Absolute knowing?  At one point in my atheist discussion group this month, a couple of people raised the issue of whether there is absolute knowledge.  They both understood that because knowledge is based ultimately on perception, what we think we know is heavily dependent on how our senses take in the world.  

No argument there.

     Where these people differed was that despite this caution, we can, one insisted, nonetheless acquire "absolute" knowledge.  That is, we can know things, maybe even reality, exactly as they are

     Perhaps.  While we could debate the point at length, it seems to me that something is missing.  The materialistic viewpoint only allows for discussion based on what is before it.  It will not admit to the possibility of anything of which it cannot, in some way, sense empirically.  Fair enough.  But this overlooks that, even if we agree that the world is all that is, we still do not have a ready answer as to why we are even here to debate such things.  We're just collections of molecules arguing over whether we can know about other collections of molecules.  There is no framework for debate.

     And we're still spinning our wheels.  Yes, in the end, perception determines reality.  But this can only be true if it is a reality that we made and not merely perceived.

     And the former we will never be able to do.