we know the process of evolution exists, observed it (in part), and know how it works.

So we know it has a role to play in some of the small changes in our recent past. Besides that 'can't see anything else' argument, how does one conclude that it is the only mechanism?

One would expect most things to be beyond human understanding, so why not the nature of a creator if one exists?

I raise such questions because I believe that evolution and naive science are the new religious dogmas of the world, and represent a trend in the following of scientific progress that needs opposing. People should take real care with their thinking when it comes to making deductions from the evidence (and you don't need to point out the oxymoronic aspect of that previous statement: I'm well aware of it.)

I've questioned everything to death, come to the conclusion that you can't do better then a good, open minded religious faith (where questioning is welcome). Unquestionable dogma is one of the worst features of much of religion, though the complexity of current science gives it, de facto, a similar level of unquestionability: consider how much training and qualification you need just to get a frontline scientific researcher to consider your views seriously without being dismissed as naive. As such, you have to draw on mainstream belief systems as resources for inspiration, voting with your feet where necessary, and ultimately convince yourself against your scepticism that you have a good belief system for living life by. Science in its present state provides little of this, just as the biblical text provides very little in the way of scientifically accurate models of our reality. What bemuses me is people who expect that one can provide a substitute for the other,

We have maybe a few decades of serious measurements about our universe to work on. Sensible practice means not extrapolating too far into the past and expecting accurate results. Sure running the physics clock back to an apparent origin makes sense from the sense of testing a theory for internal consistency and consistency with other theories (this shows an incompatibility between QM and relativity, hence the need for something such as string theory.) But if you believe you can extrapolate a few million years into the past from data gathered in a few recent decades, you need to check your thinking carefully. There is probably an assumption that basic principles as understood now and which can be verified to work now have always been that way, without variation. There is probably the assumption that a theory about the past that is consistent with the evidence you see in front of you actually happened, as is necessary to make progress in many areas, but which needn't hold true for the distant past. The problem comes when you try to eliminate such assumptions: you bump headlong into circularity.

If I had to bet, I'd be better of blowing my stake on lottery tickets. At least then I'd know if I won the bet or not.

The who created the divine creator argument is almost as old as the chicken and egg paradox which, if you apply naive logic, shows that chickens and eggs, and other birds for that matter, do not exist, and cannot exist, because the question of which came first has no logical answer.

As for the distant past, the idea that it is illusory is a rational and logical one, and is as plausible as your Linux box being installed from a DVD by a user at a fixed point in its history, vs everything having been compiled from scratch though the C compiler.

The truth is we cannot be sure about our distant origins, and we cannot even be sure that the distant past may even be deduced from evidence. Whether the apparent distant past is virtual or real is one for philiosophers, not everyday people, who just need a workable explanation to get the question answered to their satisfaction. Divine origins do this better than a rough principle (which is all the lay person will grasp from evolution) and to be honest, there is no single person alive who fully appreciates the complexity of evolution, let alone who can use it to explain our origins in terms of it to sufficient detail to rule out other alternatives (as is the case in physics for example.)

Those who believe that science can do more than offer a theory that fits the evidence do not understand the philosophical foundations of science or the limitations of inductive methods. Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith. One cannot reason around this, and ignorance and scientifistic hand-waving do not provide an alternative, though they may be convincing to some.

Some of a religious persuasion have the arrogance to believe that they hold Divine Truth in their hands; too many followers of science are treating the scientific pronunciations of the day in the same way, and this is a tragic, as is the ignorance of the antireligious of the scientists, mathematicians and other rational people who see no problem with a religious faith. Think things through before making pronouncements on the silliness of someone who believes other than you do, or else appear silly yourself.

To apply logic, you either end up with P implies Q statements that say nothing concrete, or else you take certain hypothetical assumptions as true as an article of faith. Everybody does the latter all the time, but tend to be unaware that they are doing this. Furthermore, what hypotheses people take on faith in their daily life vary, and there is no True foundation that one can show to be the case. Even scientists must have faith that the universe behaves in a reasonable enough way that what they are doing produces sensible results (and at present it appears this way, though one cannot answer questions as to the past and future on such matters given only available evidence -- circularities abound when you try.)

As a study of the past, material science can only investigate 'what appears to have been, based on current evidence', and not 'what actually was' in the very possible case that these two notions: 'what appears to have been', and 'what was', do not converge. It is not sensible for one conducting a scientific investigation into 'what was' based on current evidence to assume otherwise, for then they have no foundations. But just because this is a necessary assumption for the investigating scientists neither makes it true, nor implies that others should take on this assumption. The alternative is that the past cannot be deduced logically from available evidence, and then one must look to other sources of inspiration. Scientists do not do this, but many religious believers do. Thus we find that the two camps may be standing on different, incompatible, foundations, both of which can make sense depending on your standpoint. Total victory on the part of the evolution brigade is as absurd as an 'it's all in Gen 1' approach, being possible only with the kind of conquest over peoples thinking and beliefs that the Christians and Muslims have tried in the past. (Guess what: other belief systems survived, and a new one is now in the ascendency, but needs to learn from past attempts at conquest of belief and realise that there are better ways forward.) On both sides, though more on the fundamentalist religious side, people need to be encouraged, gently, to open their minds to other possibilities besides the ones they take on faith. And this taking things on blind faith is, so far as I'm concerned, philosophically unavoidable. Anyone whether of a holy book or a science book, who believes otherwise is deluded.

Things do happen. For a reason? Reason requires linguistic expression and, on a pure combinatorical level, human language is inadequate to describe everything. Thus there will be many phenomena for which there are no rational reasons which humans will ever find. Some things happen for an understandable reason, others happen for reasons that will be forever beyond humankind, yet others will happen for reasons that theoretically don't exist. Thought experiment: Just look at the growth of possibilities as your 'universe' gets bigger and compare this with the growth of possibilities explicable within that 'universe'.

Magical Thinking is, at some point, unavoidable: the reliability of mathematics in the realm of physics is a phenomena that we trust and rely upon, but why it should be that way is not something we can deal with. It just works. Most examples of magical thinking express ideas of behaviour of reality which either contradict everyday experience or are unverifiable or unverified by science and the scientific methods available to us at the time. But to say that science can disprove magical ideas requires that we assume that scientific insights generalise well beyond the point where we've verified them experimentally, and this is, again, a kind of belief in magic. We've seen a pattern in nature and believe that pattern applies elsewhere, or someone's told us of a pattern and we believe in it. Science adds rigour but never totally gets us away from this kind of issue.

You either believe in magic and are aware of it, or else you believe in magic and are unaware of it. Either way, you believe in magic, and more than you realise.