions on what constitutes "news" than a single human being using common sense and their best judgment.
But it does undermine the theories that purport to explain, and hence predict, corporate growth.But it is not a total mystery.
In the hands of realists the thesis is taken to undermine the theory-observation dichotomy that permitted positivists to take an anti-realist attitude to theories.
Nevertheless, if a moral theory fails significantly to cohere with our moral beliefs, this undermines the theory's ability to be justified to us.
The nonhuman primates also undermined the theory: Canals in 40 of these species were within the human range "both absolutely and after correction for oral cavity size," the authors report in the 19 February Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As with earlier problems concerning the role of existential quantification in supervaluationism, one can debate whether this is a consequence to be embraced or an untoward consequence undermining the theory being advanced.
