Cases of individuals who have claimed to have direct contact with God

Even if ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments fail to make their case, we have not shown that there is no God.  

There are cases, and today more than ever, especially among the Muslims, where knowledge of divine existence is said to be the result of direct encounters (such as visions, auditions and dreams) with the divine.  

One can take the position that such reports relate instances of direct or immediate contact with the divine that call for no inference, argument or interpretation.  This is to claim that such contacts are "transparent," that is, unambiguous, reliable on their face and self-guaranteeing - constituting a kind of immediate experiential knowledge or awareness that is not confined to religious or "sacred" settings, though it is most common there.

It is also to claim that the knowledge that is said to occur in these contexts is properly basic, that is, neither derived nor needing to be derived from any more basic knowledge.

However, let's not get too carried away.  Albeit these are real, there are many that are not.  I would not want to even guesstimate the ratio, but let us understand them with these two caveats.

• An encounter may not be transparent
• the way to understand why making cultural distinctions is useful in figuring out "what something means" in another culture, is to acknowledge that what we call "reality" may have more than one meaning or interpretation, often vastly different. Most human beings have a tendency to believe that what they see is "real," and assume anyone observing or experiencing the same situation would "naturally" describe, react to, or characterise the event in the same way they do. Anthropologists call this propensity "naive realism," or the belief that everyone sees the world in the same way you do. A corollary is that most human beings also assume that there is only one reasonable way to look at the world. However, psychologists and interculturalists have shown that the world rarely looks the same to everyone, and that the culture you are raised in will strongly influence how you will view even the most simple behaviour
• In order to talk about argument patterns and detect the so-called logical fallacies, one has to distinguish the argument as it manifests itself in natural language from its formal representation. This is because the meaning of natural language expressions is 
far from being transparent. One cannot rely solely on the syntactic configurations and
the occurrence of some key-words to guarantee a common ground understanding of
the logical form of natural language expressions. What the formal representation is
called out to do then is to fix an interpretation that is accurate and precise enough to
determine the standards against which an argument can be evaluated. In what follows,
formal representation is understood as meaning interpretation in this sense.
• belief seems to me to be as strong a candidate for an expressivist interpretation, given expressivism about rationality, as prototypical thick moral concepts are given expressivism about morality
• universal generalization must be nomic, supporting subjunctive conditionals, and not merely accidental. It is never a description, an extensional statement whose truth
conditions concern just the actual world. In many instances, it is an interpretation, an intentional
statement whose truth-conditions involve considering other possible worlds
• encourage and facilitate consideration of alternative possibilities, employing different conditional dependencies or registering their absence. This should ideally promote refinement of initial hypotheses and more transparent and productive discussion of inferential reasoning. Disagreements (reflecting divergent standpoints or premises) may well persist, but are now challenged to meet more exacting standards of rational justification.
• A conservative posture here would suggest that taking a contact as transparent should be a hypothesis of last resort - the surviving piece of an extended disjunctive syllogism from which all alternative possibilities have been eliminated.

The Danger of Claiming to Receive Direct Revelation

Admission - not possible to know anything at all

In order to ask what can be known in religious contexts, and especially what can be known about the existence of god(s), we need to be clear about what it is to know anything at all.  Although it is possible, some say, that we don't know anything at all, we will assume otherwise in order to get at the more precise question, "can we know anything about God, using the common standards for knowledge that we actually employ for everyday affairs?  Though there may be no way to disprove radical scepticism, there is certainly no good reason to believe it is true.  In the meantime, there are practical reasons to assume that it is not.

There are differences between what we know, what we believe and what we disbelieve.

There are some things that we would say we "know"

• Some are "factual"
• Too often, we allow inertia to control our actions.
• 'Because that's the way things are' is not a valid reason.
• Whenever you say 'I had no choice', you're lying.
• It is possible to have an honest and even pleasant relationship with someone you do not like.
• Loving someone or something heart and soul does not necessarily make it good for you, or them, or it.
• Everyone has at least one story worth hearing
• Some are "normative"
• We should fight to free slaves when necessary, even when doing so is illegal.
• Pain is intrinsically bad—we ought not cause pain without a good reason to do so.

