Religion and Life: Belief in God

Believing in God

A child who is brought up by religious Christian parents will lead to in God from the beginning of their life. This is because:

• They will be baptised. At the ceremony the parents and Godparents must promise to bring the child up as a good Christian.
• The child will be taken to worship God in Church.
• The child will be taught to pray to God every day.
• They will be excpected to thank God and remember God's good gift at Christmas and Easter
• The child will be sent to Sunday school to learn about God.
• They may go to a church school where nearly everyone believes in God which means they spend nearly all their time with people who believe in God.

These factors make it feel natural to believe in God and more difficult to think that He does not exist.

Religious Experience

Conversion- when your life/religion is changes

Miracle- an event that seems to break a law of science and the only explanation seems to be God.

Numinous-the feeling of the presence of something greater than you

Prayer-an attempt to contact God, usually through words. Answered prayer can lead to belif in God.

The Design Argument

William Paley said that if you find a watch in the middle of a desert, you would expect it to have a designer so if the universe works together in a complex mechanism surely it must have a designer, God.

Examples

• The universe working according to scientific laws like gravity.
• The way complex mechanisms work for, example the human eye.
• How humans grow from a tiny blueprint of DNA.

Causation

The idea that everything has been caused by something else.

If we look at things in the world, we see they have a cause therefore the universe must have been caused by something else, the only cause can be God so God must exist.

Search for Meaning and Purpose

Many people believe humans can't be here by chance and that it must have a…