There is also a difference between scientific fact and truth. Scientific fact is what science to that point has determined to be true. It may be patently false, and it would fall under the category of perceptive trith for the time being.

Like someone else brought up: just because people in the past thought the world was flat did not make the world flat. People behaved as if the world was flat (boating patterns), and so that percieved truth effectly reality, but that didn't make the earth flat in any absolute sense.

Matt Fahrenbacher