... choose1
Yes, I really mean the italicized part. If you've ever watched, for example, Monte Python's Life of Brian you should deeply understand my point. 
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... Axiom2
There is not the slightest hint of tongue in cheek in this presentation of the Fundamental Axioms of Religion here. I have had the direct personal experience of ``discussing'' my understanding of the history and origins of the Universe based on the Axiom of Causality, introduced and discussed at length below, which leads (along with various others) to the laws of physics and the other sciences, compared to their understanding of the history and origins of the Universe based on The Axioms of Religion as embodied in (say) Genesis.

I conclude that the Universe is oh, 13.7 billion years old give or take a few percent. They conclude that it is a few thousands of years old.

I point out patiently the entire facade of reasoning (Maxwell's equations, parallax, stellar dynamics, the Hubble constant, rates of radioactive decay, geological and paleontological evidence), from axioms through observations on to conclusions, that leads me to believe that whenever I look up at the night sky, light that is almost a million times older than that falls on my face .

They patiently point out that the Bible in general clearly and repeatedly states, from the Commandments on, in any number of divinely inspired prophetic statements, that its entire content is divinely inspired and infallibly, literally correct. Therefore, if all of my science is producing answers that disagree with any portion of the Bible, then it must be wrong.

If radioactive decay rates show it to be older, they must have changed or maybe I just don't understand the initial conditions. If there is a layered, apparently evolutionary fossil record buried in rock all over the world, it just proves that there once was a Really Big Flood and all the antediluvian beasts that didn't make the Ark settled out sorted by a curious mix of weight and density and size that simulates an evolutionary trend and were chemically turned rapidly into to stone by chemical processes that we don't understand or that might have occurred more rapidly then. If the night sky shows light that appears to have come from far far away and long long ago, then either the Universe was created with the light already on the way or maybe the laws of physics changed and light was a lot slower in the beginning. Even if all our current observations of physical laws and the temporal sequencing of biological events is totally, incredibly, twenty-significant-digit kind of consistent what reasons do we have for believing that physical laws haven't changed over time according to a higher law?

No fooling. I wish I were fooling. If nothing else, I've learned that as soon as one discovers in a debate of any sort that your opponent/partner has different Prime Axioms, unless you share the Axiom of Open-Mindedness, the wisest thing to do is immediately terminate the discussion, back away slowly (possibly with one hand on your wallet and another on a small but powerful handgun), and go do something useful, like doing a crossword puzzle, or taking a nice long nap.

The damnedest thing is, of course, that I can no more prove my axioms than they can prove theirs, and hence both our conclusions are in some deep sense equally irrational. Maybe the laws of physics have changed over time in a way that precisely cannot be detected now. Formulated this way, how can I prove otherwise, by definition? Logical positivism properly rejects both this hypothesis and its converse as equally unprovable (although ``logical positivists'' invariably fail to do so, because the inevitable conclusion of this reasoning chain is that no question can be answered and hence should not be asked). Belief is belief, whether in the laws of physics or the book of Genesis. But read on... 

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... man3
Hard on cats though. Even very bright people can be so silly. In the East, the question to the master is ``Do dogs have Buddha nature?'' (souls, loosely speaking) and the answer is to whack your student upside the head with a dog, or make an inscrutable remark about the wind whistling through the holes in heads. In the West, it was Descartes announcing that ``Cats have no souls'' (buddha nature, loosely speaking) and throwing his cat out of his upper story window to demonstrate it. Mmmrrrrreooow-splat!

I prefer the more interesting questions of whether or not buddha had Dog nature and whether Descartes' cat landed on its feet, shook its head a couple of times, and moseyed off to philosophize on a warm sunny wall belonging to a cat-lover far away from Descartes. 

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... faith4
An interesting parenthetical note is that a deep study of physics teaches one to view time as just another dimension, and to view the time ordering of causality to work symmetrically in time. Not only is the notion of ``greater cause'' incorrect because of the ordinal ordering of quality of cause, it is incorrect because of the time ordering implicit to the cause preceding the effect. In physics, a better way of viewing the equations of motion for a ``Universe'' is as a boundary value problem where an essentially static solution is generated for all spacetime points as much by the conditions in the infinite future as by those in the infinite past. The axioms of physics (a.k.a. physical laws) have gotten changed so often over the last four hundred years that physicists, at least, are pretty well in touch with the mutability of axioms and the profound consequences of ``minor'' changes. Which might explain why I'm writing this document instead of some eighteenth century philosopher - back then they still thought Newton was right. 
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... experience5
The Internet Encylopedian of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/l/logpos.htm 
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... meaning6
I might just as easily formulate as an alternative axiom that the only way to determine whether or not a statement is meaningful is to see if I understand it, if it has any meaning to me, whether or not I can prove it by means of experience. Or that a statement only has meaning if it can be proven by a passage in the Bible. Or that nothing has meaning. Or that everything, all propositions, have meaning, if only as themselves. This is an axiom in the ``unprovable assumption'' sense because it is not the only possible criterion of meaning and indeed is a little bit of an odd one by the standards of the dictionary and the cognitive process itself. 
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... perception''7
...and equally likely have a very hard time understanding why one cannot ask where is that electron and how fast is it going at the same time. As I believe Feynman once said, ``Nobody understands quantum mechanics...'' 
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