Truly the "historical" sciences like anthropology, archeology, Egyptology and evolution biology are on much weaker ground than the hard sciences like physics and chemistry.
In the hard sciences, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The reverse holds in the historical sciences, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Basically this is because the historical record - or geologic record - is spotty at best.
And so the historical sciences tell stories to fill in the gaps. And some of those stories strain credulity.
Well... it’s frustrating. It’s easy to beat one’s head against the wall until one screams, to see it. But that only wears out heads and walls and does no good.
The math has been done lots and lots of times. You’re asking to go up a steep probabilistic cliff that has land mines on it! If Hugh Ross has done nothing else useful (actually I think he’s the leading light of OEC theology), he’s pointed out painstakingly how extinction is the norm for a population left to itself. Also the rate of supposed evolution stepped up with the higher animals, such as the whales, where there is more, not less, to go wrong. If it weren’t for being dead set against a revealed creator for the sake of pride in their craft, the scientists would have yielded long ago to something like Hugh Ross’s theories.
No, all of science is on "weak ground" if measured against some "ultimate reality" which we can only distantly imagine.
Today we see vague hints of it in such terms as "dark matter", "dark energy", "vibrating strings", "spooky actions at a distance", etc.
We have no clue what this is all about, but I will make you a 100% accurate prediction: the more science learns, the more it learns how much more it doesn't know.
As they say: the Universe is not only stranger than we image, it's stranger than we can imagine.
So science is simply a methodology for learning about stuff -- whether "hard" or "historical", science works with whatever data nature presents, and attempts to understand & explain it.
Alamo-Girl: " And so the historical sciences tell stories to fill in the gaps.
And some of those stories strain credulity."
The real problem here is that, let's call it "Hollywood", plus some anti-science propagandists (ahem) love, love, love to blur and distort the distinctions between confirmed scientific "facts", "hypotheses" and "theories".
Virtually everything our anti-evolutionists here complain loudest about (i.e., "abiogenesis") are simply hypotheses, not theories or facts.