Faith: "Although faith has generated many roots in religion, it is not necessarily a religious word and is not exercised solely in God and god alone, but can apply to any situation where judgements are made irrespective of evidence."
FAITH

Evolution is based on facts and we have been accumlating evidence for 150+ years.
An evolutionary primer
Evidence for evolution
Evidence for macroevolution

"We have huge amounts of data from diverse fields...Each new piece of evidence tests the rest." (Theobald)

"All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heritability, catalysis and metabolism.
Replication
Metabolism

Common descent predicts a nested hierarchy pattern, or groups within groups. We see just such an arrangement in a uniqque, consistent, well-defined hierarchy, the so-called tree of life.
Common descent Wikipedia
Tree of Life

Differnet lines of evidence give the same arrangement of the tree of life. We get essentially the same results whether we look at morphological, biochemical, or genetic traits.
Genetics - an overview

Fossil animals fit in the same tree of life. We find several cases of transistional forms in the fossil record
Geological Time Scale

Many organisms show rudimentary, vestigial characters, such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight.
Vestigial traits

Atavisms sometimes occur. An atavism is the reappearance of a character present in a distant ancestor but lost in the organism's immediate ancestors. We only see atavisms consistent with organisms' evolutionary histories.
Atavisms

Ontogeny (embryology and developmental biology) gives information about the historical pathway of an organism's evolution. For example, as embryos whales and many snakes develop hind limbs that are reabsorbed before birth.
More whales
How whales got legless
Whale study with pics!

The distribution of species is consistent with their evolutionary history. For example, marsupials are mostly limited to Australia, and the exceptions are explained by continental drift. Remote islands often have species groups that are highly diverse in habits and general appearance but closely related genetically. This consistency still holds when the distribution of fossils species is included.
Biogeography
A wealth of information on the subject

Evolution predicts that new structures are adapted from other structures that already exist, and this similarity in structures should reflect evolutionary history rather than function. We see this frequently. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structure despite their different functions.
Science and Creationism - briefly discusses function, but cool link nonetheless.
Homology
Wikipedia

The same principle applies on a molecular level. Humans share a large percentage of their genes, probably more than 70 percent, with a fruit fly or a nematode worm.
Human Genome Project
Great Ape Genome
From Birds to Dinosaurs

When two organisms evolve the same function independently, different structures are often recruited. For example, wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures. Gliding has been implemented in many additional ways. Again, this applies on a molecular level too.
Spotting evolution on the wing
Parallel Evolution
Proteins do it too

The constraints of evolutionary history sometimes lead to suboptimal structures and functions. For example, the human throat and respiratory system make it impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time and make us susceptible to choking.
Top 10 bad designs!
Unintelligent Design - this guy is easy on religion, but he makes some great points

Suboptimality appears also on the molecular level. For example, much of DNA is nonfunctional.
Junk DNA
DNA and pseudogenes

Some nonfunctional DNA, such as certain transposons, pseudogenes, and endogenous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry.
Pseudogenes

Speciation has been observed.
Wikipedia
Observed speciation

The day-to-day aspects of evolution - namely heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection - are seen to occur at rates consistent with common descent.
Prehistoric Cancer!
Rate of evolution
molecular evolution

Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about eighty million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also is found in fruiting plants and fruit flies. (Benner et al.)
The fruit fly in you

The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common decent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts."

(The above text was taken from: The Counter-Creationism Handbook, by Mark Isaak, I have added urls for examples)

Originally posted on myspce. Click here to view original document with several comments.