Hi, great question! I will focus on your first question, because I think your second question, about public policy, requires discussion of all sorts of things about the distribution of goods in a society, and the law (in the US, for example, we have to keep in mind that our constitution seems to forbid any such funding). Perhaps another panelist can take up those issues. I'll stick to the question whether the feelings that God exists can count as a good reason for believing in God. First I should point out that many philosophers have written on this, and have different views (shocking! I know). Some, writing in the Calvinist tradition (e.g. Alvin Palntinga and William Alston) think that some feelings that God exists are like perceptions, or sensations, of God, and they should count as evidence for God's existence just like a perception of, say, a table counts as evidence for a table. They both have arguments (different ones) to the effect that one can rationally regard one's feelings about God as...

I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind by 'definitive knowledge'. I suspect you mean a sort of certainty, so that we have definitive knowledge that p when (and only when) we know for certain that p is true. If I understand your question this way, it boils down to how we can understanding something if we don't know it for certain. Philosophers have differing views about what understanding is, and specifically in relation to knowledge. But, setting those aside, I might be able to help you with your question by noting a connection between understanding and explanation. Suppose you want to understand you caught the flu. That is, you seek to explain why you got the flu. You do some research, ask a doctor, etc., and learn that the flu is caused by the influenza virus that is spread by, let us say for the sake of the example, exposure to the bodily fluids of an infected person. You may not be CERTAIN that the research you did is correct, but you could be reasonably confident that it is correct. Furthermore,...

Though I'm not sure what the context of your question is, and though that might make some difference, I can point to one major difference between information and knowledge that might be relevant in most contexts. Knowledge either is or requires a state of mind. That is, there's no knowledge without minds. Most philosophers think that one's knowing something requires that one at least believe that thing, and that belief requirement is, of course, a requirement that effectively makes knowledge depend on minds. Information, on the other hand, is usually thought of as mind-independent. There may be information contained in, or exemplified by, entirely non-mental entities. There is information even in a footprint in the sand. A footprint is not mind-dependent (perhaps a shoe was mindlessly and randomly dropped on the sand), and certainly doesn't require a belief. So, that's one major difference: information is, or can be, out there in the world, mind-independent. But knowledge is a mind-dependent phenomenon. ...

It is indeed a common question, at least in the sense that almost everyone has considered it at some point in life. And yet, as common as it is, it leads directly to some of the most difficult, profound ideas. As Strawson once wrote, there is no shallow end in the philosophical pool. So, it needn't bother us that the question is a common one. However, the question is also a HUGE one, as philosophers have had many, many different ideas about it. I can't possibly summarize all of it here (not that I know all of it!). But I can offer a few different ideas about what direction one might take in thinking about this question. One idea is that we can somehow tell, given the content and character of our current experiences, that we are awake. Dreams, according to this idea, are seldom if ever this coherent, this consistent, and this integrated with our accessible memories. And experiences in dreams are never this "stable" or lucid. So, we have empirical evidence, or evidence based on our present experience, that...

Whether this argument is valid really depends on what you mean by some of the key terms (this happens a lot in philosophy). But first: I don't think that a lot of philosophers promote skepticism. Most philosophers aren't skeptics, in the sense that they don't think that we have no knowledge about the world, or that we should doubt everything. But this gets us to the first term that needs to be clarified: what is skepticism? I gather from what you say later in your question that you take it to be something like the view that one should doubt everything. But then what does it mean to be a skeptic "about your own doubts?" One guess is that it means to doubt whether you should doubt, or to doubt that doubting is the right thing to do. If skeptics are people who doubt everything, that seems compatible with their also doubting whether they should doubt. There doesn't seem to be any contradiction there. We have doubts about what we think, and do, all the time. This would just be another instance of that: I doubt...

Nice question! It's one with a long history, as something like what you're saying was one of the main objections to the ancient skeptics and their intellectual decedents. Let me just say a couple of things. First, to answer your question, I don't think your observation would show that skepticism is contradictory or self-refuting, at least not technically. The observation is that some skeptics take themselves to know for certain that nothing can be known with certainty. The view that they take themselves to know with certainty, namely that nothing can be known with certainty, is not thereby shown to be contradictory. It is compatible with that view that some people take themselves to know something for certain. To see this, just notice that it is compatible with the view that no one knows anything that some people, who unlike skeptics don't accept that view, take themselves to know some things. So the mere fact that people take themselves to know (or "accept" that they know) does not show that the view...