How much confidence do you place in the scientific theory that ordinary matter is made of discrete units, or 'atoms', as opposed to being infinitely divisible?
More than 50%? 90%? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? More? If so, how much more? (If describing your answer in percentages is cumbersome, then feel free to use the logarithmic scale of decibans, where 10 decibans corresponds to 90% confidence, 20 to 99%, 30 to 99.9%, etc.)
This question freely acknowledges that there are aspects of physics which the atomic theory does not directly cover, such as conditions of extremely high energy. This question is primarily concerned with that portion of physics in which the atomic theory makes testable predictions.
This question also freely acknowledges that its current phrasing and presentation may not be the best possible to elicit answers from the LessWrong community, and will be happy to accept suggestions for improvement.
Edit: By 'atomic theory', this question refers to the century-plus-old theory. A reasonably accurate rewording is: "Do you believe 'H2O' is a meaningful description of water?".
So all we need is an example of a universe without atoms (corresponding to the example of someone who did win the lottery despite the improbability of doing that) for this analogy to work.
I think there are fields of thought in which the best paradigm is that something either is or isn't, and where probabalistic thinking will do no good, and if forced or contrived to seem to work, may do harm (e.g. the models by which Wall Street came up with a plausible -- to some -- argument that CDSs of subprime mortgages could be rated AAA).
And there are fields of thought in which the idea that something simply is or isn't is the thing likely to mislead or do harm (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number where one gets into trouble by thinking a number either is or isn't "interesting").
The "interesting number" business isn't probabalistic either, though there may be some usefulness, in Baysian arguments that treat subjective "levels of certainty" like probabilities.