These three theories are by no means equally well established, nor are they equal in their effect upon those who belive them. Do you really think "universal gravitation" is as speculative as evolution?
No. Evolution deserves to be singled out and labled. Of all the ignorant notions foisted upon humankind as "fact," this one has had a sorely deleterious effect, bringing forth and sustaining rotten fruits from the beginning. It is Pseudo-intellectual hogwash exhonerated by self-deceived frauds. It certainly does not deserve to be treated as fact. It is well-deserving of ridicule.
True enough. Louisiana and Alabama hit upon a dumb idea. Small disclaimers in a textbook gives evolutionary superstition more credit than it deserves.
I do.
On what do you base your belief that the force that prevents the moon from flying off into space is the same force that makes apples fall to the ground?
I'll tell you what I base my belief on: Newton's Universal Gravitation is simple enough for me to understand, and the numbers (as measured by others whom I trust) work out. Ah, but wait a second. If I look carefully enough at the data, I'll find that the numbers don't work out, at least not for that simple theory. Go to enough decimal places, and they actually rule it out: orbits precess at a different rate than predicted. Fortunately, there's a different theory--General Relativity. I don't understand that theory nearly as well, but I'm told (by other people I trust) that the numbers work out significantly better. (OK, I did work through an example or two, but it was hard.) But it's not intuitively obvious why that should be the case, and furthermore I don't believe that it's the final theory in any case. (It lacks a property called "renormalizability", thus we don't understand its quantum properties in the least.)
Evolution, on the other hand, makes instant intuitive sense. The data are very incomplete, even non-existent in some cases, but where we have data they fit the model brilliantly. We have an understanding of the basic mechanisms by which it occurs. So while gravity wins on data, evolution wins on understandability and elementarity. I call it a draw.
The effect of an idea about the nature of reality on it's holders is not a reasonable measure of it's likely truth.
Do you really think "universal gravitation" is as speculative as evolution?
Universal gravitation failed the perihelion of mercury experiment and had to be revised; because it now fails the dark matter experiment, serious physicists are proposing yet another revision; and it is now beginning to come under revisionist attack from the forces of quantum gravity.
There isn't a particle of difference between assuming a continuous flow of evolution between fossil finds in distinct layers of dirt, and the assumption that the law of gravity exists over large distances containing nothing but vaccum, where no experimentation or data-gathering whatsoever has been done.
The inductive evidence available to support evolution is more fine-grained, abundant, available and accessable than that supporting universal gravitation. That's why there are dozens of referreed technical journals in the biological sciences whose detailed work is predicated on the notions of evolution.