I wish we had a time machine so we could conduct accurate observations on the macroevolutionary scale and put this tiresome debate to rest. That would also put a lot of tiresome history debates to rest.

As for the whole religion thing, I wonder if the writers of all those religious texts ever expected their religions to clash with science. If I were them, I would make all pbumages about the universe as ambiguous as possible so that even the most stubborn fundamentalist would have no reason to believe that science is contradicting their religion.