Do you not see the irrationality in what you just posted?
There's no such thing as an "almost" fact. There is fact, and there is speculation and theory. There is nothing else.
Even the most weighty preponderance of circumstantial evidence does not add up to one solitary FACT.
I spelled it out for you in my last post. There is only what we know, and what we do not know. Between those two things there is only the misty grey limbo of belief.
My personal integrity compels me to live with the truth. The truth in my world are those things which I can sense or measure in some way.
George has a dog. His dog continually gets into Sam's yard and terrorizes his cats and his children. Sam has repeatedly asked George to put some control in on his dog, and has finally told him that he'll "put a bullet in that dog if he crosses the fence again", but George just can't seem to keep his dog out of Sam's yard.
One day George comes home and finds Fido cold and lifeless in his back yard with some sort of hole in his head. He immediately "knows" that Sam shot his dog. But does George really "know" this - or is this just his theory, based on all of the circumstantial evidence to hand?
What George really knows, is that his dog is dead, and that there's a hole in his head. Nothing more. He didn't personally witness Sam shoot him, but he's convinced, nonetheless, of the truth of his conclusion.
You see where this is going?
You cannot know what you yourself do not see or sense in some manner. You can accept as true, something that has a great deal of testimony, historical precedent, circumstantial evidence, etc., as true, but you are simply supplanting belief for direct knowledge and indisputable facts.
Having said all that, I admit to having a few of my own beliefs, that is, things that I choose to accept, based on the strength of the subjective reality of others.
By the way, your last post raised both of my eyebrows. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for your perspective about personally verifiable FACTS.
However, I’m chronically prone to arguing the other side.
1. There IS NO TRULY 100% “OBJECTIVE” FACTUAL REALITY in our flawed time/space dimension as quantum physicists are so prone to affirming. Even the “hard” “science” of physics cannot any longer claim OBJECTIVE FACTS without qualifying the subjective and . . . relative aspects of the observer and even of that being observed.
2. WHEN a person 100% congruently INSISTS that they will ACCEPT NOTHING AS FACT which they have NOT OBSERVED AND VERIFIED PERSONALLY AND THOROUGHLY OBJECTIVELY
THEN
they have just fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole wholesale.
A) They are no more 100% purely OBJECTIVE than anyone else alive.
B) They will never have 100% of the perfect pristine 100% accurate facts about anything any more than anyone else will—personally observed, or not.
C) LOTS OF THINGS ARE NOT AS THEY APPEAR—even in physics experiments.
D) IF ONE WERE TO BE 100% CONGRUENT AND FULL OF INTEGRITY ON THE POSITION THAT ONLY PERSONALLY VERIFIABLE ‘FACTS’ CAN BE ACCEPTED PERSONALLY AS ‘FACTS,’
THEN, SUCH A PERSON WOULD HAVE A VERY LIMITED (IN TERMS OF SCOPE, OPTIONS, FLEXIBILITY) LIFE; AN EXTREMELY SHORT LIFE; AN EXTREMELY UNINFORMED LIFE; . . . and actually . . . a rather ignorant life.
E) LEARNING THINGS 100% TOTALLY AND ONLY BY FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE has never been correlated well with
—maturity
—success
—wisdom
—great knowledge
—understanding
—accurate predictions
. . .
I believe that what it comes down to is that essentially what you are insisting on is
that YOUR uniquely biased, flawed, clever, knowledgeable, learned, . . . whatever . . . subjective, imprecise, imperfect,
perceptions, measurements, observations
and the imperfect, biased, flawed, subjective THOUGHTS related thereto
JUST HAPPEN TO BE GREATLY BETTER than what you can collect from the array of ‘others’ out there reporting on the same thing.
. . . or put another way . . .
What when you have what —one? 3? 5? 8? 12?
UFO’s parked in your back yard . . . and an equal number of UFO pilots stiffed in as many freezers in your garage,
THEN you’ll KNOW something compared to knowing virtually nothing now.
I’m saying your criteria for KNOWING is more than a little troublesome, flawed.
And, it sets you up for . . . relatively . . . long periods of
relatively
greatly week degrees of knowing and probably very weak confidence therein.
#######################
Functionaly, in some ways, I’m more like you. I consider a very small number of things to be ABSOLUTELY KNOWN by me in the UFO field. I BELIEVE a larger number of things to be true. I hold very loosely but consider probably true a much larger number of things.
However, I accept confirmation from The Lord on all such in a wider variety of ways that you seem to. I’ve learned at 62 that I do NOT HAVE to EXPERIENCE everything the hard way first hand to accept things as true.