How do you simply explain how we know the things we know about the observable universe.
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That depends on your philosophical outlook.
If you are an empiricist, we interact with the universe through our senses. We make observations, gather data, perform experiments, construct hypotheses, etc. With many people doing this over and over, we can discover a great deal about how the universe works. Perhaps not everything, but a lot.
If you are a solipsist, you recognize that our senses don’t necessarily reflect external reality. We know to a certainty that at least at some times they lie. Taken to an extreme, you can infer that it is possible that there is no external reality (or that it is very different from what we believe) and the only thing you can be sure of is that you exist. Everything else could be a delusion, artificial inputs, a simulation, etc.
Interestingly, you can’t really use either of these philosophical outlooks to disprove the other. Solipsism is inherently impossible to disprove empirically, and if it were correct then empiricism is wrong (or at least somewhat wrong).
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