I've got the day off so here goes. But I doubt if we'll hear from the rabbit again.
Quote: "The standard textbook example of natural selection involves a species of finches in the Galapagos".
You do the usual evolution-denier trick of ignoring the real significance of the study. There are actually two species of finch that breed together in good conditions and separate when times are bad. Where is your 'each according to its own kind' in this situation?
Quote: "Like every other scientific theory, the theory of evolution lies at the end of an inferential trail".
So why is it so difficult for you to accept just this theory?
Quote: "Before the Cambrian era, a brief 600 million years ago, very little is inscribed in the fossil record; but then, signaled by what I imagine as a spectral puff of smoke and a deafening ta-da!, an astonishing number of novel biological structures come into creation, and they come into creation at once".
So there was more than one creation? There was certainly life before the Cambrian. Had God stuffed up the first one? Not very clever of him/her/it.
Quote: "Thereafter, the major transitional sequences are incomplete".
Some of them. The number is diminishing but I see here you accept a 'God of the Gaps'.
Quote: "But Dawkins, replied Phillip Johnson in turn, had carelessly assumed that 5 percent of an eye would see 5 percent as well as an eye".
In the Kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king is an appropriate comment at this stage.
Quote: "This suggests a view in which living creatures are spread out smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities, like colors merging imperceptibly in a color chart".
Many of them are. If you like I'll give you a lecture on ducks, geese and swans. And seagulls. Not to mention tits (the birds). Are you not aware of regional varieties?
Quote: "Are there general principles that specify sexual suicide among this species, but that forbid sexual suicide elsewhere?"
OK. I concede God might be responsible for all this and all the other similar phenomena you mention. But why would he/she/it do it.
Quote: "Chance lies at the beating heart of evolutionary theory".
No it doesn't. All species, even humans, have to survive in some sort of environment. Evolution is hardly the result totally of chance. Sure, there's some element of luck but comparing it to manufacturing a watch is completely absurd. I notice this actually takes care of the rest of your post but I'll do one more.
Quote: "The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes".
Exactly. As a description it serves extremely well. For example what sort of God would place a whole series of fossils in the ground in sequence that lead by small changes from the earliest Australopithecus yet found all the way to modern humans? Pretty strange God you believe in.
