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But whether you can without a doubt say that two fossils had a common ancestor cannot be concluded by observation of the fossils. You would be drawing conclusions without sufficient evidence because you weren't there to observe it.

I haven't been around to observe 99.999+% of the stuff I know to be true. And even for the stuff I think I observed, it could have been a hallucination.

Claiming that we must restrict things we know to things we directly observe does not pass the smell test. Ever been to Mongolia?

It's like the origin of the universe -- no one was there to witness it, so no one can say with absolute certainty what happened.

Who needs absolute certainty? 'Best guess' is often good enough, and 'beyond reasonable doubt' is better still.

It's easy to get lost in the details. Keep in mind the plaintiff's main purpose in this litigation -- to show that the mandated ID statement violates the First Amendment, according to the three-pronged Lemon test, which I detailed back in post 21. To summarize, a state action will be un-Constitutional unless:

First, the statute [or state action] must have a secular legislative purpose;
second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion,
finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion."

As I read the case, failing to pass any one prong of the three-pronged test will be sufficient to cause a state action to flunk the First Amendment. And I think Behe's performance is going to sink his ship.

"Claiming that we must restrict things we know to things we directly observe does not pass the smell test. Ever been to Mongolia?

Nope. But I know someone who has. And as for whether or not Mongolia exists, there is a testable, verifiable hypothesis.

"Who needs absolute certainty? 'Best guess' is often good enough, and 'beyond reasonable doubt' is better still.""

I had a number of discussions many years ago with a physics professor from Princeton on the theories of the Origins of the Universe. After many hours discussing this stuff, I asked him how certain he was about it. He laughed and said, "I can't be certain of any of this stuff. But I'm still convinced it happened the way that I described. If I find out differently in the future then I will believe differently."

He was convinced of what he was saying but he agreed that since we couldn't test and verify the hypothesis there was no way he could draw an absolute conclusion.

I think you guys are overselling Evolution.