Welcome to the fray Jeanie, I hope you enjoy your stay and take something positive away with you.

You of course realize that your belief - one way or the other is immaterial: what is real is real no matter what you or anyone else believes. For instance we can believe that the objective world about us is evidence that tells us the truth about reality, or we can believe that the evidence lies -- particularly when we think the evidence inconveniently contradicts what we feel comfortable believing. The problem with this is that then you believe that the truth about reality is that it - reality - is a falsehood.

All you need to do then is explain the evidence in a manner that is consistent and that includes all the evidence. This is what biologists, paleontologists, taxonomists and other scientists by the thousands have done.

Again, you are free to believe anything you want to. You can believe the world is flat too. The question, the issue, is whether you are willing to test your beliefs and discard false concepts when they are contradicted by evidence, or whether your would rather discard the evidence to stay comfortable in a cocoon of relative ignorance (= lack of knowledge on the topic).

The evidence shows that the oldest life is 3.5 billion years old, that hominids have been in existence for at least 3 million years, that Homo sapiens has been in existence for at least 200,000 years.

The evidence shows that the earth is at least 4.55 billion years old and that the universe is at least 13.7 billion years old.

Or the evidence lies, all evidence lies, the world is lies. Buddhists believe all is illusion ... perhaps they are right eh?

Okay: it wasn't random, but the result of selection.

But of course. Including the natural law that governs variation and adaptation, the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation, descent with modification ... evolution ... in an endless display of diversity, including bacteria that give live birth and unicellular animals that reproduce by sex (but have only one sex?). The natural laws that build your body from exactly the same materials as the bacteria, and in fact need bacteria to survive..

And yet the creator gave us these wonderful inquisitive minds, more curious than a cat, to poke at the world and see what we can understand, for then we understand the creation better eh?

In all of science, in every branch, under every tree of knowledge that we have acquired by the principles of science we have evidence, the foundation, and theory. The theory explains the evidence and produces predictions that can be used to test if the theory is valid or false. It's a process of attrition in weeding out false concepts, for theories - no matter how well tested - cannot be proven, only disproven, falsified. But in science, theories are more than just ideas, concepts, guesses, because they have to explain all the known evidence and predict new evidence.

And then they have to be tested, tested, tested, tested. So long as a theory is not falsified by any of the testing then it can be considered a valid theory, useful for making predictions (like Newton's theory of gravity is useful in predicting rocket flights to mars).

And of course science is not the only avenue to knowledge - we also have logic and philosophy, and religion/s. So many different ways to understand the world, and the question, the issue (for those interested in the truth and not comfort candy) is how do we determine which is true and which is false.

Enjoy.