"Where is he, Lord, that I may trust (pisteusō) in him?" (Jn. 9:36). The man, recently healed of blindness, has a knowledge of something that those who have never known his ailment do not: namely, the primacy of trust over doubt for any properly human rationality.
The Pharisees insist that the man was born in sin and is therefore unfit to lecture them. The problem of course is that since he was born blind, the man has lived closer to the noetic consequences of sin than they have. They have deluded themselves into thinking that doubt is the appropriate response to ignorance: "as for this man, we do not know where he comes from."
Polanyi has well-developed why this posture of doubt is so disturbing not only to life in general but to the acquisition of knowledge. Imagine the scientist that abandons a hypothesis at the first sign of contrary data. The scientific method depends not on doubt but on faith. Once doubt is embraced as axiomatic, there is nothing in human capacity to prevent its complete takeover. We simply cannot know very much without doubt, since anything we think we know is interpreted through a web of perceived meanings none of which is certain.
One thing I know: I was blind and now I see. The man had no pretense about his ability to make himself see what he clearly had just begun to see. The utter gratuity of his seeing made him humble about what there was to know and how it could be known. How many things did he come to know in the first five minutes after his healing that he had known of only by testimony before that? How quickly he must have come to see how peculiar the relationship between faith and sight is: the seen expressed truly and accurately in the testimony about it but revealed to be only a barely serviceable faculty in the greater light that sight is. The one thing that man knew is that he had been blind. And in the first moment of seeing, he knew his blindness better than ever. There were so many true things he had nevertheless not known. The gift of human reason is the knowledge that there are things we do not know. We exercise that reason in discerning trust, beginning with affirmation as the necessary precondition to discerning, qualifying, and negating: doubt is a movement of faith or else it is neither rational nor honest.
The only other option is a self-defeating epistemic position that leaves little at all to be known in the end. It is by their proclamation that they can see that the Pharisees remain in their sin (Jn. 3:18). Jesus does not say to him "do you believe in me since I healed you?" Rather, he asks, "do you believe in the Son of man?" There is no indication that the man knows it was Jesus that healed him. Rather, having spent a lifetime being conducted by the testimony of others, this man is eager to believe in that which he does not know. He knows, as so many of us do not, that we demonstrate rationality primarily in our trusting.
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