On another note, responding to the statements that no one "knows" religion isn't true, I offer this: My friend Billy and I were sitting in my living room the o

On another note, responding to the statements that no one "knows" religion isn't true, I offer this: My friend Billy and I were sitting in my living room the other day when I told him that in the kitchen, there was a bottle of tequila. He went into the kitchen and saw some El Jimador, and when he came back he knew there really was a bottle of tequila in the kitchen. So we didn't need to go to ABC to pick some up for later. Now, in a technical sense, Billy doesn't actually /know/ there is a bottle of tequila. He saw it, but many possibilities exist: 1) He was mistaken, and the power of my suggestion made him mistake a bottle of bourbon for a bottle of tequila all the way across the kitchen. 2) He actually hallucinated, maybe he doesn't realize that he's Schizophrenic. 3) I tricked him by placing a fake bottle of tequila in the kitchen. 4) etc. So in the pure technical sense, Billy can't say for certain that there's no bottle of tequila. However, for the purposes of planning a party for later that night, we'll be utterly shocked if the bottle isn't there. I'm not going to grill him: "But dude, how do you KNOW the bottle is there?" -- he saw it, it's there. We'll say the probability of the bottle being there is ~1 (which means approaching 1, a la a mathematical limit. Mathematically we can treat it as 100% probable, but the ~ acknowledges that it's not literally 100%) So let's say a religion formed around the idea that my kitchen contains a bottle of tequila. Someone who didn't believe it could plausibly say: No one really knows if the tequila exists, because that would require a PERFECT knowledge of the kitchen, and no one can have an absolutely perfect knowledge of Pete's kitchen. Humans are fallible, therefore we will never TRULY know if the bottle exists or not. So to that person I say, you are correct. Instead of there being a probability of 1 that the bottle exists, there is instead a probability of ~1. So the rational thing to do is behave as though the bottle is present, because the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that it's there. There is maybe a one in a billion or one in a trillion chance that it's not. When we have the party later that night, I enjoy a Margarita on the rocks, with sea salt around the edges of the glass. I add my drunkenness (I had several margaritas) to the evidence that the tequila bottle exists. The party is a success. Yay! So, my point is that it's not correct to act like ~1 is the same as .5 -- many people try to say that because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, that the chance of God (the God of the Book, anyway) existing is 50/50. It's actually more like ~0.