Good deal by the judge!
aniron, you need to learn what scientists mean when they say that evolution is a fact. Careful scientists distinguish between evolution and origin of life ideas. The origin of life, or abiogenesis, is not part of evolution as it's normally defined in science. Evolution, as Darwin himself was careful to state, is concerned only with what happened with life after its origin. Of course, lots of people, including incautious scientists, often lump evolution and abiogenesis together, but that's more of a philosophical or even metaphysical discussion. One needs to understand these things before one simply says, "evolution is not a fact!" or one risks looking like a dummy.
Evolution in the careful sense simply means that the paleontological record shows that life has changed over time. That is a fact, and it's a fact in the same sense that gravity is a fact, that electromagnetism is a fact, and that the claim that human history has evolved is a fact. People might argue about the mechanisms or underlying causes for these things, but such arguments are not relevant to the basic facts. And of course, when careful scientists say "fact", they don't mean in a completely absolute sense, but in the sense of a generally accepted observation, or as Webster's defines it, "a piece of information presented as having objective reality." Some people don't accept such facts, despite overwhelming evidence. Flat-Earthers are a good example.
Stephen Jay Gould gave an excellent point of view on the difference between fact and theory as regards evolution:
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact" -- part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science -- that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
You can read a lot more on this here: http://www.geocities.com/osarsif/ce09.htm
Now, is it a fact that evolution has occurred? Sure! Only young-earth creationists dispute this, based not on science but on their sectarian interpretation of Genesis. I won't attempt to convince anyone about this here, but there are plenty of good, solid references that will convince anyone besides YECs.
AlanF
