"Inferred", "believe", etc. It's still speculation, and it requires faith. That may be fine for some, but not others and the others should not be forced to accept what is based largely on faith (even if it doesn't SEEM like faith to you).Not to the extent evolutionists claim. There's no solid evidence of species evolving into other unrelated species. That has never been observed.You can call it whatever you want but you can't call it proof.Back to the argument that evolution wins by default. Inability to disprove it does not equal proof of it, but "line of reasoning" DOES equal speculation.
It isn't the "argument that evolution wins by default" that I was putting forth, but a question to illustrate that for someone to off-handedly dismiss as baseless speculation a century and a half of work and hundreds of thousands of peer reviewed papers by tens of thousands of scientists, many of whom are religious Christians (such as Francis Crick, a born again Christian who decoded the human genome and it a highly respected scientist) who only followed where the evidence lead them. It isn't speculation, it's the height of human achievement.
What other scientific theories are so controversial? What other theories are so continuously challenged? And yet the theories of evolution are still the widely accepted best theory that explains the evidence and with which the most accurate predictions have been made?
I accept that none of the above means the theories are true, but they are hardly speculation.
Of course not. Science doesn't work that way. Theories are not facts. They explain facts. That's why Natural Selection is a theory: it explains evolution, a fact. Only facts are proved.
Evolution is a proven fact no matter how much one denies that, or quibbles over the exact meaning, or splits hairs about the use of the word, or disputes the extent of how far or how much a population evolves. Evolution is an observed phenomenon.
You're right, no one has lived long enough to observe a new species evolve from a known species (that takes millennia); but it has been inferred from the fossil record and from DNA. And there is no reason to believe that there is some arbitrary boundary at which evolution stops: that all canine populations are subject to genetic mutation and environmental pressure over time, but only so far as human beings still recognize the species as "dog".