Wanted to make this because a lot of atheists on here seem to believe (y'see?) that it's something limited to religious people. Spoiler alert: everyone believes. Question is how to define it. I'm going to try my best here, without being too vague or needlessly esoteric (like that), a trap I often fall into with debates about deeper philosophy. Belief is a thought that you understand to be true about the world. That's probably a clumsily-answered and epistemologically-unsound, but hey, that's me. So, an example: I believe Obama is the President of the US. It is a thought that I understand to be true about the world. Simple. Opinions are a little more complicated, obvz. I personally believe that Halo 3 is the best Halo game ever. Does that make it - objectively - the best Halo ever? Of course not. Can there [i]be[/i] such a thing? Considering 'best' is a sujective term, limited to human experience, no. You can clarify by saying in what field it is best, sure, but 'Halo 3 is the best Halo' cannot be factually correct. Perhaps if you're referring to something more objective like sales or money made or anything like that. Now, to say 'Tartan believes that H3 is the best Halo' is to state a fact. It is true that I believe that. That's my real thought process regarding H3. So that's a perfectly legitimate and true statement. The trifficult part comes in when you try to differentiate between belief and knowledge. Knowledge must pertain to objective, provable things about the real world. I once attended a philosophy club at school, and the teacher leading it posited this: 'Knowledge is verified true belief.' So there are three components to that motion - verification, truth, and belief. Verification is the act of understanding that something is true. To test it, to determine whether those criteria manifest outside of thoughts and theories. Truth is what is real. Not what is believed to be real, or even understood to be real, but what is real, with or without human interpretation. Belief, I've already covered. Now, here was a question the teacher posed us: A man is at work, waiting to use the vending machine. The woman in front of him is counting her change to make sure she has enough for that delicious Dr Pepper eyeing her suggestively. His mind dawdles as he waits, and he tells himself, with no prior knowledge of the situation, that she has £1.18 in her hand. Cut to the woman, counting her coins: £1, 10, 15, 17, 18p. So the man was correct. But does he know that she has £1.18? Even were she to turn and share the news because social media has bred us to broadcast such trivia, would he know it now? What if she miscounted to £1.19 because -blam!- the number 9 that's just going one too far, and told the world of her £1.19, but for whatever reason he still believed it was £1.18?