Is it or is it not obvious that Jar was poisoning the well?
No, I don't see any poisoning of the well. There are some positions that are not consistent with a reasonable state of mind; there are some things that reasonable people by definition cannot disagree on.
The basic accuracy of the theory of evolution is one of them. Obviously, the specific details are a manner under debate. But the evidence as it stands cannot simply be dismissed by a reasonable person.
That's all Jar conveyed.
And my conclusion that most educated athiests would be likely to choose whatever science's best guess at the moment is? Did you find anything flawed with that argument?
Nothing contentous there at all, IMO. Atheists are largely people who adopt a reasonable approach to looking at the world; such people more or less have to accept the theory of evolution (as I've argued above.)
But it's possible to be an unreasonable or insane atheist. It's possible to believe that there are no gods because your invisible giant bunny friend told you that, and you always believe whatever he says.
I would not expect such an atheist to be swayed by scientific evidence and reasoning. Would you?
These are common meanings.
No, I get that. The common meanings are irrelevant because that's not how those terms are used in science. Nobody calls
anything a law anymore; that's a linguistic artifact of a time when the relationship of scientific inquiry to the world was substantially different.
These definitions obviously suggest a hierarchy of certainty.
In common use, yes. It's not clear where that common use originates, however, because that's certainly not the scientific use.
I mean, Newton called his laws of motion "laws." But they've been disproved. But their name hasn't changed. Isn't that enough to prove that "law" and "theory" don't describe different levels of certainty, but rather, naming conventions from two radically different epochs in science?