UD’s dear commenter Elizabeth Liddle (whom I greatly admire for her respectful dissent from our dissent from evolutionary orthodoxy) asks the question in the title of my post.
Upon hearing this challenge my first reaction was, Where to begin? I’ll begin with two self-evidently wrong propositions of evolutionary theory.
1) Gradualism. Attempts to cram the fossil evidence into the gradualistic model display transparent desperation to make the evidence fit the theory. The fossil record testifies consistently and persuasively to three things: stasis, abrupt extinction, and abrupt appearance of new functional life forms. In addition, common sense argues that there is no gradualistic pathway for almost any biologically complex and functionally integrated system. A simple example is the avian lung. There is no conceivably logical gradualistic pathway from a reptilian bellows lung to an avian circulatory lung, because the intermediates would immediately die of asphyxiation.
Furthermore, attempts by Darwinists to explain away this kind of obvious problem strike ID folks — we consider ourselves, by the way, to be the real “free thinkers” concerning origins — as desperate attempts motivated by a desire to defend a theory in evidential and logical crisis.
2) The biologically creative evolutionary power of stochastic events filtered by natural selection.
This proposition is dead-simply, obviously, and empirically unreasonable (except in isolated pathological instances such as bacterial antibiotic resistance, in which case the probabilistic resources are available to allow informational degradation to provide a temporary survival advantage). Natural selection is irrelevant. Throwing out failed experiments does nothing to increase the creative power of random events. Simple combinatorial mathematics render the stochastic proposition completely unreasonable.
The two examples I’ve provided I find to be self-evidently wrong.