Well, welcome back. In the last episode, we were talking about having proof for God. We were responding to a request for proof for God.

So in this, we're going to go a little bit deeper into that whole topic now. And this first

question comes from Alan. How would you understand the difference between believing and knowing

from a biblically informed Christian perspective? With knowing in the secular perspective,

being that which one can see, smell, touch,

or demonstrate empirically, how is knowing understood with much of the Christian worldview

being that which we come to believe?

Well, this notion of knowing even a secular basis is controversial.

That particular way of understanding knowledge is called verificationism, and that means

that group of people, and this was very popular in the early part of the 20th century, and

ended up falling out of favor for very obvious reasons.

I'll share it in a moment.

But the verificationism is that a statement is not even meaningful if it can't be verified in an empirical fashion.

Okay.

Like the way scientific things are characteristically verified.

But the fact is almost nothing we know.

Just take an inventory, write 10 things down that you think you know.

And virtually none of those things do you know in virtue of a verificationist kind of view, an empirical and thus. Even that there are atoms, you know,

that are what the electrons go around the nucleus of the atom. Well, that's science. That's empirically

tested. Yeah, but that's not how you know it. You know it because somebody else told you. So,

you're knowing that by authority, not by empirical method.

So this is one of the reasons that empiricism or verificationism, which are synonymous for our purposes right here, fail is because they can't satisfy their own demand.

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