Religious Experience, Prayer, Design and Cosmological Arguments
Religious Experience as Evidence for God
Religious experience refers to moments when a person feels they have encountered God directly. The Bible records one of the most famous: in Exodus 3, Moses encounters God at the burning bush. A bush burns without being consumed; God calls Moses by name from within it and reveals his divine name and purpose. This experience transforms Moses from a reluctant fugitive into the leader of the Exodus. Christians point to the burning bush as evidence that God communicates directly with human beings and that these encounters have real, life-changing consequences.
Christians across denominations accept religious experience as a genuine route to knowledge of God. Atheists and Humanists challenge this, arguing that religious experiences are subjective inner states that could be produced by the brain, psychological conditioning, or wishful thinking. Richard Dawkins suggests the brain is wired to detect agency and meaning even where none exists. Christians respond that the moral transformation, lasting effects and consistency of religious experiences across vastly different cultures suggest they point to something beyond the individual mind.
Exodus 3 records Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush — a bush that burned without being consumed. God spoke Moses’s name from the fire and commissioned him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Christians use this as evidence that God reveals himself through direct experience, not only through scripture or reason.
Prayer and Answered Prayer
Prayer is central to Christian life, and the experience of answered prayer is used by many Christians as evidence that God is real and responsive. 1 John 5:13–17 teaches that if Christians ask anything “according to his will,” God hears them and grants what they request. This is not a guarantee of receiving whatever is asked but a promise of God’s attentiveness to those who seek him. Christians who report praying for healing, guidance or provision and seeing specific outcomes often cite these experiences as among their strongest reasons for belief.
Atheists and Humanists are sceptical: they argue that apparently answered prayers are explained by coincidence, confirmation bias (noticing the hits and forgetting the misses), or the natural course of events. Studies on the efficacy of intercessory prayer have produced ambiguous results. Christians respond that reducing prayer to an experiment misunderstands its nature — prayer is not a mechanism for testing God but a relationship with a personal God who knows what is best. The claim is not that prayer guarantees specific outcomes but that God is personally present and active in the lives of believers who seek him.
Catholics and many Anglicans emphasise that prayer includes set prayers (the Lord’s Prayer, liturgical forms) that bind the Church across time. Protestant and evangelical Christians often emphasise informal, personal prayer as a direct conversation with God. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians frequently report dramatic answers to prayer including physical healing, which they present as evidence of God’s ongoing miraculous activity. Quakers traditionally practise waiting prayer — silence before God — which is about receptivity rather than petition. All these forms reflect the conviction that God is real and present, but the expectation of specific types of answer varies significantly.
The Design Argument
The design argument proposes that the universe’s order and complexity imply a designer. Paul states in Romans 1:18–24 that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” have been “clearly seen” in creation since the beginning of the world, making those who deny God without excuse. This gives the design argument scriptural support for Christians: the natural world itself testifies to God’s existence.
Paley’s watchmaker analogy from Natural Theology (1802) argues that if you found a watch on a heath, its intricate mechanism would lead you to infer a watchmaker. Living organisms are vastly more complex than any watch. Therefore, they too must have a designer — God. Many Christians find this persuasive: the fine-tuning of physical constants in the universe (the fact that even small changes would make life impossible) seems to point to intentional design.
The Cosmological Argument: Aquinas’s First Three Ways
The cosmological argument argues that the universe’s existence requires a cause beyond itself. Thomas Aquinas presented three forms in his Summa Theologica. His First Way begins from motion: everything moving was moved by something else; there cannot be an infinite chain, so there must be a first unmoved mover — God. His Second Way begins from causation: everything has a cause; there cannot be an infinite chain of causes, so there must be a first uncaused cause — God. His Third Way begins from contingency: things in the universe exist but might not have; there must be a necessary being whose existence is not dependent on anything else — God.
Atheists including Dawkins raise the “who made God?” objection: if everything requires a cause, God must also require a cause. Christians respond (following Aquinas) that God is by definition a necessary being — one who cannot fail to exist and does not require a cause outside himself. The cosmological argument does not say everything has a cause; it says everything that begins to exist or is contingent requires an explanation. Hume challenged whether the premise “every event has a cause” can be established by observation — we only observe causation within the universe, not the universe as a whole. Dawkins also argues that invoking God as the designer simply pushes the problem back: a designer complex enough to create the universe would itself require explanation. Christians respond that Dawkins conflates contingent complexity (which requires explanation) with necessary being (which does not).
Aquinas’s First Three Ways: (1) from motion — everything moved needs a mover, so there is an unmoved mover; (2) from causation — every effect has a cause, so there is a first uncaused cause; (3) from contingency — contingent things might not exist, so there is a necessary being. These are the spec content — the Ontological Argument (Anselm) is not assessed here.