Evolutionary biology rests of vast mountains of evidence, no "faith" is required."is not quite true.
It is, and your subsequent material doesn't contradict what I wrote. We're talking about two different things. The problem is that the word "faith" has several distinct meanings. There's "faith" in the sense of "belief despite lack of evidence (or often "in the face of contradictory evidence"), held due to premises of another sort. Religious faith is an example of this kind of faith, and is the kind the person to whom I was responding was talking about, and I responded in the same vein. The kind of "faith" which your source is talking about is another kind of "faith", it is confidence in something despite incomplete evidence, due to inductive reasoning. (See for example definitions #1 and #2 at dictionary.com").
I have no large quibble with the quotes you include (albeit I have some small complaints which probably aren't worth going into here), but they don't refute what I wrote above.
I read a Pro-evolutionist book, "Denying Evolution" by Massimo Pigliucci. This was in response to a different person who disagreed that faith plays a part in evolutionary theory of origins.
Again, it sounds as if you and your correspondent were talking about two different senses of the word "faith".
In my first e-mail to you, I made a statement about faith being required to believe in evolution. Massimo reaffirms this on page 28 where he says, “Although we all necessarily have to make assumptions about the world in order to live our lives, some assumptions represent small and others large leaps of faith and science is distinguished by an attempt to make those leaps as small as possible—in fact, no larger than any person of common sense would make …”
Look, in this passage Pigliucci is clearly speaking about "faith" in the sense of "conclusions made from incomplete evidence", as is made clear by the fact that he is talking about *assumptions*, not "faith" in the sense of "conclusions made despite the *absence* of evidence."
Also, I find it odd that you would truncate the sentence at the point you did, since your truncation alters the strength of the sentence. "...no larger than any person of common sense would make..." makes it sound like he's talking about the size of the "leaps of faith" that an average person might consider making in cases of Big Questions like origins or whatever, but that's not what he meant. The complete passage, which you cut off in mid phrase, is: "...larger than any person of common sense would make while engaged in the process of buying a used car, for example." That changes the meaning considerably -- why did you cut it off the way you did? Do you feel that was an honest alteration of the sentence?
He demonstrates a few of those leaps of faith when he states that science is not immune from ideology or social pressure (p.66),
Observing that something is not immune from ideology is not the same as saying that it is based on "faith".
or on p. 145 that science can not draw conclusions about things it can not measure
Fine, since it doesn't, this is not an example of scientific "faith" either.
(like a primitive organisms (p. 203)
Page 203 does not argue that primitive organisms are beyond examination, nor that it takes "faith" to draw conclusions about them. All it says is that no *modern* organism is a perfect representative of "our earliest ancestors". And you're "forgetting" to mention that in later pages the author goes on to describe *other* ways of acquiring evidence about the nature of primitive organisms...
or transitional forms or how non life created life or how mutations could add genetic information vs. subtract information, etc.),
What about them?
or how science is subjective because it is done by human beings (p.248),
That doesn't support the claim that evolutionary biology is based on "faith"... The same goes for the rest of your attempted examples.
In short you don't need faith to study what you can observe, but you need faith in the scientific community for things that cannot be observed (like original primitive organisms).
In short, you have misrepresented Pigliucci's actual position, and twisted it to your own agenda in a way that the author would most likely strongly disagree with.
And again, no, this is not about "things that cannot be observed". You're misunderstanding what it means to make a scientific observation. It does not mean necessarily actually being able to sit there and watch a thing or process as it takes place in front of you. Indeed, if we could do that in all cases, we wouldn't need science in order to investigate them. Science exists precisely to explore the things which *aren't* so directly apparent.
What needs to be "observable" in science is not necessarily the thing or process being explored, but its consequences, its effects, its results -- the evidence of its existence and/or workings.
The funny thing is...you don't need to believe evolutionary theory of origins to DO science.
Speak for yourself. I find it very useful in mine. No one's saying that it's fundamentally useful in *all* sciences, but then the same could be said for any other field or theory in science as well -- they're all quite useful in the appropriate realms, and less useful in others.
In other words, this is more of an ideology then practical science.
In other words, you're making claims which are quite incorrect, and which don't even follow from the material you provided.