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Anyone that believes the theory of evolution claims that man came from apes doesn't know the theory enough to criticize it.

I'm quite confident in saying that evolution predicts an ape in the ancestry of humans. If you could use a time machine to follow back modern man's ancestry, it would take you through increasingly (as we see it) apelike creatures until you reached something which you would absolutely have to call an ape. It wouldn't be any modern species exactly, but it would be very close to a chimpanzee.

Furthermore, if you followed back further (say, 30-40 million years), you would reach creatures which were much more primitive and had noticeable tails. They would be monkeys, in other words. Not any particular modern species, but monkeys.

Go back farther yet, to the early Devonian, you will have traced our ancestral line through the only vertebrates around then--fish.

I see your claim all the time. "Evolution says man and apes (and/or monkeys) are descended from a common ancestor. It does not say man is descended from apes."

Evolution says both things. We are not descended from gorillas or even chimpanzees. (However, our last common ancestor with the latter is only about 5-7 million years back. Not only are they our closest relatives, but we are theirs.) It also says that our line is a twig on the ape branch, the apes arose from the monkeys, the monkeys from earlier primate groups, primates from earlier tree-dwelling mammals, etc.

I'm quite confident in saying that evolution predicts an ape in the ancestry of humans.

Eh, it's semantics. Many creationists believe that evolution states that humans came from contemporary apes, rather than a no longer existing ape ancestor species. This is because they haven't actually bothered to study anything about the species, so they have the impression of evolution as some sort of linear progression, begging the question of "why are there still apes".

I'm quite confident in saying that evolution predicts an ape in the ancestry of humans. If you could use a time machine to follow back modern man's ancestry, it would take you through increasingly (as we see it) apelike creatures until you reached something which you would absolutely have to call an ape.

What something should or should not be called is, in the end, a matter of opinion. If you wish to label some common ancestor "ape", though, you make a statement that might tend to confuse others into believing you're refering to a modern animal. People then ask why it is apes still exist if people evolved from them. The answer is they didn't. They evolved from a common, ape-like, ancestor.

But if you insist that this ape-like ancestor should be called an ape because of its similarity to modern apes, then you're forced to call humans a kind of ape, too. But this makes the statement that humans evolved from apes silly.

All this can be avoided by simply saying humans and apes evolved from a "common ancestor".