Evolution is the factual reality of how living organisms spread into a wide variety of extinct and extant forms. It happened. It continues to happen. It always will happen.
The Theory of Evolution is the scientific explanation of why evolution happens. The theory has been tweaked and updated over the last hundred and fifty years as more data and access to new techniques allowed greater insight. That process will continue, but will not affect the fact that evolution the proces happens.
This is exactly the same as gravity, which manifestly exists, and the theory of gravity which explains why it exists. A theory that has been tweaked over the he years , including a radical rewrite due to Einstein. A theory which is still not quite as accurate or as well evidenced or as useful as the Theory of Evolution.
I hope that helps.
Naturalistic evolution seems to be a philosophy and way of interpreting data. Darwinism and the modern synthesis are theories that attempt to explain how life evolved and these theories of evolution have been updated and tweaked and continue to be updated.
Compared to gravity, we observe, for example, random mutation, inheritance of traits, and Epigenetic modifications like a physicist observes the effects of gravity. No one actually knows for sure what exactly gravity is, but we can observe and measure it's affects. So far, so good.
The problem is that evolutionists think that they can extrapolate these biological processes to account for all of life evolving from a common single cell ancestor and the evidence simply is not there for such a grand claim.
A living cell creates proteins and organizes proteins to perform complex and intricate functions that these chemicals would not do on their own. Each living cell is an industrial complex of nanotechnology controlling the chemicals and molecules under their control in an incomprehensibly precise way. The cell governs what the chemicals do. It's the difference between your computer and a pile of plastic, silicon, and precious metals. Molecules just don't organize to form a computer. If our computers could reproduce, the process for that reproduction would not be based on chemicals assembling on their own but a precisely directed process of the computer controlling how the molecules organize. The computer to reproduce would need artificial intelligence.
Gravity is the force that can be measured to show how fast your computer will fall to the earth if dropped from an airplane. Newtons law of gravity: F=G(m1m2)/R2. You can't make such a formula for how your computer is assembled and operates.
The chemicals inside a living cell are not self-organizing but are forced to organize in precise ways by the nanomachines within the cell. I hope that I don't need to argue with you about that. Epigenetics is showing how the cell is preprogrammed for contingencies or adaption. Error correction processes within the cell serve to conserve the DNA. Random mutations have been observed for sure, but these have never been observed to add anything significant to the cell. You can't give me a single example.
So, what is there really to extrapolate from what we observe to account for descent from a common ancestor? This is why the theory continues to be tweaked because they don't know for sure.
This is why naturalistic evolution is a philosophy looking for a theory. You think that the theory explains it but from what I see if falls far short based on the observable evidence.
