"A fact is something that has been proved to be true." Um...proved how? All experience is subjective. Witnesses (if any) misremember, CCTV evidence (if any) misleads, and Bob may have a very good reason for insisting he was somewhere else that night, but it's perfectly possible to convince someone under hypnosis that they've seen all that. Or none of it. All the evidence ends up coming through the same twisty, furred-up channels, to be assessed by the same spongy pinky-grey instrument, and all facts derived from that evidence are in fact opinions.

But leaving that aside (see "studenty and pretentious"), I think jelas's and my point is somewhat different. You wouldn't, in the ordinary way, ask for proof that we talked to Bob. You wouldn't question the assertion. You'd trust us, as a matter of course, to know what we were talking about and report it honestly. You'd believe in Bob on our say-so. There's nothing wrong with that; it's normal human interaction. Even if Bob were living in a shack in the Nullarbor Plain, hundreds of miles from human habitation, his only companions a crocodile, a case of Fosters and a mobile phone, even if no human being had clapped eyes on him since he last walked into Norralorrawonga in 2002 to buy diesel for his genny, you'd take his existence on trust. Bob would be, to you, a fact.

When it comes to God? All about the proof. My experience of God (if I had ever had one) might be even more intimate and vibrant and real to me that any experience I ever had of Bob, but to a sceptical enquirer, who would believe in Bob in a moment purely on my say-so, God would only ever be an opinion, an alternative fact that I must be putting about for some ulterior motive. Something I have chosen to pretend to believe in, rather than a fact that shapes my entire identity and my view of the universe I live in. My own fact, to which, as per the truism, I am not entitled.

I don't know your own personal stance on religion, weebleflip, but in my experience with hardline sceptics all that "may or may not be" stuff only comes out for best. It's very, very clear that they would never believe in God even if i were to give them his phone number, and they traced it to that shack in the Nullarbor Plain, and flew out to confront him and his crocodile. He could turn the Fosters into wine and they would always know it had just been some trick. They could canvass all three of the inhabitants of Norralorrawonga and they could say "oh yeah, that's God, raised old Jeb from the dead last year," and the sceptics would know they were ignorant, or deluded, or lying. Bob they would accept without question; God they never, ever would. And that wouldn't be their opinion; to them it would be a fact, and they would never think of it as "their own fact."

Bottom line is, it's one of those irregular verbs. I have the facts; you have beliefs; she has opinions, and unless I agree with them they're wrong. The "may or may not be" is just politeness, and while there's nothing wrong with being polite either, we should be candid about admitting that's all it is.