Well said, Bird.

Belief in evolution reduces to a faith held contrary to fact and makes a monkey of the believer.

Trivial response to Dawkins (ie, not as 'sophisticated' as the criticisms one finds at the wiki essay linked):
1. Assume creation does not declare "God!"(contrary to Ps 19, Rom 1:18ff), that is, assume no God. Don't state this, but present it in a different way, as it usually gets presented: chance ultimate (while simultaneously denying ultimacy of chance by insisting on concepts such as "laws of nature"). (Leave, btw, questions of "morality" and "right v wrong" on the shelf. Don't even ponder what "chance" does to these concepts.)
2.Pick a DNA molecule of any critter. In fact, get techncial enough to select the least complex DNA.
3. Make the scientifically possible calculation approximating that molecule's complexity. Pick the low end of the range of answers possible. One gets a number far bigger than 10 raised to several hundred.
4. Now compare this to the number of cubic microinches in the entire known universe (a minimum of 13x10exp9 light years in radius, include not just everyone knows rather at most limited potential places where life might exist, but every bit, from the hard vacuum of space to the interior of stars) multiplied by the number of milliseconds from an assumed starting point of some 13x10exp9 years ago.
5. Note that the answer to 4 divided by the answer to 3 is essentially zero. Not zero as in "a billionth" or zero as in "a septillionth", but zero as in 10exp(minus hundreds). Ie, no "chance" that even the simplest DNA happened by chance. (And to get from that molecule to another molecule having only the difference in location of one atom, same number again. Boggles the mind.)

Granted: only a spiced up, modernized argument from design.

Humbling observation that should make one (ie, me) much aware of own limitations and very, very kind to those believing lie: ability to perceive this not a matter of brilliance, but of grace.

If you just looked at the fossil record without viewing it through the lens of the bible,can you honestly say that you would come to the same conclusions about life on earth? What you seem to be doing is trying to fit all the evidence into your narrow world view,something you accuse the scientific community of. If you let the facts speak for themselves and lead us into conclusions based on scientific observations, it would seem to be a more honest approach than working backward from personal presuppostions.

I don't think the Bible ever argues the existence of God, it presupposes it.

Romans 1:20 is part of a larger pericope speaking to how sin mars our understanding of God, including comprehending the "plain" qualities of God, along with His divinity - not His existence. While one might argue that scripture's discussion of His attributes is prima facie evidence of His existence, proving God's existence is not the attempt of the verse or passage. The main point, among others, of that passage is that people have perverted their love for God and fashioned it into a love for other things (aliens or ideas about aliens?) - they are unaware of God's divinity and power and have, therefore, been given over into lusts/depraved minds. I could just as much say that 1 John proves God's existence because it says that "God is love." How could God be love if there is no God? The verse, along with the rest of the Bible, presupposes God's existence all along - never questioning it or arguing for it - but knowing that it is true from the get-go. There is no shred of doubt of God's existence in the Bible; not even to the extent that Scripture would attempt to argue for it (as if that was necessary?), from my point of view.

All that to say that I think Bird makes a very interesting point. Part of me wonders if we're not just arguing away strong ideas from very intelligent people, just as these intelligent people may be arguing away points from a most-intelligent God. But - Hawking, et al., are human - and they are prone to error, feelings of inadequacy, and a desire to know/understand the depths of things beyond them, unaware that a relationship with God would remedy all of these base issues. Sill, God has allowed more time for many of them to see more clearly - perhaps we should pray for them.

If God were as obvious as Rom. 1:19-22 claims, then we could discover him through rational inquiry,and not have to rely on "faith". I don't think our resistance is rooted in unbelief so much as our desire to make sense of the world with the mental tools we have been born with. If it was God that gave them to us, we should have been able to discover him that way. It appears that God is the one hiding from us, and not us afraid to face God, as you said.

i think rational inquiry will always discover god.
stephen hawking said: "spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing." does that sound rational? the existence of a creator is not the big question. the core issue is "how can my alienation from this creator be remedied?"

Richard,

Great conversation! And I appreciate the civil tone, definitely.

