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Let's sit down at work out an deductive-logic path to the theory of evolution, shall we?
- Modern Genetics shows that individual breeding within a population can change the traits of individuals.
- This change can manifest in a number of ways: a child can either inherit traits from the parents, or random mutations in the genome can result in new traits in the child.
- Paleontology shows that there used to be creatures that are no longer in existence living on the planet.
- Dinosaur fossils do not correspond to any known living creature, for instance.
- Geology estimates that the Earth is really, really old.
- The most conservative estimates place the age of the earth at around 4.5 billion years old.
Those are our starting points of reference. Now, assuming that history is consistent and that all three postulates above are true, evolution must be true!
How? Well, it's obvious that what currently lives on the earth is different than what used to live on the earth. If the traditional viewpoint that species are eternal were true, it would both fail to explain what happened to the old species, and where humanity came from. Genetics, however, provides this missing source: Mutations and mating.
Darwinian Biology allows for the extrapolation of the changes noted in point one to effect an entire population of any species. If a certain trait, be it mutated or bred into existence, is useful or helps creatures stay alive long enough to mate, it will, slowly propagate to the rest of the species.
Here's where the age of the earth comes in. Although the evidence for an entire species changing in this fashion is debatable in the time-frame that our current science can be conducted in, it's a given over the age of the earth! 4.5 billion years is a really, really, really long time, biologically speaking; more than enough time to allow life to go from protozoa in some primordial ooze to humanity, even with a couple of mass extinctions along the way.