What’s the difference between believing a thing and knowing a thing? What is the basis of knowing? Is it direct experience?
Let’s take something totally mundane as an example. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow morning. It has risen every morning since the first morning I can recall, and everyone else seems to share this experience, so I feel confident arranging my life in such a way that when I go to sleep at night, I believe the sun will rise the next morning. It’s not based on faith, because there is a lot of evidence to suggest it will. And I don’t know it will for certain, because the sun could blow up sometime while I’m asleep.
How about something a little more challenging. Let’s say you were abandoned by your mother at birth. She gave you up for adoption. Your adoptive parents told you she was a prostitute and wanted nothing to do with you, that she was a drug addict and left you on the steps of a church. Every time you got sick as a child, they would bring up that it was likely due to the fact that your mother was taking drugs while pregnant, or that you were malnourished or neglected prior to being adopted. You develop skin rashes in grade school or asthma, and it’s all put down as a result of how badly you were neglected as an infant.
You develop a complex. You believe that you are sickly because of this early deprivation. You nurture feelings of abandonment, a deep sadness, separation anxiety, rage or some other issues, based on your belief in being abandoned and neglected by your own birth mother. You have problems with self esteem, problems in relationships, you go to years of psycho therapy, read self help books, join support groups.
In reality, your “adoptive” parents actually kidnapped you as a baby from your very loving parents. Your parents are bereft and have never stopped looking for you, thinking about you, hoping someday by some miracle to find you.
Let’s move on to something more direct and experiential. You are driving on the freeway and suddenly you see Jesus sitting in the passenger seat. He tells you to change lanes now. He even reaches over in the split second that you are motionless, stunned, and grabs the wheel and starts the process for you. You change lanes just in time to avoid a truck swerving out of nowhere, which would have killed you for certain had Jesus not intervened.
If you were not a Christian, you might convert on the spot. If you were a Christian, this might be taken on face value, that Jesus actually appeared and intervened to save your life, though he didn’t seem much concerned with the lives of the other people who were hurt or died in the wreck. Or you might think you were psychotic, and seek medical help. Or you might believe it was your subconscious projecting an image of Jesus in order to protect you from the accident, which was registered by the subconscious mind before it could be registered by the much slower conscious mind.
There is also the vast reservoir of received knowledge and received wisdom. You believe the earth orbits the sun, but how many of you have actually made the observations and calculations to verify this for yourselves?