Religious Experience Unit 1 Believing in God

1.2 Lesson aims To investigate religious experience. To explore why religious experiences may lead to belief in God.

Learning outcomes By the end of the lesson you should be able to: explain why having a religious experience may lead to belief in God explain your own opinion about religious experience. explain why some people may disagree with you.

Religious Experience Religious experience is the way in which people come into contact with God. What types of religious experience are there?

Tasks Find and copy down the meanings of these key words, there is space in your booklets; Conversion Miracle Numinous Prayer

Numinous Religious experience can be just a feeling you get when you are in a holy building, say your prayers, or even look up at the stars and feel in the presence of something greater than yourself. This is called the numinous.

Conversion It can be a more definite feeling of God’s presence which makes you more religious and changes your life (for example; St Paul on the road to Damascus Acts 9). This is called a conversion experience.

Conversion Many people who have conversion experiences describe it as if they have a sudden understanding. They realise that they have a path which they must follow. It may be that they discover a believe in God, or they may change their religion as they realise they would have a greater religious experience within a different religion.

Prayers Prayer is a way for a religious person to feel that they can make contact with God. This can be through formalised prayer during worship such as the Christian Eucharist, Muslim Salah or the Hindu Arti. Prayer can also be a private experience. The feeling that your prayers have been answered is itself a religious experience.

Summary People claim to experience God in miracles, answered prayers, the numinous and conversion. Religious experience makes people feel that God is real.

Independent Work Explain how having a religious experience may lead to, or support, belief in God. (8 marks) (We haven’t covered miracles yet but these should be included in this answer).

Exam Focus What do you think? You must decide what you think about the issues and ideas you study. The questions are meant to be quite easy and to get full marks you just need to give two reasons. For this topic you should have thought about: whether there is such a thing as the numinous and whether it means God exists whether conversions really happen and whether they prove God exists whether you believe in miracles and whether a miracle would prove that God exists whether prayer is valuable and whether answered prayers prove that God exists.

Revision What does an atheist believe? What does an agnostic believe? Do atheists and agnostics ever pray?