evolution is religion free ... "because it can't" is more an admission about yourself than fact.
Evolution is more religion than science. Maybe science is a religion the way things have turned out. Myself, I don't care what you want to call it as long as it leads to the discovery of truth and further enhances our knowledge of the world because God wanted it that way.
I don't think evolution is a religion at all. I'm quite sure Darwin did not intend for it to be. But I think there are those who make a religion of it and worship it to the point they do not allow themselves or others to question it in any way and/or allow themselves or others to consider any possibilities outside the science of evolution. The Christian, the Jew, the Buddhist, and probably others all allow for the unknowable and the unknown within the realm of both science and religion. And they know that evolution can coexist quite rationally and peacefully alongside other explanations and theories for how it all got from point A to here.
Evolution is a religion in the way that people believe it based on faith. It's not about going to church on Sundays type religion. It's based on faith in atheism and not so much on actual science or facts, reasoning and historical truths. For example, geologic claims of Charles Lyell who was an atheist and wrote a book, Principles of Geology, in 1854, about his uniformitarianism hypothesis, to counter Christian geological thinking of catastrophism during the time. He also mentored and influenced his pupil Charles Darwin. Thus, evolution was born from atheist roots and foundation and why it's the polar opposite of creation science.
I don't question your facts here and, assuming you are correct, your post is quite informative and thought provoking. I myself try to look at the issue with a different and simpler pragmaticism. (Is that a word?)
The fact is science exists. And I am quite confident that evolution is a valid science that studies how various life forms on Earth have evolved over time. Where it becomes a religion these days, in my point of view, is when the Atheist or whomever refuses to acknowledge that evolution cannot answer all questions on how life forms evolved and/or rejects intelligent design as any possibility in the equation. When they demand that Evolution be taught that way, I object as strenuously as I do when Evolution is not taught at all.
Atheists who attempt to use evolution as a means to discredit the possibility of some form of intelligent design, along with their quite absurd dogma that if science cannot prove there is a God, then there is no God, are absolutely inserting their own religion into the mix because they are certainly not being scientific.
The theist of course understands that if there is a God, then that God is the author of science along with everything else and there is no conflict.
>>F: The fact is science exists. And I am quite confident that evolution is a valid science that studies how various life forms on Earth have evolved over time.<<
Sorry, a bit long, but finally had time to write it.
Today, atheist science exists and that is what is taught in schools. The scientific establishment has systematically eliminated the supernatural, the Bible, God, intelligent design as theories from science and schools by saying one is a religion while the other intelligent design isn't a valid science. We could not be created in any way shape or form because the aforementioned can't be testable nor falsified. When I went to school, this isn't the way I was taught science works.
I learned evolution through my Alma Mater's website evolution.berkeley.edu and thought this was what happened for a couple of decades. A couple things got my attention. First was the concept of an eternal universe or the Steady State Theory being rendered pseudoscience and it was replaced by the Big Bang Theory or the universe had a beginning. Second, was the media always telling me how old things were in their "science" articles. If the ages of the universe and earth were facts, then why keep telling me these things? Why keep telling me dinosaurs became extinct 245 million years ago? Facts are things we all know to be true and use them. Third, I started to look at creation science and what they were saying because circa 2011, evolution wasn't panning out like I thought, e.g. Monarch butterflies were not gone from California due to global warming. I remembered they hibernated and migrated for the winter. To challenge evolutionary thinking was unquestionable because prestigious science institutions like The Smithsonian, Nature and Science, top universities, Encyclopedia Brittanica, top scientists from the 90s and today and so on all subscribed to it.
Yet, what they were saying didn't pan out in biology such as coelacanth and the common ancestor theories of tiktaalik, tetrapods returning to the sea to become whales, birds descending from dinosaurs, and even the theory of how dinosaurs all became extinct due to volcanoes were challenged and changed. It was like challenging the theories of the earth being the center of the universe or that Columbus discovered America. The theories of Charles Darwin had been all proved wrong except for natural selection and genetic modification. OTOH creation scientists based their theories on Genesis from the Bible and that we were created in 7 days and formation of the earth was based on Noah's Flood. This was what people believed in the 1800s before uniformitarianism took over against catastrophism. What they were saying didn't change. Only that science provided further evidence for what they were saying. On creation's side, there were famous scientists which I was studied in school like Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Carolus Linnaeus, Michael Faraday, Samuel B. Morse, Louis Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, James Joule and others. Sir Francis Bacon is the father of modern science. I started to look at what they were saying and that was from the Bible. What it said was incredulous like people lived to over 900 years old in the old days and we are descendants of Adam and Eve.
Yet, if one looks at the evolutionary thinking and the origins of life, we see that the BBT started from compressed gases and invisible quantum particles from a single point. This seemed just as incredulous. The universe is just primed for life and that multiverses can pop into existence. Life came from primordial soup after it was hit by lightening. Well, that experiment didn't pan out in the 50s. Where was this life? Where were the parallel universes? I read the Brief History of Time and its followup A Briefer History of Time from Stephen Hawkening during the 90s and early millenium. Where were the multiverses and time machines? How can something like that happen or work? Even the theories of quantum mechanics went against the traditional physics of Newton. It went against the laws of thermodynamics. All these invisible particles were doing something, but we couldn't see them because they were too small. All of the aforementioned were disavowed by creation science.