Assumptions?

 https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/assumptions.html

Creationists and intelligent designer spotters often call evolution an "assumption".

I find this to be a gross insult as well as being incoherent.

Why an insult? To earn a Ph.D in science requires one to study a subject in great depth over a considerable period, to do considerable original research on a topic (no, not just watch a few YooToobs or go to a Kent Hovind talk), write it up in a dissertation, and have it mercilessly examined by those who are most qualified to be able to find any faults with it, such faults as there may be. Thus, we talk about a dissertation being "defended" - defended against all attempts to find fault. If it can withstand these attempts, we gain confidence in the truth value of the work. To call the outcome of this process, resulting from years of study and toil, to call it the mere naked "assumption" is indeed grossly insulting. Contrast this with the creationist approach of shielding ideas away from any critical analysis or, God forbid, any testing. See https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/aig-statement-of-faith.html and https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/icr.html

Incoherent? Where would such an "assumption" of evolution stem from, in the absence of sense, reason and intellect"? The desire to deny God? 

I have news for you creationists and intelligent designer spotters. Intelligent, educated theists accept the truth of evolution while maintaining their belief in God. You cannot defend your anti-evolutionism by hiding behind the hem of God's robes and claiming that you are the only troo ™ Christians.

Normal people, theists and atheists, accept evolution on the basis of sense, reason and intellect. They do not assume that there is a malicious little godlet falsifying the plain evidence we derive from such faculties in order to fool us. And even if there was, it would make the practise of science, and discussion about it, pointless. We may just as well give up science and take up knitting or train spotting instead.

But what about the creationists? What assumptions are they making? That it was God who inspired ancient men, very ignorant of the world and how it works, who gave us the "God given truth", just because the ancient ignorant old men claimed they did? How gullible do you have to be to believe that over what all your sense, reason and intellect tell you? 

What about biblical prophecies though? Don't their fulfilments prove that they do represent the word of God? No. I'm afraid that is a case of confirmation bias, which afflicts not only "Christian" anti-reality fantasies, but those of Muslims and followers of Judaism and Hinduism too, only different ones. Who is right? How can you tell? Confirmation bias is a well recognised source of perceptual distortion affecting not only fringe religious beliefs but all virtual asylums full of the craziest conspiracy theories too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias. As to the prophecies themselves, these are deconstructed here. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_prophecies.

So should we invest in our gifts of sense, reason and intellect, or bow down to the words of ancient, ignorant old men and their unsupported claims?

In the words of Fred Hoyle (he of misdirected admiration from creationists) and Chandra Wickramasinghe -

 “The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur’an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”
–Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14