Darwin's time machine; the evolutionary imagination

Charles Darwin loved to speculate about the past, and say things like ''it's easy to imagine..." this or that imaginary event occurred. (e.g. an eye developing from a light sensitive spot on the skin). He then went on to use these fantasies as proof of his theory. People seemed to forget that these ideas were just stories, and somewhere along the line acted as if they were true or real.

These stories of his had no explanatory power. It's a simple thing to imagine that something is possible.
What would happen if I said, ''I can easily imagine a time machine." Would this mean we could all act and talk as if time machines were real? as if we could travel in them? I don't think so; neither do I think we can make any progress toward a true understanding of origins if we travel in Darwin's winged carriage. (Darwin was the H.G. Wells of his day; but being more clever than Wells, he got people to believe his fiction was actually non-fiction.)

What Darwin was doing in his armchair speculations (strapped into his thought accelerator) was building a time machine; one he could use to travel back to the distant past in, to observe the 'emergence' of life. (Destination; small, warm pond. ETA unknown.) People don't seem aware of the hubris in such a notion, of its utter impossibility. We're so used to it by now that we aren't shocked by it; neither do we laugh at the absurdity of it. It's pure SF, but we've accepted it as truth.

We speak of the past as if it existed - but does it? Imagine a birthday party from the days of your grandparents. All the balloons are gone; all the smiles, the laughter, the noise... all of it is gone. While this is just a banal illustration, it seems clear that the past doesn't exist - but we speak of it as if it were some kind of concrete entity. If the past doesn't exist however, it means that any ideas we have of it are matters of faith. We can't be certain of what doesn't exist. This means that (contra the Darwinists) evolution cannot be a fact. Only if we had a time machine could we know this; but since the past doesn't exist there's no way to get to it. (It's as impossible as booking a flight for Shangri-la.) It was, and remains, metaphysical speculation in the form of a grand story.

All science deals with things that exist or happen in the present. While I think it's at least theoretically possible to be objective about the present, I don't think this is possible when dealing with the past. Why? Objects only exist in the present. Any 'object' that we talk about as existing in the past isn't real, but only a mental construct. (i.e. it's not a physical object, but an abstraction created by the human imagination.) As all scientists and researchers are finite, fallible and fallen, this imagined object (entity) cannot be exactly the same as the object that did exist once (in the country called the past). This means that our ideas about it can't constitute facts but only theory. [1.]

Summary;
Darwin claimed it was easy to imagine how the eye might have developed, or how the bear might have become a whale. [2.] This variety of hubris has been surpassed in our day by cosmologists who claim they can imagine a plenitude of universes, as numerous as bubbles on a sea of foam. When people start speculating about the past there's little to restrain them.
- I guess it's like what's happened in SF - the stories just keeping getting bigger, with events happening on a grander scale. We might call it metaphysical inflation.

Notes;
1. Being finite beings (and creatures of God) we should be satisfied with theory; rather than seeking absolute knowledge. (i.e. in regards to scientific investigation)
2. 'In the first edition of "The Origin of Species" in 1859, Charles Darwin speculated about how natural selection could cause a land mammal to turn into a whale. As a hypothetical example, Darwin used North American black bears, which were known to catch insects by swimming in the water with their mouths open: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale," he speculated.
- Well; even a great author comes up with the odd stinker.
3. I wonder to what extent the Laudanum Darwin consumed facilitated the ease with which he imagined the various scenarios he writes about in his books. They often seem to have a dream like quality to them.