Equating science with faith

Sure you can. In my family we have a theory: my mother's family started out in Ohio when her dad was a small boy, moved to Kansas for a few years, then moved on to Oregon. We have all sorts of evidence to back this theory up: the family legends, photographs, and there exists actual birth, death, and marriage certificates for the right names at the right times.However, we do not know when my granddad's ancestors first came to North America. Yet not knowing when or how my ancestors came to America does not negate the evidence that we have of their journeys starting at the time they left Ohio.

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Actually, uniformitarianism is based on the principle that explaining what we see today in terms of processes that can be observed and studied today and making testable assumptions is better than making stuff up as you go along.

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. -- Kurt Vonnegut

You're missing the point. You are the one who claimed that you can't have a theory without a starting point. I'm pointing out that you can. Available evidence can allow you to determine the history of something even when it isn't sufficient to tell you straight off how it began. Just like my family migration: the evidence is good enough to confirm our family stories, even though we know nothing about the beginning of the family. Just like biology: the evidence is good enough to get a pretty clear picture of the history of life on earth, even if we haven't yet figured out how life began.

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Well, yes, I guess you can believe this on philosophical grounds. I don't know of any like this myself, but I can't rule out their existence either.- Actually, our belief that life evolved from a common ancestor over the past three and a half billion years is based on what we can actually see.We can discuss the evidence if you want, although that would be more appropriate for another thread.-But you keep getting on a tangent off what I was responding to. Any theory about the origins of life is going to be based on a different data set (as yet incomplete) than the data set that shows the history of life after that origin (which is pretty conclusive). That is why we have a fairly good understanding (although not yet 100% complete) if how life has evolved, but we are still trying to understand how life originated.But this is the difference between science and faith. We have some good ideas about how life evolved, but this is not faith. This view has been shaped for over 150 years by the accumulation and study of actual evidence -- the opposite of faith. This is why we do not yet have a clear and detailed theory about the origin of life -- because we do not yet have the necessary data, which science (but not faith) requires.All that we know, like evolution, is based on evidence. Our admission of things that we do not yet know, like abiogenesis, is based on a lack of evidence.This is different than faith, which makes stuff up and holds onto the made up beliefs in spite of the lack of evidence, and sometimes in spite of contrary evidence.

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. -- Kurt Vonnegut