Clarification/Follow-up by tonyrey on 08/26/08 2:07 am:
frick,

Facts are mysterious creatures. They are intangible but refuse to go away. If we say they are just words we are faced with the problem of what we know, i.e. the individual items of knowledge.

We know, for example, there are quanta of physical energy even though they are invisible. They may eventually disappear but the fact that they exist now will always remain. It is indestructible!

Do you follow?

Clarification/Follow-up by frick on 08/28/08 4:54 am:
No, I don't follow so, for this one, I will just sit on the sidelines and watch.

Clarification/Follow-up by tonyrey on 08/28/08 8:27 pm:
frick

It may help if we say that a fact is a truth - i.e. correspondence between a belief and reality. We cannot grasp the truth with our senses but only with our intellect. We know things we cannot perceive. We see two objects, compare them and realize they are similar but their similarity is intangible. Yet it doesn't exist only in our mind. Even if no one recognized the similarity it would still exist! And it will always be true that the similarity existed at a particular time in history. Nothing could ever destroy or alter that truth.

It goes to show that truth is literally far stranger than fiction... and that materialism is a very crude interpretation of reality...