By the way, it’s linkS!
The evo geologist said missing “link” (singular).
THis may be somewhat out of context, but I watched a show the other night called “The Evidence,” and it took a scientific look at responding to critics of Christianity. As a geologist myself, I understand the scientific view point that if you can’t watch it, observe it, quantify it, measure it, submit it to physical tests, it can’t be called scientists.
Then these folks started talking about consciousness. I asked a friend who believes in evolution, and I said, if this is all just chance, I am, by dumb luck a person instead of rock. There is no reason I should not have been a gabbro instead of a human. He seemed to agree.
And especially on the cosmological view that all matter of the universe was initially combined into a small volume, and upon the Big Bang, matter disassembled, assembled, evolved, some matter became rocks, some water, some animals, some trees.
No one knows how inanimate matter came to have life. There are a lot of so-called theories, but nothing more than “this may produce amino acids that may lead to cell building.”
But even more confounding, and not explainable by scientists, is consciousness. Science cannot explain consciousness. That is a pretty serious thing, it is the reason we even think about what we do, or study science in the first place. So, the pre-imminent reason science came to exist, human consciousness, cannot be explained by science.
It just seems paradoxical for a scientist to discard a theory based on the fact that it cannot be defined by the scientific method.