Ugh, evolution

WARNING: Boring scientific discussion in this blog entry. :P

You know, one topic I have to face all the time when studying environmental management is evolution. These days so many lecturers and students accept evolution as a fact and INSIST it's a fact even though it is just still a theory. Just the other day, one of the more famously cynical of my lecturers was teaching us about organic chemistry in this useless first year subject that I still have to take due to some silly restructuring of course structure by the Monash science people..... and at one point, my lecturer was talking about evolution and said that evolution is a FACT and those religious people need to get that into our heads and accept that 'fact'.
Well, I'm far from 'religious' (since Christians shouldn't be religious in the first place, but that's another discussion I've been into before), but I'm not quite so sure that evolution is the FACT that everyone seems to think it is. I DO however, believe that an important aspect of the volution theory - natural selection - is a fact. But everyone seems to think that evolution and natural selection are the same thing, when it really isn't. For those who aren't science geeks like me, natural selection in the process where individuals in a species with certain traits that give them a survival advantage over other members of their species will be 'selected' to survive more than others, so that that trait they have is retained in the species. As such, organisms become more and more better adapted to survive in their environments. For example, if a whole bunch of white moths live in an environment of trees with dark trunks, this makes the moths highly conspicuous to predators out for a meal. But if one or two of these moths have a mutation that causes them to turn black, and thus making them less noticable, the predators don't see these black moths and they survive to propagate while the white moths are all eaten. Thus the black moths grow in numbers while the while moths decline, making the entire moth populations turn black over time. We can see such examples of natural selection happening all the time, so I don't dispute that natural selection is a fact.
BUT the evolution theory is a whole different ball game. The whole evolution theory evokes images of humans evolving from monkeys, which evolved from dogs, which evolved from fish, which evolved from plankton, which evolved from bacteria, or something like that, through the process of natural selection. Which is a nice theory and all, but quite frankly, from what I've read, the fossil record doesn't fit the theory all too well due to the lack of fossils with traits showing a definite transition between the evolution of one animal to another. Plus, the theory of evolution states hinges on different animals evolving new features or traits through genetic mutations that are retained over generations. While mutations can explain certain changes like changes in colour for the moths, some features of organisms are just too complicated to have been produced through million of years of chance mutations. Take for instance, just one simple cell. Some cells have long 'tails' called flagella that allow them to swim everywhere...the flagella requires several different components to work properly. Even if one of those components had evolved by chance mutations, the others would have taken many more years to 'evolve' by which the time the first component would have been eliminated through natural selection coz' it serves no function without the other components. And even if the first component DID serve an important function and was retained over generations, the other components would have to evolve and be retained in a similar way, but at the end, each component would have to somehow join together to become a functioning flagella. Such super complexity in just ONE cell! Imagine, how on earth did birds evolve feathers, or animals evolve eyes, when these body parts need a whole bunch of components to have 'evolved' simulaneously to form a functioning body part. Natural selection doesn't explain this. So unfortunately, I am unable to subscribe to the notion that evolution is a 'fact'. The only reason people think it's a fact is because the idea has been drilled into everyone's head so much in schools that they think it must be real (just like everything else we learn in school. Probably a heckuva lot of other things out there people think are facts, but actually are completely WRONG). I don't think I'd be ruining my scientific credibility by believing in creation as opposed to evolution. I don't think God created ALL the animals present in the world today (it would be mind-boggling getting all of them onto the Ark, I would think), but that He initially created certain animals, and these adapted through natural selection to different environments to gradually become different species. Like the horse, zebra, and donkeys would have all come from the same original animal. In a way, this is sort of like evolution, but certainly not in the sense of horses evolving from bacteria, but rather one animal 'evolving' into several different but closely related species. I don't know why people who believe in creation are always accused of ignoring the 'facts' of science, when in fact we look at the facts and come to the conclusion that creation is the best explanation. The non-creationists can just as easily interpret the 'facts' to mean whatever they want. But you know, Ockham's Razor is a nice rule to live by...the simplest explanation is probably the right one. And the simplest explanation is that God created everything! And that doesn't makes me any less of a scientist, coz' I like to find out how the world works, just like any other scientist.
So anyway, knowing my stance on evolution, I kind of have to roll my eyes everytime I sit in a lecture and hear the word 'evolve'. Would be interesting to have a nice debate on the evolution thing sometime.