Just a few quick points, for what they are worth (probably precious little): I agree with you that there is not a scientific proof for God. If that is the only criteria under which you would come to believe in Him, then you probably never will. But I'm not sure that's a fair criteria. And I am very sure that it is not a criteria that God would support. As maddening as it can be, he requires faith, honors faith, holds faith up as a very valuable thing. The Bible says that "without faith, it is impossible to please God". For whatever reason, He wants us to come to Him not only (or primarily) because of what we have seen and observed, but based on a faith in what we have not been able to see. Read Hebrews 11 sometime for more on this.

On the other hand, there is a historical assertion that can be examined and weighed on its merits, and upon it the entire Christian faith hinges. I'm speaking of the resurrection of Jesus. This is an event that Christians assert happened at a specific place, at a specific time, in a specific way, and one can sift through the evidence that is there and decide if it is valid or not. I've heard of atheists who came to faith through examining the evidence for the resurrection.

One other minor point: the fact that a book is 2,000 years old or 200,000 years old or 20 years old says nothing whatsoever about its truth or falsehood. C.S. Lewis called such evaluations based on how current an assertion of truth is acts of "chronological snobbery" :-)

I have only one useful point to add: that is that there is a difference between chance and unguided natural process. It is not chance that keeps makes my ball return to Earth when I throw it, and it is not chance that feeds the complexity of a snowflake as it falls to earth; neither is it chance when tornado emerges from the various flutterings of butterflys' wings, or when a cell divides in two. These things might be chaotic, yes, but not random: I hope Roy appreciates the difference.

Because to observe that a large molecule of DNA is supremely unlikely to arrive spontaneously, by all the right atoms colliding at once in the correct formation, is a strikingly banal, and misses the point. It is not science that suggests that it happened that way, the theory of evolution is quite clear that complexity is thought to emerge gradually through a long series of steps, each step requiring no more magic than carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen + some others doing what they always do.

The only reason that calculation keeps being repeated is because of intelligent design proponents who are unconcerned by the immorality of misleading people about science.

It's a bug-bear of mine (can you tell?) :)

Quaid makes a good point. I for one would be deeply shocked, maybe a little disappointed, if it every turned out that we were capable of understanding the universe.

This discussion of the first chapter of Romans has been enormously helpful to me. I've been treating it (I'm not alone) as if it *is* an argument for God, and I've always found it deficient; but I see now that it's not arguing that at all, and it works better.

I still disagree, of course. Nothing I know about the world particularly suggests either eternity or divinity. The sun is finite. The planet is imperfect. Nature is indifferent, sometimes cruel.

"Is love just a collection of enzymes and emotional mind games?"
I think you give enzymes and emotional mind games too little credit.

Simpler emotions are easier to accept as enzymes etc. It does not trouble us to think of hunger and fear as purely biological, even exhilaration, tribal superiority and pleasure are don't give us any philosophical problems.

The Greeks teach us about the different types of love. If you consider each type of love in turn, I don't think there are any that pose a particular problem. Eros and storge are the easiest, as they correspond to the primary biological imperatives. Philia is something that, in my opinion, could naturally arise in any social animal. Can a wolf exhibit philia to its pack, for example? I know very little about wolves, but from experience with their very close relatives, dogs, I'd be tempted to say yes.

Agape is the hardest I suppose, but as soon as you progress beyond the over-simplistic understanding of evolution as a tendency towards the brutal and selfish, it isn't hard to understand either. Inasmuch as genes (and memes) drive individuals' behaviour at all, it is only with the aim to propagate the genes (and memes), and it is not always survival of the individual that best serves that purpose. Sacrifice is not unique to humans.

Richard,

I do have some problems with the Constantinian era of church history, but I'll say that Constantine didn't force "his version" of Christianity on anyone -- he didn't have a version! He kept flipping back and forth between Arianism and the orthodox understanding of the relationship between the Father and the Son. During his tenure as the first "Christian Emperor," he kept his position as head of the empire's pagan religion and then eventually died as a believer in Arianism. So ... that version of Christianity was most certainly not forced on the church.

