I also get the impression that many of the evolution-talkers really don't give a damn about the veracity of what they are saying from day to day, or what the effect of it is on the perception and understanding of science. They practice divisive propaganda entirely modelled on the socialist sort. They are afflicted, to varying degrees, with an aversion to the word "truth". Mentioning "truth" provokes some of them into incredibly disparaging statements of the very notion. And they are surprised by our reaction. Which is itself surprising. Why would someone believe that a conservative would go along with a theory of science based on the idea that there is no truth? If there is no truth, all that's left is a struggle of propaganda. Even though truth is a dirty word for some of these evolution-talkers, they nevertheless want us to "accept" what they say as if it were true. And we must "accept" their ever-changing, ever-evolving positions as well. It used to be true that recapitulation was definitive evidence for the truth of evolution. That truth has changed. But all this is of course just marxist-style philosophy on dialectically evolving truth. The truth is whatever the party says today.
Here's something from the preface (by MacDonald) to Enrico Ferri's Socialism and Positive Science. If I recall correctly, Ferri was a student of Caesare Lombroso, who was, alongside Ernst Haeckel, an honorary associate of Rationalist Press:
"The chief value of this study, however, is the claim that it so successfully makes, that the Socialist conception of human progress and of the social conditions which are to be the characteristics of the next, the Socialist, stage in that evolution, is not only in accordance with the processes which Darwin proved to be the method of the development of life from the Moneron to man, but is those very processes themselves applied to human society with such modifications as are necessitated by the fact that they now relate to life, which can consciously adapt itself to those circumstances, and aid natural evolution by economising in experimental waste. Thus, Socialism is naught but Darwinism economised, made definite, become an intellectual policy, applied to the conditions of human society,""It maybe true logically, as Ferri asserts, that once the evolutionary process is granted, it is as easy to swallow the gnat of eternal and self-existent force and matter as it is to swallow the camel of an eternal and selfexistent God."
That's a keeper...
As an investigative tool, we know of none better than the methodology of Science. Born out of the philosophical rigor of Western Civilization, that was its assignment: to investigate and discover the facts. Its assignment never was to discover the truth (or the TRVTH, if you prefer). It is our values, informed by the facts, which will take us to the truth. Our opponents seek to inundate us with facts (‘science’), then lead us to conclusions (ideas) without ever examining the underlying values that inform those ideas. I call that practice the “fallacy of the smuggled concept.” Our friends, boop and A-G, describe it as “doing philosophy under the colour of science.” Same thing.