A response from kinwove

You're asking the thing underneath the first question — and it's the harder one.

Honestly: you don't know it the way you know other people are real. You can't point to a sensation and say "there, that's God." That's not available to you, and it wasn't available to the people in scripture either. Faith by definition means believing something you can't verify by sensing it directly.

But the question assumes that sensing something is the only way to know it's real. That's not true even in ordinary life. You know the laws of physics work even though you don't feel gravity — you see its effects. You know other people have inner lives you can't access, but you infer it from what they do and say. You trust people based on pattern, on how they've acted over time, on what they've promised and kept.

With God, the evidence isn't sensory — it's structural. It's the fact that the universe exists at all, that it follows rational laws, that you're the kind of creature who can ask the question. It's historical: the empty tomb, the transformation of the disciples, the fact that Christianity exploded in a hostile Roman empire in the first century. It's personal: the moments when something shifted in you, when you sensed yourself held, or when something fractured and you realized you weren't driving it.

None of this *feels* like what you're asking for right now. But feeling is the weakest form of evidence there is. A feeling can lie. Evidence builds differently.

What changed you toward faith in the first place — what was that?