Also, you implied that it was Constantine (at Nicaea I presumably) who gave us our present day canon. Not true (forgive me if I'm reading you wrong on this one). The vast majority of the NT canon (at least Paul's letters) were recognized by the end of the 1st century/beginning of the 2nd. And the establishment of the canon wasn't even something that was on the docket for Nicea I in Constantine's day. The "gospels" you mentioned, were not gospels at all, and the majority of the early church recognized as much.

About your point on political power, I think a close inspection of church history would indicate that often times political power didn't win much of anything (thought that's not universally true, of course). In the days of Nicaea I, Arianism had most of the political clout. In fact, based on Nicaea-era political power alone, the entire Christian church these days should look more like the Jehovah's Witnesses than anything else.

Quaid,
Because I know you love and believe the Bible I wrote what I did (#15) re 'scientific proof'. Book says evidence suffices, evidence clear. Not *merely* re unattached attributes, but that these characterize, well, God. (Contrary to some songs I've heard in churches, one should not worship attributes, but one has no excuse for not worshipping God.) For you that spells QED.

And, nB, not believing in God requires faith. Further, that faith has no support in fact. Not a single fact exists which does not declare, "God". Concluding "not God" from any fact requires suppressing the truth, an unrighteous (rather than morally neutral) activity.

I don't mean by the above paragraph's observations that I have permission to do sloppy work in "answering a fool according to his folly" (cf Pr 26:5). Instead, I have every reason to challenge that person's claim to autonomy, every reason to expect that careful homework on my part will reveal the glaring flaws in their thinking, the places at which they, on the one hand, deny God while, on the other hand, depend upon him. (Eg, chance is ultimate vs 'laws' of nature)

Richard in #19: you leave Someone out. The God who so loved me as to have given me his word did not do less than I would in communicating with my wife. I would not send her a letter by means whereby I knew it should never arrive. If that is so of me, how much more so of God who sovereignly reigns over all the circumstance of history?

As a matter of historical record (one can look it up), the preservation and transmission of the Bible shows exactly that. Repeatedly one finds the folly of people, even their attempts to destroy the Bible, thwarted and turned into something which ends up preserving the Bible and better enabling certainty of our having an accurate record.

Thus some short observations: 1) more sure of having accurate record of Bible than of either Lincoln's Gettysburg address or Shakespeare's plays; 2) some doubt about perhaps one letter per page of Hebrew Old Testament, and (counterintuitively, perhaps, since it's more recent) few letters per page of Greek New Testamentl 3) taking even Bible most sure depending on poorest record, most liable to poor translation, still have record so reliable that not one central assertion of Christian faith (as expressed by, for example, Westminster Confession, worth looking up) missing.

Richard
One argument in favour of biblical accuracy is that independent chains of copyists still agree very well with each other. If you wrote a letter to your wife and sent it through copying from Iraq, but did it twice, and both versions agreed well with one another, your wife could be reasonably assured that the message is accurate.

the bit in the last paragraph should be "it is not the presumption of Random"

Richard,

Bill,
I didn't mean to imply that Constantine wrote the new testament,but( I may be wrong)wasn't part of the result of the Nicean council the solidifying of what we now have as the NT canon?

I think you have me confused with Bill. :-) And to answer your question, no. Again, the canon wasn't even on the docket at Nicaea I.

Honestly, it's frustrating to see how bad fiction can produce bad history. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code asserts that "Constantine collated an entirely new Bible at the council of Nicaea." Now the idea has creeped into popular culture that Constantine was the one who determined the NT canon. That is completely false -- it's fiction.

By the end of the 1st century, and certainly by the end of the 2nd, Christians had a general agreement about the make up of the NT canon. (There were still some disputed texts like the epistles of Peter, James, and Revelation.) In around 170, the church in Rome (which was not even close to being what we now understand as the Roman Catholic Church; in 170 they were still a persecuted minority with no political power whatsoever) proposed a canon of Scripture that consisted of the four gospel and Paul's letters (I think that was it). However, the canon wasn't officially made canon until a couple of church synods in the late 300s, some 60 years after Nicaea I.

