I believe evolution to be true to the extent of what it says and what has been proven. That we are descended from earlier beings, and that we all descend from a common beginning many, many eons ago. I believe in what the rocks say.
I do not believe evolution tells the whole story. First I merely assert evolution tells of evolution, but has no place in sociology nor in philosophy. You can’t use it to explain religion. In effect, evolution stopped being man’s causal agent the moment he became his own (hey, that’s not bad!).
I do not think evolution explains all of our beginning. The first self-replicating cells and where they came from is almost as incredible to my mind as the creation story. And that this basically happened a couple of times. That life is ubiquitous to this earth because of what the earth is is true. But in the instances we witness this in our geological time there is other life to spawn new life. Mt St. Helens would be a good example. But earth was that, the whole of it, a couple of times. I would say they had to speculate on the other couple of times, but surely one time the earth was truly barren.
But, that first time. What was that? And apparently it happened not too long after it became possible for such a thing to survive its introduction. And yet we cannot duplicate what should be such a simple event.
There is also the conundrum of the modern morass. The prevailing view in western culture is that man is basically an evolved monkey with a hairless ass. If that is what he is, then his existence hasn’t much worth nor inspiration. It does to the actual monkey, but the class holds no value. Worth becomes subjective to the victim when the tribe or the brute comes to collect his non-worth. He wails his subjective worth as a white flag, but he is simply a monkey with a hairless ass. He has moved from running around Lake Turkana and squatting to poop, to running over his shag carpeting to squat and poop over a porcelain bowl.
Now, the monkey has been very clever, and has made better places to poop, and has thought to wipe his ass (I don’t know if early man, or his precursors had deep butt cheeks like ours, nor if they did whether they ever bothered to wipe – that brings up a question – when did man first wipe? Would we suppose that the first conceptual being thought first to wipe his ass? I would, but I’m a clean freak.) but, he is still a monkey.
If we are simply refined monkey (and I am purposely using monkey here, even though it is not correct, it is rhetorically useful) what meaning is there to our existence? I don’t dispute that we in fact evolved as evolutionary science says, generally, that we did. How, being such a being, can we claim anything above our own subjective worth?
Another problem if man be merely a refined monkey is the problem of solemnity. All his endeavors to be more than a ridiculous monkey with a genetic glitch that gives him the edge of a gadgetry trickster, are absurd. Making love is absurd. He may as well shriek like a monkey and throw feces on his wedding night. He is as the amoeba, springs into being, struggles, dies.
The evolutionary view of man and cosmos (which I deny the validity of – of evolutionary science having a right to have such a view) makes the whole “life” endeavor some gigantic mistake. Yes, it came about through all the stuff that makes the world acting as it does, and after billions of years in a certain corner enough happy accidents happened and then some further happy accidents accumulated into the spark of me writing this right now and that could be wiped out by a meteor smashing through my roof and removing my head without me ever knowing it. Or all of us being wiped out in some galactic-scale holocaust amounting in the whole thing really as significant and a gamma ray flash (that being the possible thing that wiped us out!).
Of course the assumption here is that the monkey is ridiculous. Is he? It is bromidic today to speak solemnly of the monkey and to make man ridiculous.
But all of this means that evolution speaks nothing of worth either.
You may find it useful to research the concept of emergence (as in “emergent properties”) versus simple reductionism in your analysis. It may not answer all your questions, but it might provide some additional perspective on the matter and perhaps some clarity.
I would if I had the time, I don’t – at present. For that specific reason I labelled the post a ramble. I have a swirling head cloud of many divergent strains of thought that I know belong together and can only achieve the barest coherence writing them let alone speaking them to myself.