> You feel immense certainty about your position

How certain I am about anything has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What I said is true regardless of what anyone believes (me included). Reality comes first and is what it is. Beliefs follow (in case of people who follow the evidence) or they don't (in case of people who are choosing to ignore the evidence or believe liars or clueless but confident).

> but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for other people

I didn't attempt it. I have done that it the past, but since then I learned that there are plenty of coherent legible packages and other people still don't care.

> It's just this big ball of interlocking faiths and trusts in authority that cause you to say that.

Sure, exactly the same thing that causes me to exit my apartment through the door, not my window on the third floor.

Again, what I believe and why, doesn't influence truthfulness of anything. I may only do the best I can to try to believe only truthful things.

> but this is little different to a religious person asserting that unbelievers are wrong; why, well because you've got to have faith, obviously

not really, if you are correct

If I say 'addition of real numbers is commutative' it's not a religious statement. And if you say it's not, no matter how much proof you demand from me, and how little I provide you'd still be wrong and I'll be right even if only because I trusted the right authority and you trusted the false one.

> Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.

The responses will get increasingly dismissive as the people who are correct run out of ideas how to provide arguments that unconvinced people will be willing to honestly engage with. I won't pay for a ticket on Jeff Bezos rocket to show you that Earth is round, because if I did you'll conclude that windows were screens displaying computer graphics, and you've been drugged to feel weightless and start listing indisputable evidence of all that, where indisputable here means, you won't be willing to discuss it in detail.

> lab leak hypothesis ... crazy fringe conspiracy theory ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore

I'm sorry to inform you, but it still is. No new evidence was discovered. The fact that more people started to believe it and repeat it doesn't point to any additional truthfulness despite what you might feel (due to mere exposure effect).

> staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence.

Very improbable things happen all the time. Because there's a lot of very improbable things that could potentially happen. Unlikely is infinitely far from impossible.

> Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists.

Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it? Scientist are literally the people who dedicated their lives to learning tools that let you tell truth from falsehood. You statement sounds like, we should listen less to music made or played by musicians.

Or do you think we shouldn't trust people at all? But we ourselves, are people too. To operate in reality you need to seek knowledge about it from best sources available. And if you have trouble determining the best sources, you should look for sources that will help you to determine what the best sources are.