Dear Avira,
I purposely avoided the whole evolutionary dialogue. If you aware of how the science of the Genesis shifted in Rav Hirsch’s day, and even more so a hundred years ago, you would know how ideas formed in the old thought system would age into today’s science. Even the atheists don’t think that evolution is anymore a problem for literalists. But still, I carefully avoided it. You seem to be stuck on Rav Hirsch’s scientific knowledge, not just his conclusion.
Now this is just a retort from you, but it is my main point. You can only operate the way you claim to be correct, by controlling the entire narrative. It won’t work for you to accept something you understand to be incorrect to get clarity on a different part of the dialogue. You have to be right everywhere, or else risk being disproven on some point. In sum, you don’t have a concept of truth as a guide. You work on the assumption that the conclusions that we are aware of are the Truth. And that defines the guiding concept by force of it being true.
So this is my problem. The idea that chazal’s conclusions are absolute truth, would require us to accept them as unknowable but true. Or to arrange our knowledge around these accepted truths. The problem is that the Rishonim did not use either method. Rather they had two fountains of flowing into one river of Truth. Knowledge – the five senses, logical deduction, known observation, etc. And the Torah. As in revelation, prophecy, and tradition. When it was unclear to them, they state their dogmas. There many instances of questioning and doubting chazal. None of them insisting that chazal’s conclusions define the truth.