The canon came about as a gradual process, not as royal fiat. Yes, there were heretical books that were left out because the heretical books lacked apostolic authority, and the early church recognized that. It's very important to understand that the vast majority of the Christian church had a core NT canon of the four gospels and Paul's letters very early in history. Gospels like Thomas' and so forth never had a wide audience.

You mentioned "a myriad other tracts" being around at the same time in church history, and that's true. But how does their existence negate the veracity of the received canon? The other tracts existed but lacked apostolic authority and were not received by the early church.

It's true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I definitely need to go back and do more homework. I'm going to check out the reference that Roy mentioned.With a title like "infallible word", I can guess the direction they will approach the subject from, but I'm still going to check it out. I suppose it would be next to impossible to find an unbiased work on the subject due to the subject matter. I think I need to make an effort to approach this as openly as possible to avoid my own prejudices. The last thing I need to fill my head with is a bunch of half-baked ideas.

I echo what Bill said, Richard. Thank you.

Good deal. Steaks are on the grill, Blo is bringing some baked potatoes, I've got O'Doule's chilling in the cooler, Jared has the stogies, Shrode's bringing the spiritual gravitas, and Bird's flippin' the U2 wax.

Pull up a seat :-)

I won't be around to respond for a bit (sighs of relief all around), but on my return I intend to bring the funk. Along with two or three carefully selected cheeses.

May I, Bill, bring ice cream, hot fudge, nuts, banannas, cherries, and whipped cream? And, of course, coffee?

Yes, if by Coffee you mean Diet Coke.

Add just a little caramel, or a little choco syrup, and put whip cream on it, give it a label other than what it is. Amazing what Stardollars tm can do...and what McRainbow tm can do as well for less. Well, almost as well. I prefer the 5 buck coffee smoothy shake frosty. Probably matter of it having more sugar. (I miss Calvin's chocolate frosted sugar bombs eaten to inspire action against Hobbes.)

Wish he had. Just think how much more prolific he woulda been....

By calculating the probability 50 consecutive sixes, I hoped to remind you that the throws must be independent in order for that multiplication to be meaningful. Since the sequence of bases in a DNA strand are NOT independent events, the analagous multiplication (which you describe in more detail in comment 39) is meaningless. So the chances of a random base generator reciting a given genome is as you describe, but no-one is suggesting that nature works/worked this way. Simply put, you are arguing against a strawman version of science.

Scientists are notoriously unwilling to discuss abiogenesis since evidence is sparse for the details of that event, but when pushed we might find a simple kind of self-replicating RNA machine a more plausable first prototype than a fully-fledged creature with a 1000-base genome. This hypothetical RNA machine prototype is much simpler, but it would be sufficient for evolution to work, having both inherited charactristics through the more or less faithfully copied RNA sequence, and variation through mutation and liberties there might be in the copying process. (Inheritance and variation are all that is required for evolution to work).

That's about it for my substantive remarks, but there are a few ideas which come accross as mistakes in comment 39, for examples:

"Evolution happened. But only once. Can’t find any currently living ‘missing links’. If the chemical forces always produced the same result, we’d have the same results now"
1) Evolution is not the event at the start of life (which is called abiogenesis), it is the continuous process which we claim is still happening now. Not only once.
2) Anything we find is clearly no longer "missing". But every current species which doesn't does not become extinct is a "link". There is no difference between a link and a species.
3) The environment is known to have changed over time. (The appearance of early life itself appears to have had a very significant influence on Earth's conditions!) So we do not expect all species that ever lived at any time on Earth, going all the way back to RNA machines, to still be viable.

"We’ll even skip here the conundrum of how a mutation in, say, the male would get passed on if there were not the simultaneous mutation in the female. We’ll table for now, too, what we know about genetics and recessive traits."

4) No conundrum I'm aware of. Every girl has a father, she can inherit new mutations from him as easily as she can from her mother. (the exception to this is the Y chromosome, which is quite small).
5) Unaware of problems with genetics and recessive traits. How, for example, is a recessive trait a problem for evolution?

