We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.
We also can't do a pelvic exam of Jesus' mother to see if her hymen is intact, yet the church insists that we accept that it is--purely as a matter of faith.
As for hauling 10,000 generations into the lab, thankfully it's not necessary. As Richard Dawkins noted in 'The Ancestor's Tale':
If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins.
Are there questions science has not yet answered? Absolutely. Will science eventually find the answers? Probably. Humans have been doing science--and good science at that--for thousands of years, but the concept of evolution through natural selection was proposed relatively recently in human history. The fact of the matter is that the combined evidence from many different lines of scientific inquiry validates Darwin's theory time and again.
The pope should have more faith in human intelligence.
