Those examples you give, Mish, are still hypotheses. Which can now be revised based on the new data you provide.

You need to define how YOU mean belief. Which version.

BTW, I agree with Gribble. Like him, blind belief is something I avoid, except for esoteric things like music appreciation, but that is something that noone would ever try to rationalize. In that sense, religious belief is basically ‘a sense of taste’ or a personal preference about how to understand one’s existence. A particularly viral one, IMO, b/c of the seductive nature of people needing an answer to the Big Question & its complete lack of testability. Religion basically sets itself up as an untestable paradox.

I try to live my life as rationally as possible & avoid invoking untestable explanations for things. Particularly when there are perfectly good theories to explain the world I live in. And if something doesn’t make sense to me (b/c one can’t know everything) then I look for an explanation or at least a set of reproducible results. Like Gribble's car mechanic example. I don’t ‘believe’ in religion, santa claus, astrology or magic tho—there’s simply no data to support them. I might like to believe in things like alternative medicine, space aliens on earth, and ESP but unfortunately the data we have about these things do not support their existence either. If they ever did (assuming the experiments are solid) then I would reconsider my position.

Your weatherman (or woman, whatever) example is actually a good one for this argument. The difference b/t rational and belief-based living would be this: a weatherman has been predicting it would rain fire & brimstone from the sky for ~5000 years. Except for the odd, unscheduled meteorite, which we understand the physical basis for now (thank you Newton & Greek/Chinese astronomers--not God--oops!), they’ve been pretty awful at predicting the weather. The Weather Channel is a lot more reliable, so my bet is on them & not “The End of the World is Nigh” folks.