There are some things that we believe, but might not say we "know"

• The relation between desires and oughts (reasons) thus has the following structure: 
• 1. I want x to be the case.  2. Y is an appropriate means to x  
• Thus, I ought to choose y. 

There are some things that others believe (or even claim to know) that we don't believe and hence, don't know (and don't believe they know either)

• Average people think the road to riches is paved with formal education. Rich people believe in acquiring specific knowledge.
• In most cases, servant-hood was more like a live-in employee, temporarily embedded within the employer’s household. Even today, teams trade sports players to another team that has an owner, and these players belong to a franchise. This language hardly suggests slavery, but rather a formal contractual agreement to be fulfilled

Whether one claims to know, to believe,or to disbelieve a proposition should be a function of the presence or absence (of the right kind, of sufficient quality, and in sufficient quantity) to underwrite the claim that the proposition is true. At a minimum, knowledge is "justified true belief."

To better understand this definition of knowledge, let's go through each of the three elements.

First is that the statement must be true. I can't claim to know that Elvis Presley is alive, for example, if he is in fact dead. Knowledge goes beyond my personal feelings on the matter and involves the truth of things as they actually are. Some critics of this definition of knowledge question whether truth is always necessary in our claim to know something. For example, based on the available evidence of the time, scientists in the middle ages claimed to know that the earth was flat. Even though we understand now that it isn't, at the time they had knowledge of something that was false. Didn't they? In response, it may have been reasonable for scientists back then to believe the world was flat, but they really didn't know that it was. Their knowledge claims were premature in spite of how strong their convictions were. This is a trap that we fall into all the time. While talking with someone I may say insistently, "I know that Joe's car is blue!" When it turns out that Joe's car is in fact red, I have to apologize for overstating my conviction. Truth, then, is an indispensable component of knowledge.

Second, I must believe the statement in order to know it. For example, it's true that Elvis Presley is dead, and there is enormous evidence to back this up. But if I still believe that he is alive, I couldn't sincerely say that I know that he is dead. Part of the concept of knowledge involves our personal belief convictions about some fact, irrespective of what the truth of the matter is. Critics of this definition of knowledge sometimes think that belief isn't always required for our claims to know something. For example, I might say "I know I'm growing old, but I don't believe it!" In this case, I have knowledge of a particular fact without believing that fact. In response, if I say the previous sentence, what I actually mean is that I'm not capable of imagining myself getting old or I haven't yet emotionally accepted that fact. I just make my point more dramatically by saying "I don't believe it!" Instead I really do believe it, but I don't like it.

Third, I must be justified in believing the statement insofar as there must be good evidence in support of it. Suppose that I randomly pick a card out of a deck without seeing it. I believe it is the Queen of Hearts, and it actually is that card. In this case I couldn't claim to know that I've picked the Queen of Hearts; I've only made a lucky guess. Critics question whether evidence is really needed for knowledge. For example, a store owner might say "I know that my employees are stealing from me, but I can't prove it!" Here the store owner has knowledge of a particular fact without any evidence for it. In response, the store owner is really saying that he strongly believes that his employees are stealing from him, but doesn't have enough evidence to press charges. Evidence, then, is indeed an integral part of knowledge.

The big questions about evidence are --

"What kind(s)?"
"How good?"
"How much?"

Are the procedures used to discover what is so in contested and weighty puzzles appropriate for everyday domestic puzzles or would that be overkill?

The techniques of critical reasoning are not techniques for generating beliefs or cleverly presenting arguments.They are not techniques that tell you how to move from premises you now accept to conclusions you haven’t yet considered.They are techniques for evaluating some beliefs in the light of others. By contrast,the detective in fiction is often depicted as “deducing”unexpected conclusions from a set of clues.Critical reasoning does not operate in this way.It is a procedure for judging beliefs,not for generating them.This can be seen as a task akin to editing a written text after it has been produced in first-draft form by yourself or others. So the answer would be yes - same procedure.