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I know I said I wasnt going to post again but I had sent a copy of our thread to a friend of mine, who incidentally is a longtime student of philosopher (going on twenty years anyway) He is my most respected friend and at time advesary in argumentation. He replied to me with some points that I have his permission to post. I found them to be valid and so wished to introduce them into the argument. He said the following.

First of all, anyone who has actually studied epistemology should be able to tell you that what it ALL eventually boils down to is where your personal comfort level is of drawing a line in the sand and saying, "Ok, I'll accept these assertions as true for a foundation but I can't really prove them. I CAN prove things AFTER them if I have first agreed to take this set of foundational assumptions as true." The key being though that no matter who you are or where you start you ALWAYS build on a set of assumptions that you are willing (actually that you HAVE) to take on faith. And it all boils down to a comfort level usually derived from personal experience and not necessarily rigorous logical examination. If that were the case, there really could be no foundational set of assumptions.
Kant, for me came the closest to an honest pursuit of this with "Cogito ergo sum." (I think therefore I am). This is actually a lovely (and entertaining if you are into that kind of thing) little piece of reasoning when you follow him through it. But, even as sound as he was convinced it was and as sound as I think it is....once you get down to Kant's bedrock(that I exist), the fun really begins as you start poking holes in that and you really don't exist at all. Even after he has accounted for the great deceiver (a hypothetical being in his rationale, not necessarily the devil), he posits that he exists because even if everything he thinks is wrong, he is still thinking. Is he? How do I know? How do I know I am thinking? Maybe I am really nothing more than some fading electric feedback from a datadownload...(you can really exotic on all these variations of the "brain in a vat"/Matrix scenarios).
Anyway, without getting too far off track. If you are going to pursue epistemology...be prepared. If you honestly and rigorously pursue it, it ALL spirals towards skepticism. The great irony is that even the skeptics "believe" in something without a foundation....They believe that there is nothing that can be known.....which is of course a hard assertion of knowledge which of course means that you aren't really a skeptic at all.
If you remember, this argument is how you and I finally "broke the ice". But my point is that epistemology, like all philosphy including Ayn Rand's (which most philosphers just call "Objectivism" and drop the epistemology)is an interesting and certainly very enlightening pursuit. But the enlightenment you receive is that there really is very little that you can truly know for sure and without question and therefore almost everything you claim to "know" is founded on some other assertion that you simply "accept". A humbling thing to keep in mind when arguing with others.
I would not at all say that it is a worthless pursuit. But to run around making absolute epistemolgical claims is sophomoric at best. I say that acknowledging that there are all sorts of knowledge claims that I believe to be very defensible but I acknowledge that I am basing them on a foundation of BELIEFS, not facts.
Men and women of science, philosphy and theology ALL work from a set of ssumptions they have agreed (at least to themselves) to acknowledge as true even though they can not prove them. If you want to get into a real hotbed of argument. Spend some time studying the philosphy of science. The modern religion. Science and technology is above all this arguing right? Because they deal in hard cold objective facts. Wrong. There is no such thing and science has no more claim to truth than religion. The only thing science can trumpet is usefulness and practicality (which of course it tends to be). On the other hand, if you believe your eternal soul is at stake....is science or theology more practical?
Anyway, if you begin arguing this with almost anyone, in the scientificcommunity or not you will find that they generally have no idea how much their beliefs and their "knowledge" is based on absolute faith, ignorance, or just plain guesswork.
As regards the assertions that the belief in God is not rational, religious people don't find esthetic values in art, Christians caused the dark ages and other silly notions. Does this person not realize that that his assertions are nothing more than hypothesis? Is he incapable of recognizing that the very fact that he holds those beliefs as "given" is nothing more than his own assertion of a belief. He "believes" that such and such is the case and thus it is true? His main premise, that there is no God, is in and of itself utterly absurd taken as a truth. It cant be declared as a truth because it can not be proven. You can not "prove" a negative as even the most elementary student of philosophy knows, therefore the position that there is no God can only be an assertion of belief as it is utterly un-provable.
I would also add that generally speaking no philosopher is ever taken seriously when they simply appear to parrot as a disciple the teachings of a single philosopher. Philosophy is about thinking and what we think as people and as cultures changes from day to day and year to year for someone to declare that a single philosopher has the absolute truth to the keys of rational thought is utter nonsense. They are not thinking they are parroting. Perhaps it is good in the sense that at least they believe in something, but they should refrain from criticizing others who have the decency to do their thinking for themselves. It only makes them look stupid.