For those that care here is my background and education. (for those that don’t care, skip to the next paragraph). I have a degree in Biochemistry and a doctorate in Medicine. The degree in Biochemistry included courses in biology, vertebrate morphology, taxonomy etc. I am a conservative Christian and believe in creation and not the modern Theory of Evolution.
The Theory of Evolution has always been and will always be a theory and one that lacks good evidence. I think that so many discussing this topic these days lack a basic understanding of the scientific method. A theory is an idea that explains observations. It can never move from a theory to an established law without experimentation and repeated verification. The evidence from the fossil record is very weak and no matter how many “missing links” you come up with you can never prove the Theory of Evolution because you 1) were not there to observe the process and 2) cannot reproduce it. (I am not talking about and we should make a clear difference between the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection. Natural Selection can be observed directly in nature and actually can be reproduced. Natural Selection does not prove the Theory of Evolution. Just because I can change one species of fruit fly into another one in the lab does not mean I can change a frog into a dog no matter how much time is given to me. The leap of faith that people take from Natural Selection to the Theory of Evolution is enormous.)
The fossil record is simply a scattered series of “snapshots” of nature’s past. The theory part comes in when you try and assemble all of these snapshots and try and make them tell a story. Imagine taking a film (that you’ve never seen) and isolating 1% of the frames from that movie randomly. Now lay those pictures out on a table. Think you could tell the story accurately. Even if you had a large number of frames and knew what order to put them in you are still not seeing the whole movie. To take this analogy even further you first have to take a leap of faith and “believe” that the frames of the movie lead from one to the other. I must first “believe” that one species evolved into another species in order to explain two similar fossils. And that’s what we are left with: a theory to explain an observation – not proof!
In my office I have a 4’x 6’ chart of all of the typical biochemical reactions that occur in a living cell. Very small print, thousands of reactions. I find it much easier to believe that Someone created than to believe that it all happened by chance.