From my understanding, I would suspect that in reality it is very difficult to be completely unbiased in practice. Surely evolutionists have a bias that is as least at risk of packaging data that fits and not really addressing observations that may suggest a problem with the theory? (The same is of course with me!)
Well, no, because within science there is as much to be gained by disproving a theory as there is for proving it.
There is no investment in evolution as there is in ID or creationism. ID/creationists are desperate to prove their god exists, but there is no desperation to prove that evolution is true - because it in itself does not prove that god does not exist. It might cause trouble for particular interpretations of the Bible, say, but those interpretations had little to no credibility in the first place.
This "missing" links you alluded to:
Again, from my understanding, would you not expect to find a multitude of these missing links littering the planet? The fact that they have universally been called "missing" links is surely quite damaging to the theory?
It's not a term popular with the actual scientists as I understand it - all fossils are intermediate in some way or another.
As SithDoughnut said, fossilisation is a somewhat rare process given the sheer amount and breadth of life that's ever existed. That's hardly the only evidential approach to verifying evolution, mind, the genetic evidence is arguably even stronger these days.
I know that a small number have be found but even some of these have shown to be fraudulent or dishonest. I would expect to find an abundance of evidence - not rely on a small number of "debatable" skulls etc...
Well, not all skulls are ' "debatable" ' and you haven't really specified what ' "debatable" ' means - and tacking this on to a remark about fraudulent fossils, I can't help feel you're tiptoeing round an accusation that you think more of them are fraudulent than are already thought to be so.
It's worth pointing out that many of the most infamous forgeries were never taken particularly seriously by scientists in the first place - and they were all shown to be forgeries
by the scientists themselves. Creationism sure isn't capable of that - in fact many creationists, in their rush to recategorise hominid fossils as either ape or human can't seem to agree whether a particular case is ape or human.
You'd think God would be able to speak more clearly to them.
If you were a skeptic of the theory of evolution (like me) would you not consider this a problem?
Depends on how much you know and understand about evolution. Not everyone claiming to be a skeptic is necessarily competent on such matters or is even being properly skeptical.
Surely a true scientist should remain a skeptic rather than declaring the theory a "fact"?
Not all scientists do - I know one or two (Coyne/Dawkins perhaps) have gone down the positivist route like that, and I don't particularly care for it.
Evolution is a fact in that we know life changes over time. The theory tries to explain why and is backed up by observed facts.
That said, just because there isn't 100% cast iron metaphysical proof for a scientific theory doesn't mean we should just discard it. We understand gravity a heck of a lot less than we do evolution, but
completely by coincidence(!) we don't see Christians rejecting the theory of gravity en masse.