Is knowing better than believing?

Question

What is the link between beleiving and knowing anyways. I wonder if atheists respect people who see a pantheistic reality or gnostic.

Answer 1

There's a lot of philosophical study of this, and it's a difficult question.

A fairly good answer is that knowledge is "justified true belief": that you know something when you believe it, it's true, and you have good reason to believe it. But as one smart aleck philosopher pointed out, sometimes you believe it and have a good reason to believe it and it's true...but your reason happened to not be true.

But anyway...where the typical person trips up on this is in thinking that we are in a position to tell the difference between our beliefs and our knowledge. Many people think that they can somehow tell, perhaps through feelings of certainty, that something they believe is also true knowledge.

But of course being certain doesn't make you correct, and in fact in general it seems that people who are certain of things tend to be the people who are wrong about them. Certainty is often (usually? almost always?) the product of ignorance. You become certain of something by not thinking too hard about it.

I suppose that I respect pantheists or gnostics as much as I respect believers in general (there's a wide variation there, depending on quite a few things). I generally don't respect people who think that "we each make our own reality", though - that's just nonsense. Reality is not just what we believe. It's separate from that.

Answer 2

There is no link between believing and knowing.

I respect people on their ability, knowledge, and character.

Answer 3

I don't see any link between believing and knowing. Knowing is absolute certainty something is right. So I think knowing is better.

Answer 4

Knowing or knowledge will always be better than believing or belief.

Answer 5

Faith is a substitute for evidence.

Belief is a substitute for knowledge.

faith + belief = self-delusion

Answer 6

Neither

Answer 7

for sure