Second, Darwin's great discovery was that evolution isn't by chance. It if was just random variation, nothing would work. It's important for you to understand this, if you want to understand anything about it... Natural selection is the antithesis of chance.
Perhaps you don't know what "non-sequitur" means. What do you think it means?
You seem to be saying, "Everything works, and continues to work, therefore it could not have been by chance."
And once again, you thought up a silly idea and want me to take ownership of it.
In fact, as Karl Popper noted, we do have examples of random evolutionary change, and those cases don't result in increased fitness. Only those changes that have a selective value can be acted on by natural selection. That's what the Hardy-Weinberg equation determines.
Admittedly you could argue that random chance is only needed for abiogenesis
It appears that the physical laws of this universe are such that life is likely to appear whenever specific conditions exist. If you want to call that "random chance", i'd have to disagree.
and thus any future evolution is just the product of adaptable DNA.
You still don't get it. Random variation, by itself, can't do much of anything. But random variation plus natural selection, does increase fitness, which is how new traits and taxa evolve.
This still leaves the student, who is sitting in a biology class, with the indoctrination that random chance was the only root cause needed.
And you've just illustrated why it's a bad idea to sleep in biology class. The average 8th grader knows better than that.
Please don't compare this issue to plumbers. Plumbers are intelligent designers
Here you've confused plumbers and plumbing (and scientists and science). Try to focus here; the key is that both science and plumbing are methodlogically naturalistic. Which is why plumbing manuals don't talk about God.
Even if plumbers are often theists.
hich makes it consistent with creationism.
You have that wrong, too. Michael Denton, as you should have noticed, says that the more evidence we have for the universe being designed, the less credible creationism becomes.
That is in no way a threat to the faith of the Christian.
Nor is evolution or plumbing. The only difference is, plumbing doesn't scare you.
Gravity remains unexplained.
That is only partially true, but it's a good point. Evolutionary theory is more solidly confirmed than gravity. We know why evolution works, but we still aren't absolutely sure why gravity works. Also, evolutionary theory isn't in conflict with scripture.