"Must be a matter of chance"

6) The role of chance in evolution is limited. (see comment 27, short legs)

"And, to get by chance from that to any other different DNA which would survive are just as miniscule [as a flask-full of nucleic bases assembling into a full-length genome]."

7) This is not true. The important quantity is the "edit distance", the number of replacements, insertions and deletions required to transform the first genome to the second.

"you have a faith based commitment that evolution happened no matter what science says."

Is that your assessment of me personally?

"On the one hand, no God, hence chance. On the other, orderly universe, hence no chance."

I think you're conflating chance and intentional, directed action. That same conflation was what lead the ancients to believe that the orderly, regular movements of the planets and stars needed angels to push them around the firmament.
It is useful to consider the movements of the heavens as orderly, but not personally directed by supernatural agents. That approach seems to work quite well. This is an example of orderly action which need not be personally overseen by a willfull agent. This is how I manage to consider the orderly nature of the Universe without needing to consider God to make progress.

"...tho I wish you'd not waffle"

? Please note:
{my extraneous words from me} / {your extraneous words} == fuhgedabowdit.

"I don't care that you can get 6417 people jumping up and down in unison and saying "that's not science". "

I've made no appeal to authority. Please don't treat me as a representative for everything you disapprove of in a non-creationist.

"Well, actually, many folks (including some scientists) insist on abiogenesis despite the lack of any scientific basis for such."

There's no response to that unless you reveal whom you're accusing. You could be right, but it's possible you've misunderstood and the scientist wasn't insisting. The furthest I've seen a materialist go towards insisting is to gently invoke Occam's razor.

"either something which regularly happens or something which occurs by chance. I take it you agree we don't observe the first. Must be the second. Tell how chance isn't involved."

1) That's a false dichotomy. Just because something doesn't occur regularly doesn't mean it is random. Eclipses and comet collisions are rare or unique not random.

2) You're confusing the random input from mutations (which are accepted or rejected in a highly NON-random way) with the randomness of the whole DNA code. That's a bit woolly-headed: just because the word "random" applies in one place (to mutation), doesn't mean it applies in another place (to the sequence of DNA). Your calculation is only meaningful if the sequence of DNA is random (in fact, each base would have to be random and independent): it isn't.

3) You agree that since introduction of life, the environment on Earth has changed a great deal (eg. atmospheric oxygen was not present before plant-life -- that's a pretty big deal!). So your demand for RNA machines to arise from the primordial soup today in conditions which are clearly non primordial is irrational.

"If you buy into variation"
How could one sensibly not "buy into" variation? Do you believe that this directly observed phenomenon does not happen? Are children not slightly different from their parents? Since we started sequencing DNA a few decades ago, we have been able to track variation directly at the genome level. Do you have a quarrel with even this?

"Not talking about *merely* the start, but every single step of the bazillions of links. (All of which must happen, btw, in the correct sequence or else the organism dies and cannot evolve."

No. Most mutations are harmless, and could happen in any order. A mutation outside a gene, and which is not a binding site for eg. transcriptase enzymes (ie, the vast majority of the genome) has no particular effect. Even within the gene, triplets of bases (codons) correspond to amino acids, but there are only 20 amino acids. You already know that there are 64 combinations of 3 nucleic bases: you showed me the calculation in an earlier comment. Therefore, the code is redundant: there are many mutations that can happen inside a gene which has no effect whatsoever on the protein it encodes. Further to that, even many mutations which do exchange one amino acid for another might have little or no effect on function.

I'd be interested though, what made you think that the order and content of every evolutionary step needed to happen in an exactly prescribed sequence? What is the theory you are basing these pronouncements on?

I'm very familiar with factorials, thanks. Are you familiar with the common fallacy of firing a gun aimlessly at a barn wall, then drawing a target around the bullet hole? You might go further and calculate the probability of hitting that target, and pronounce yourself a crack marksman as a result. But it would be a meaningless number. Similarly, you've taken the modern genome of one (some?) (all?) species, and drawn targets around them. How do you know how many alternative ecosystems with different genomes would have been equally viable from the point of view of the first organisms? (had they gone in a different direction, affecting the environment in a different way etc.)


