I figured that neither you nor anybody else could fill the massive holes in the theory of evolution that cause educated people like myself to doubt it.
That is some theory that can’t connect the dots between some 55 million year old ancestor of a horse and the predecessor fish that supposedly came from the primordial swamp.
Where you see an ironclad theory because you want to, I see massive assumptions that have to be made to believe this theory. It is definitely plausible, but goodness sake, you can drive a truck through any part of it, there is so much you have to simply take on faith.
To that extent, it is nearly like the theory of man made global warming. That you can’t trace a known fossil lineage of any animal on the planet makes the theory very weak. It takes a massive leap of faith to assume that because we know the horse evolved over the past 55 million years, than it must have evolved over the preceding 500 million years.
I’m just asking you to provide some evidence and you can’t. I didn’t expect you to. There isn’t any evidence. Nor for the tiger nor for the wolf. That’s my point.
So in the end, if you want to believe in the theory of evolution, which again it may be plausible, there is so much needed evidence missing, you can only believe it with a massive leap of faith on the scale that is needed to believe in man made global warming.
Sorry, but that is the fact of it. I’m not asking you to not believe it. I’m saying that the supporting evidence is extremely weak, so don’t tell me to accept it as fact when there is 500 million years of evidence we need to find before we can even hope to treat the theory seriously. Until then, we just don’t know what happened in that intervening 500 million years from fish to ancestor of horse do we?
I’ll be shocked if you can admit the fact that we can’t know what happened during this interval and that the theory of evolution could be completely wrong in explaining the rise of modern animals.
By your criteria, it appears that there is no legitimate science. No matter what scientific discipline you choose, the gaps where knowledge is unknown and probably unknowable are far greater than the known and documented facts. Should we throw out medicine, because of the double whammy against it--not only do we still not know most of what could be known about the human body, but what we *do* know was discovered by biological investigation informed by the theory of evolution.
A theory is not meant to be an all-encompassing encyclopedia. It is meant to be a framework that coherently links all of the known facts, and gives the ability to predict where and how more facts may be discovered. Theories can be revised as necessary to refine their ability to encompass all of the known facts and predict new facts. Science is an iterative process.
Just because we can't pick a horse at random and trace its family tree, individual by individual, back to the original multicellular organism that gave rise to all mammals does not mean we can't deduce the most likely chain of events that led from there to here. Just like if you were to tell me that you drove across the US on I-80, I wouldn't need to specifically know which gas stations where you bought gas to deduce that you did stop and buy gas along the way. Even if there wasn't a single gas receipt in your car, and you paid cash every time so there was no paper record of those purchases, I would *still* be 100% sure that you bought gas. That is because there is no other plausible explanation for your ability to drive 3,000 miles.
I suppose you could claim that Hyracotherium, Orohippus, Hipparion, Plesippus, etc., were all more-or-less horselike animals created by God 6,000 years ago, and that Noah only brought horses, zebras, and donkeys aboard the ark and let the rest of them drown... there just isn't any scientific evidence to support such a belief. The scientific evidence supports an evolutionary process tying these animals together.