Good discussion, jpsdad. I'm not real good at taking things on faith. Observational evidence either supports a proposition, or it doesn't. Many things people believe are, in fact, false.
I was trained from childhood to think skeptically, especially at stuff "everyone" knows is true, or because "science" says so.
A brief comment on the Big Bang. Roger Penrose & Stephen Hawking demonstrated that prior to the BB, neither space, time, matter, or energy existed. Thus, whatever caused the BB had to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial. Also immensely powerful, and, given the incredible fine tuned universe for life, intelligent with purpose. Implications are so obvious that the atheistic Soviet Union actually forbade teaching the BB for years.
Back to fish. I recall reading that scientists have discovered that the genetic instructions to build an air breathing animal are found in fish, something like fifty million years prior to land animals appearing. Hard to explain why these utterly useless genes would hang around if they were the mere product of chance.
