[split] a discussion on origins sparked by "The Order of Things"

[Torkelburger]

Newton believing anything doesn’t make it true.
Again, go back to my post and read what I said, which was that the causal relationship you assumed between Newton’s lack of our present day knowledge and his belief in god, was bogus.

It isn’t bogus.  Many people today, many of them scientists, do not have a belief in a god or anything supernatural (and may be described as metaphysical naturalists) specifically because of their acceptance of scientific facts, by their own admission.  Some people do not.  The fact there are religious people today (including scientists) doesn’t matter.  We do not know which camp Newton would belong in would he have lived today.  Whether you agree with people doing that or not is a separate issue.  But many people do that.  We know that people believed in much more superstitious and silly things long ago, many of them unscientific and proven wrong in recent times.  Such as alchemy, and magic/woo-woo stuff such as how-to instructions of “curing” leprosy by incantations and using the blood of birds (as in the Bible), etc., etc.  We also know that a person's environment greatly influences religious belief.

“Evidence”? Any evidence we have for the “Big Bang” theory is incomplete and hugely circumstantial.

There are at least 100 data points to support the Big Bang.  The BBT is the most robust current model supported by the evidence (no scare quotes).  Prior to Hubble, hardly anyone even thought about an expanding universe.  It was expected that the galaxies would be blue-shifted or at least varying colors, but when it was seen they were all red-shifted, the models adjust to where the EVIDENCE leads.  This is the opposite of religion and faith.  In religion, you don’t change any model or belief at all.  In religion, the conclusions are always assumed from the start and are unchangeable.  You assert you know the truth ALREADY.  Faith is when you don’t even ask.  You just assert that you already know the answer without even searching for it.  You are told it by someone or some thing with some supernatural source or feeling, etc.  And the answer is equivalent to magic.

It would be like scientists asserting the Big Bang just out of nowhere without even looking through a spectrometer or telescopes or detecting the cosmic radiation, etc.  You would have just made it up out of thin air.  That would have been faith.  But that’s not what happened at all.  Scientists went with what the evidence showed.

Which is why Narlikar even to this day thinks that the steady state theory has legs. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose in 1964 “proved” that running the film of time backwards does lead to a singularity, but any number of new observations tomorrow may lead to an adjustment in that conclusion.

Exactly.  Which is what I said in my previous post earlier.  Science is always revealing new things, usually in the direction of becoming more precise.  Again, that’s a huge difference with religion, which assumes the conclusion from the very start.  And religious claims never have any evidence at all.  None.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nothing even to “adjust”.

The presence of a universal background radiation doesn’t necessarily mean that there was a Big Bang. The universe may have been oscillating for all time.

We have to go where the evidence leads.  And if we do not currently know any answers, then we say we do not currently know, not make up answers from anyone’s “faith”.

In the inevitable absence of certainty, most people choose to have a model to explain the world.  Not choosing to have a model is no great act of scientific bravery.

This is hilarious.  You equivocate scientific terminology with a religious worldview/woo-woo as if those things mean the same thing.  Very sneaky of you.
In any case, you’re arguing in favor for the God of the Gaps, aka the Argument from Incredulity.  Mega-logical fallacy.

If anything, it shows the subject to be lacking in creativity.

Give me a break.  I am only concerned with whether or not something is true, not with whether or not something is creative.  Whether or not something is creative has nothing to do with whether or not it is true.

What is the distinction between faith and belief? Faith is the assumption that a belief is true at a given level of evidence (which may vary from 0 to 99.99999%). That’s how I see it.

Wrong.  Faith is believing in something when there is no evidence at all.  None.  Zero.  But yet you still hold a belief despite the lack of evidence.  Further, faith is also used to hold a belief in OPPOSITION to empirical evidence.  Such as chain-smoking Frank Zappa repeatedly denying throughout his life the evidence that supports the fact that regular cigarette smoking has an increased causal risk to cancer (and then died of cancer at 52).

When there is 99% empirical evidence for something, it requires acceptance.  When you have a good reason to accept something, or have evidence for a fact, etc., you GIVE THE REASON.  When you do NOT have a good reason, you assert the “fact” on faith alone and just state that you have faith that it is true.  Because that is ALL you have.

That is the very definition put forth by the bible itself in Hebrews 11:1—"the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  IOW, just believing in something you hope is true without any empirical evidence that it is.

Just to be clear, if you’re coming after me with some hocus pocus faith in Jesus argument aired on Alabama TV, don’t. I’m not American.

I don't care if you're from Timbuktu.  There is no need to be paranoid.  No one is coming after you.