> But I have to say, there is no way I can get behind evolution being as grounded as melting ice. To me, it seems the whole theory is like the leaning Tower of Pisa. On the top floor, gosh, it sure fits beautifully with the floor below! Nice even lines, perfect compatibility. And with the floor below that, well, it fits together this way, with these beams and girders, and that floor is all nice and pat with the one below it, too.
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> But the further up you go, the more and more of a stretch it is to claim you're on that straight vertical line from the ground. We don't like having to stretch like that. We don't like having to suppose, "Gosh, this entire tectonic plate must have turned upside down!" (an exaggeration, calm the hell down) and trying to figure out how to support that. But we do it. We stretch and strive and create more anomalies for ourselves, because at any given step along the way, it makes WAY more sense to zero in on our deviation from the vertical as the "anomaly" to try to account for, rather than the throw the whole tower away, which does, after all, fit together so nice. I mean, Occam's Razor and everything, how could such an obviously clean, consistent, smoooth little tower be all wrong?

I wonder what would be left if one gave up from despair from the current difficulties and discarded macro-evolution as the best explanation, though. If the current diversity of life didn't evolve from a relatively small number of other life forms, you're essentially left with Creationism-compatible explanations, any of which must essentially claim that all species on Earth were either created or transported here (by God, aliens, or what have you).

Okay, that's simple enough to state (perhaps Occam's Razor is well pleased so far), but then what about the (assumed false) interpretations which evolutionists have put together into vast interconnected structures of data that *seem* to show that evolution has occurred? [More convincing than fossil evidence/radiometric dating, I wager, is the ever-growing ocean of evidence linking various organisms based on genomic ties.] If this is all false, then either: (1) there's a *massive* conspiracy in the scientific community to fabricate it all and keep quiet, or (2) a powerful entity would have had to deliberately create the genomes of all organisms humans have studied to make it *look* like creatures we think are related in specific ways really are (not to mention inserting fossils in various places in the Earth to back up the fabrication).

Is this really where we'd be taken if we cast aside the "overly complex" framework of evolution which is quite naturally not yet (and probably *never*) completely understood? Is the alternative to the tower (not leaning, in my opinion) a bridge made of silk?

Maybe my logic's flawed and there could be another ready explanation which hedges a bit, positing "Yeah, fossils and genomes aren't a big cosmic hoax, but evolution's not the answer." I just can't imagine what that could be.