Thought I'd chime in with my two penn'orth...

Tony wrote:

If we weren't able to sit here contemplating our own existence, then we wouldn't be contemplating our own existence.

That's the WAP (Weak Anthropic Principle, not to be confused with mobile telephony, of course!) in a nutshell, or to quote from an argument on the Internet Infidels website:

The WAP is significant in that it makes the improbability of any one universe (i.e. our own) irrelevant. We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.

Which, to me, copes quite nicely with the calculations of probability you come across from time to time that are so high that it all seems completely improbable.

And I couldn't agree with you more that it's necessary to emphasise that the Big Bang Theory only talks about the first few moments, not about life at all - and what happens before the initial singularity (if the concept of "before" has any meaning, rather than being a question like "what's north of the North Pole?"), is in all likelyhood completely impossible to determine.

I also think it's important to separate the fact of Evolution, as defined as "any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next", from the theories of how current flora and fauna came to be as they are, from the initial creation of life on the planet. The first is demonstrable in any biology lab; the second open to debate, but the main theories have such a weight of evidence behind them that I find it unreasonable to believe otherwise; and the third is unknown, possibly unknowable, but I don't consider it unreasonable to assign blind chance to it (q.v. the WAP!), especially given such research as this.