On the Presence of God

Abstract

In trying to ascertain whether we can know that God exists or have reasonable grounds for believing that God exists or know or reasonably believe that there is a religiously adequate concept of God sufficiently intelligible or unproblematic to make belief in God a reasonable option, it is important to ask what we can make of the claim frequently made by religious people that they have experience of the presence of God. The claim is often made that the concept of God cannot be incoherent or utterly problematic and that it cannot be that we cannot reasonably believe in God because there is direct experience of God, and indeed for religious argumentation to come to anything there must be such experience.¹