The overhwelming evidence for it has been observed, yes, and has passed all verification tests and falsification tests.
Or was it imagined?
No, that's how the creationists arrive at their conclusions (for dozens of examples, just read this thread), not evolutionary biologists. That is, when the creationists aren't simply lying.
People have difficulty with "it evolved" because it goes against Scriptural teachings
One would think that "people" would have learned not to make this kind of error.
As the famous explorer Ferdinand Magellan said, in reference to a clash between the trustworthiness of direct evidence over dogma:
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." (Ferdinand Magellan, from George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 461.)And:
"To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover."Hint: Galileo was right -- because he followed the evidence where it lead. The Church, the Cardinals, and the Pope himself were wrong -- because they clung to their arrogant notions that they were unable to misunderstand Scripture.
-Galileo"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."
-Galileo"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment."
-Galileo"Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages."
-Galileo
Learn from their mistake.
and any "proof" is in the imaginations of it's believers.
I see -- so vast amounts of evidence supporting evolution, including just the tiny taste of it presented in post #661, is all just "imagination"? It's just made up? Someone fantasized all of it? Is that really the paranoid, slanderous, pig-ignorant position you want to put your name on?
I regret to inform you that your creationist sources have lied to you, and lied badly. And you have made the mistake of swallowing their lies whole.
For anything to "evolve", it must have a design/purpose/instruction.
It has to have a survival advantage. A "use" if you will. That is hardly synonymous with "design/purpose/instruction", although I know how much trouble creationists have gasping such simple distinctions.
Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
St Augustine of Hippo