Religious experience is widespread and life-changing
The claim
Hundreds of millions of ordinary people report direct, transformative encounter with God — across every culture, education level, and skeptical disposition.
These are not all delusions. The default epistemic stance toward sincere first-person testimony, replicated at scale, is provisional credence. We use the same standard for love, beauty, and moral indignation. To exempt religious experience alone is special pleading.
Belief in God is properly basic.
Belief in God, when produced by the sensus divinitatis functioning correctly in an appropriate environment, has warrant in the same way perceptual or memory beliefs have warrant. It does not need to be inferred from prior, more-certain premises.
The demand that the believer first prove God's existence from neutral premises smuggles in evidentialism — a position that itself fails its own test.
Hundreds of millions of testimonies are not noise. They are the ordinary functioning of the cognitive faculty God designed.