"Either each of those changes is determined, and will always happen as a result of immutable chemical laws, or else each can happen only once."

Look up chaos theory.

"Don't see any changes happening in real time present. Hence could happen only once. Quite a faith evolutionists have."

Look up faith. According to the catholic encyclopedia, it's an assent of the intellect to a truth which is beyond its comprehension. Evolution, along with all of science, is a belief only in the tangible, measurable, evidential world, which, as far as anything can be, is entirely within my comprehension. Therefore it cannot be a "faith"ful belief.

"Means that every single transition, species, whatever you want to call it, that changes from this to that in a similar past environment should do exactly the same in today's environment."

"environment" includes the life that exists at that moment. A gene that might have been competative a hundred thousand years ago might not be competative against modern forms versions of it. Eg. a prey animal's eyesite and a preditor animal's camoflage are sensitive to each other, in an arms race, neither could go backwards (normally an empty idea in darwinism, there is no one single "forward" direction to eovlution) without being a failure in evolutionary terms: either the camoflage is insufficient to hide from the prey, or the eyesite is insufficient to run away from the predator.

"Means also the fossil record should have links all over the place."
It does.

I don't have a legitimate calculation to offer. That doesn't make the egregious issues with your calculation any the less stark and important.

I put it to you that the gap between simple chemistry in primordial environment (which plausibly gets us as far as nucleic bases, amino acids etc., see Miller experiment and others) and the simplest plausible RNA-machine is not very large. Furthermore, consider the possibility of a few even simpler RNA machines working symbiotically. It's much easier, probabilistically, for this symbiosis to occur than to demand every piece of machinery to arise at once in an individual. I'm talking about RNA machines -- it's called the "RNA world hypothesis" -- because that's the idea I'm most familiar with. I like it because RNA stores information but is also quite active metabolically. The modern ribosome could be thought of as an organism in itself, and with that as a starting point, the modern biological world of DNA (just for storage) and proteins (for metabolism) can plausibly grow.

There are many other hypotheses of course, nobody really knows, and I can't think of anyone who claims to. I'm still wondering who it is that you perceive is insistent about any of this deeply hypothetical stuff. Most scientists have a hunch, but they present it as precisely that: a hunch.

Do you think I'm being insisting on this RNA world hypothesis?

If we allow that the first creature / RNA world soup is massively less complicated than your 4000-base creature (based still on a sophisticated modern-world genome -- even in our era there are smaller viruses out there by the way) there remains a big issue: the role of probability in getting from a genome A to genome B in a series of gradual steps.
1) You treat genome B as if that's the only destination. That's drawing the target after the shot has been fired imo. B is not fixed before the great random walk from A began.
2) It need not take a single path. Since most DNA does not encode anything, there is plenty of genomic "scrap paper" for mutation to work on harmlessly, and when something useful is hit upon, it becomes selectively favourable to ramp up expression of the new / modified gene. Because over 90% of the genome is scrap paper, there is room for massive variation in genotype with no impact on phenotype.

To the secondary issues. Don't forget that it is an examination of life (particularly on the Galapagos islands) and fossils that gave rise to the idea in the first place. Since I don't accept your probability estimate, obviously I don't think it has any effect on what we should infer from those observations. From your previous remarks about fossils, I think I might detect some confirmation bias in what fossil evidence you pursue. Talkorigins' faqs have a some documented examples of transitional fossils for you to consider:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

I wrote "There are many other hypotheses of course, nobody really knows"
and you read this as something I "willingly commit to" or "insist on", and even insist that you accept it.

I'm beginning to question if I am capable of meaningfully communicating with you. Could I make it any clearer?

"You on the one hand "don't accept" an attempted probability estimate that opposes your faith"

No, what I don't accept is a probability estimate which is based on a model with NO-ONE finds plausible. Yes, you're right: it is overwhelmingly unlikely for a modern creature to arise spontaneously and instantly from a prebiotic environment. But as a result, nobody thinks that's what happened. So tell me, why is this a problem?

