Since I was a science prof who taught many branches of the sciences at a public university, I'd like to say one [in my view important] thing about "knowing". When I taught my kids about "the scientific method", I taught them that it is just one way of "knowing". I then pointed out to the young scientific idealists that there probably never has been a scientist who has strictly used it. All of scientific research begins with vast numbers of intuitions in an individual's mind, which constrict the unthinkable number of possible things to discover down to a hopeful one or two. This process is neither strictly "logical" nor "rational". The only reason it is successful is that after all the wild-in-the-woods irrationality of the research path beginnings, the "finder" is supposed to [with great humility] present the findings to the world for critique. The only way such critique is possible is if someone other than yourself can "run the same experiment" and get the same results. Therefore, the subject matter of this method restricts itself to something anyone might be able to do and "see" in a controlled repetition.
Much of our current science doesn't, at least in practicality, meet this requirement. You or I cannot commandeer the Large Hadron Collider. You or I can't get our hands on the Dead Sea Scrolls either. Etc etc ad infinitum. We live in a world wherein we largely trust almost everything to faith of one kind or another. No one should underrate this. It is why small cadres of very subject-limited "experts" can get thinking AND HOPING too hard in a narrow direction which no "outside authority" can really check, and pronounce something "true" which turns out to be quite stupid years later. "Truth" in science tends, thereby, to be a moving target. Einstein "refines" Newton. Someone will "refine" Einstein for speeds extremely close to the speed of Light, as almost everyone is VERY uncomfortable with the "infinities" which show up as the curve closes out. New Physics will someday arise.
Now a last very controversial thing: the statement was made about belief in God being an example of an inferior way of knowing since it could not be knowing at all, but "just" faith. In my opinion, it is possible for me to "know" God just fine. If I have "worked at it", through many meditations with Nature [The Creation] I often feel the Presence of God directly there. In fact, that Presence is far more palpable than Higgs Bosons. I often will sit in my front yard chair and hold a large stone, simply hefting it. Do I feel the effects of the Higgs? Yes. But what I really feel is the sustaining Power of the Creator's Will constantly through his Universal Laws, holding together the underpinnings of the Universe. In this preposterous mere belief, I am in good company. This is EXACTLY what Isaac Newton felt, and why it was a deep spiritual experience for him to have discovered the "Law of Gravity" --- to him one of the Great Words of Creation spoken by God "at The Beginning."
Newton's measurements and calculations were his science. The powerful tangible feeling that he got from them was his spiritual knowledge. He knew the difference. One belongs in the restricted classroom that we call "science". The other in a far more important classroom that we call Life. I never "taught" Newton's spirituality in science classroom, but I would answer questions [making the proper distinctions for the students]. "Kansas" is wrong. Only the part which is science should be in the science classroom. Newton's spirituality, Johnny von Neumann's personal "proof" of the Great Primary Observer, and Intelligent Design theories are intellectually important, but in the wrong classroom.
There are more than one ways of knowing.
