This is worthy of being split @moderators
Well if you can’t in principle use evidence to test past events, evidence does not matter. It just comes down to what we each personally believe, independent of evidence. That doesn’t just apply to origins, but also the whole field of history and essentially the entire legal system. If there is no meaningful way to interrogate the past, we quickly reach major absurdities.
I used to agree with you about the distinction between historical and operational science. Then I found out how all science relies on past data, and historical science can produce new data.
What happened was that I was looking at the progress of knowledge from the wrong timeline. The key timeline to consider is the progress of our knowledge, not the ordering of events in the past. From that perspective, you see that historial science in fact has predicted new data, data that certainly existed before the prediction, but was only discovered after being predicted.