"On the other hand, with nary an attempt to provide a counter estimate of the number gradual steps needed much less the chance of any single one of them happening, you insist your faith is probable."

1) I did mention "edit distance", although I didn't explain it. It is the minimum number of mutations (replacements, insertions and deletions) needed to transform genome A to genome B. This is not a purely philosophical quantity, it is the basis of a lot of solid, useful work which requires measuring the similarity between genes. (If you're interested, look up the BLAST or Smith-Waterman algorithms for further description of this concept).

2) The chance of a given mutation might be low, but the number of paths from one genome to another is high. You don't simply multiply the probability of the events you think have happened, you must also sum over all the paths that could alternatively have happened. In other words: don't paint targets around bullet-holes. Calculating the total number of paths involves big factorials and large powers to, you know.

3) I don't insist my faith (sic) is probable (point to where I did please), all I'm doing is criticising your estimate.

"You insist that evolution had to happen."

I didn't say that, I fear you are still burdened with your false dichotomy I pointed out above. Anyway, we know it doesn't have to happen, we have half a dozen nearby planets + moons which bare this out.

"Yet you demand that no one call you on the absurdity of your denying that 'having to happen' means it should continue to happen."

Again, I fear I have already found the limit of my own clarity and eloquence. I can only repeat, just once more: the environment has significantly changed since life first arose on Earth. We don't expect dinosaurs to live in modern conditions either, why should pre-biotic life?

"You insist that neither you nor anybody else is insisting on evolution only sentences away from your insisting on evolution."

Please quote instances of my insistence, because I don't think I did. In fact I don't think I mentioned insistence about evolution one way or the other: I was talking about nobody insisting on a given hypothesis for abiogenesis (except for the creationists of course).

"every single link that could happen now would happen now"
Every single creature that lives competes with other individuals and species that occupy the same niche. A salmon-like salmonid that isn't quite as good at swimming upstream as a modern salmon simply wouldn't prosper in a world that contains salmon. An eagle that isn't quite as good at spotting prey from flying altitude simply won't find food in a world that contains modern eagles. Etc.
All existing species are already at local optima. Each species is already well adapted to its niche. Small variations away from the optimum do not flourish, simply because the optimum species already exist and they can't compete.
When evolution does happen, it's when the environment changes. Those niches move around a bit: the ideal characteristics for a lone predator on the North American in the Arctic might change slightly with the climate, might favour better swimmers or better runners as ice becomes patchier or thicker, or that niche might disappear entirely leading to extinction.
Or, on a small, isolated environment with few pressures, evolution can happen more "for the sake of it." Lack of predators made the Galapagos islands ideal for this, and it's no coincidence that this is the type of environment where evidence for evolution was first discovered.

"In fact ,nothing tracks back to anything other than itself"
From the FAQ I linked, there are examples of chains from fish to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to mammals, and reptiles to birds.

"If evolution were true, instead of a few debatable suggestions, one would find links littering the landscape, with no or nearly no intermediate steps not lalying around, maybe even living."

from the FAQ:
"In fact, no current evolutionary model predicts or requires a complete fossil record, and no one expects that the fossil record will ever be even close to complete. As a rule of thumb, however, creationists think the gaps show fundamental biological discontinuities, while evolutionary biologists think they are the inevitable result of chance fossilizations, chance discoveries, and immigration events."
In summary, fossilisation is a rare event, and us discovering a fossil is even rarer.
You contradict the FAQ here: you are quite clear that evolution demands that fossils be in greater abundance. Can you fill in the argument for this please?

Evolution is not a faith-belief for me, because I hold it only tentatively. The idea of tentative belief is perhaps anathema to you, and that might explain why you see me insisting on things I explicitly do not insist on. I'm sure you hold tentative beliefs of your own, you couldn't function without them; why do you insist (;)) that my beliefs must all be faithful?

If something is true I do most certainly want to know it, I am anything but wilfully blind. I cannot take Paul seriously in Romans, he is simply wrong if he is trying to describe me.