I butted heads with Bladerunner on the "Are you an atheist" thread and have been reluctant to step into this buzz-saw, particularly since A2E seems one of the more virulent pulpit-pounding fundamentalists.
The issue of "incomplete fossil records" is of course an example of "hedging the bet." The problem is that if an animal dies in an area that chemically decomposes bones as well as flesh (usually, that means alkaline soil), there are no fossils. If there is tectonic activity, the fossils might have been there but they are now buried by physically tumultuous disruption of the ground on which they had been deposited. In other words, if you wanted complete fossil records you are asking the wrong question to begin with, because you don't dare ask questions that give better answers - like the number of gene changes between two linear species or the number of changes in parallel from a common point. THAT is a lot more telling - but it requires someone to actually think a bit, and so far, A2E hasn't shown any evidence of wanting to do so.
The "why are there still apes" question is SUCH a joke that I have to stop laughing before I address it. We didn't descend from apes. We descended from hominids. However, that is immaterial. When the biologically separated species move to also geographically separate, they no longer complete for the same food. Man descended from the trees to become a ground dweller. Apes remained tree dwellers. Man had the new food source, their ape cousins had the old sources. No competition, so they could continue to survive separately. That would have been true even if we HAD descended directly from apes - which we did not.
Abiogenesis is easily - but not quickly - possible. If you think that CELLS formed in a single event, that is wrong. Free-floating chemicals such as RNA and its components formed in the primordial soup that was the oceans of several hundreds of millions of years ago. These chemicals randomly combined (and usually fell apart... but not always) based on simple laws of physics and chemistry - electrophilic and nucleophilic attraction.
Each milliliter of ocean was home to many hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of molecules other than simple water. Each milliliter had literally thousands of molecular interactions per second. Now, how many milliliters of ocean were there at that time? (Answer: In the trillions, I'm sure, but it is hard to compute.) How many seconds were in the interval between the time those reactions started and the time that abiogenesis occurred? (Answer: Again, hard to compute but each DAY is 86,400 seconds, multiply that by 365 * several hundred million years - and the number will be in the billions or even trillions.) NOW multiply the number of seconds x the number of reactions per second per milliliter x the number of milliliters in which the reactions occurred. It's a big number. Quadrillion? Quintillion? Big enough to qualify for the laws of large numbers, I'm sure.
The final question is simple: Was that time and volume and number of reactions per second per unit volume enough opportunity for random chemical reactions to produce one example of life? If your answer is NO, then your problem is skepticism, and DON'T show your skepticism without granting me the equal right to assert my skepticism over the content of the holy books.