#Knowledge is #justified #true #belief. That definition is about 2500 years old, and although #philosophers have been trying to come up with a better definition ever since, no one has. All claimed counterexamples are #sophistry.

A lot of my fellow #scientists and/or #atheists have trouble with the word "belief" because they associate it with faith—which in turn can be defined as belief *without* justification, or whose truth is unknowable. But it's really a lot simpler than that.

If I walk inside dripping wet, and someone asks me if it's raining, and I say it is because I've just been out in it, then I'm stating my belief. What you believe is anything you can honestly affirm if someone asks you, "Is such-and-such true?"

Belief can be simple and immediate or complicated and long-term. It can be trivial or profound. It can be true or false, justified or unjustified, testable or untestable. The honesty, that's the key. Knowledge, a proper subset of belief, has a much higher standard.

The above is an extended way of saying that if someone begins a loaded question with an aggressive, sarcastic "Did you know ..." then you are amply justified in truly believing they're full of shit.