I think, perhaps, Little Hawk, that belief in something is a very different thing to the empirical demonstration of its existence. I don't just believe in numbers, or bugs (or even myself) though I accept my concept & understanding of them are culturally derived, or not. For instance, I have little concept of number, but I know how far a bundle of fivers is going to go in ASDA; I am no dietician yet I know which food is good for me, and which isn't, or what's going to happen to my brain when I sink those beers I bought earlier. This is Gnosis. I don't just believe that by banging on these keys in a certain order I can write these words, I KNOW. Just as I know these words are themselves the product of 50,000 years of human communication, each enshrined by concept and ordered by seemingly innate & ancient structures of grammar and syntax. I also KNOW people are WRONG if they mistake these STRUCTURES for RULES, unless, of course all rules are defined by exception. There are few absolutes when it comes to opinions and perspectives - this much is self-evident too.

It is, I think, an old gaff to say such things are a matter of faith, and to then put them on the same plain as things that DO require faith - UFOs (in the ETH sense at least) / Folk Music / God etc. etc. - simply because without a strong consensus of what is REAL, our whole world view wouldn't just fall apart, it wouldn't have existed in the first place. Imagination is a wonderful thing - collectively, individually - but it is toward objective falsifiable enlightenment that the road of learning leads and the religious invariably fall off along the wayside onto stony ground and fail to thrive in the hapless realm of their own parables wherein there is no difference between what is, and what ain't.