M Ted, now we are getting to the nub of the matter. Science, as you correctly point out, offers little in the way of absolute truth. The trouble is that NOTHING else does, either. So in the end, we are talking about what we mean by truth. There must be thousands of definitions, ranging from an unattainable ideal a la Plato to what's most convenient for the state or the individual.

What science has on offer is an attempt to approach a particular kind of truth- a correspondence between causes and effects, that we can be reasonably sure of (within the limitations) because we can repeat it time and again. When it's right, it works every time, and we can be reasonably sure that it reflects something true about the world in the conditions we exist in. And by "true" we mean that it appears to be something underlying, that would remain true even if people ceased to exist.

Now, the challenge for other kinds of truth is to say what are the limits- is artistic truth (beauty?) something that is independent of people, or is it confined to humans, to some human cultures, to sub- groups within those cultures? How can we tell if taking action on the basis of that truth will help or hinder us in different circumstances? By religious truth do we mean something in the same sense as a scientific truth or a metaphor, an artistic truth? And today that last question is anything but hypothetical.