How could an intelligent person still believe in evolution?

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I think with Einstein, in particular, it was his "god does not play dice"-statement, which made everyone go: "see, he said there's a god!" - but that statement of course was taken out of context, i.e. had nothing to do with his religious tendencies and was merely a poetic phrasing of a certain theory he had...

As for the last piece - why is it so hard for people to accept other/alternative theories.

Those theories get spit-balled without any credible evidence. Typically if someone comes up with a theory, for honest reasons, and finds out that it doesn't hold they let go of it.

There's a wonderful transition to be seen from 4 million years ago to 60,000 years ago in our ancestral line. Our ape ancestors had 48 chromosomes, we know which pair fused to make 46 now. The one thing I would give you - I don't think it's necessarily a sure thing that we understand all of it. Mutation, even with the timescales involved, on its own doesn't a make a lot of sense. You also have certain traits that blossom in unconnected places at different times which is a difficult thing to explain by direct mutation. Either way the tree aspect of it, ie. the slow/progressive morphological changes can't really be doubted at this point. What seems to be suggested there - science is missing something about the value or even the autonomy of information in natural dynamic systems.

The other part, lets say that there is something seemingly (at least to us - now) supernatural in the process of how life conformed to different shapes or lead toward certain outcomes by bridging impossible odds - to even say that consciousness kicked off and began life rather than the other way around wouldn't be the same claim as 'Yahweh did it!', at least not in the formal Jewish/Catholic/Protestant sense. To suggest that it's either Yahweh or nothing is also a leap of logic that has no inherent reason for validation aside from, again, gratifying those who hold a 20th/21st century Evangelical read of the bible as the center from which they reason all other things from.

To be sure, we have a lot to learn about complexity.

I'm just going to leave this here.

They decided to pick some kid on YouTube as the person to refute? Such cherry picking doesn't present much of a challenge for them.

If you ever turn the volume down, on commentary and debates, there are more funny faces, than thinking ones.

Progressives laugh, because they believe incredulity is a science.

This is a character flaw. We say that winners don't scoff. Posers and losers put-on fronts. How does this work in an autism forum.

What kind of evolutionary biologist meets your standard of proof. Can he believe in Ancient Aliens?

Remember, atheists are now seeker-friendly. (A wordplay on seeker-friendly, non-congregational Christians.) Atheism no longer denies any superstition, ever, anywhere, so much as positing a materialistic cause. Black cats might be statistically associated with bad luck, and some cow has possibly jumped over the moon, somehow. They've literally come up with a palatable explanation for flying reindeer, with God as my witness.

They're saying that Intelligent Design and Christianity are not necessarily the same thing.

All structured information is a form of language, so requires a decoder or reader. Also, disorder grows over successive transmissions. There is no tagged, serial-numbered example of a beneficial mutation.

A gene associated with some resistance to hepatitis is linked to a greater prevalence of Lupus. One associated with a resistance to malaria is linked to a prevalence of sickle cell anemia. The antibiotic resistant bacteria have lost the coding to create an enzyme. By some calculations, any specie will become inbred, over time, meaning it would be designed for obsolescence, or, if design is a religious word, they devolve and become extinct.

A possible exception to the rule was unstable hybrids, from disparate species, but this was presented in a spurious manner, such as humans being the offspring of pigs. The now-politically-incorrect Ariel suggested hybridization, in anti-abolitionist literature.

Really, evolutionism has claimed a sort of miracle, which no living person has ever witnessed. The beneficial mutation or missing link are like hen's teeth, four leaf clovers and unicorns. You possibly have materialistic explanations for those, but not for information out of the void. The proverbial explosion in the typewriter factory does not write a book, although you have told us why the Red Sea can part for Moses, on cue, and close upon the Egyptians.

The materialists possibly work harder, on making the case for religion than for materialism, nowadays, but, at least we are allowed to believe in leprechauns or the Easter Bunny. I almost want to be a materialist, so I am allowed to talk about Creationism. I am almost converted to your religious view. Possibly, after a few more decades of monkey-trial threads. My resistance is weakening.