Is religious experience evidence for God?

Yes - genuine evidence, though not coercive proof. Across every documented culture and century, enormous numbers of ordinary people report not merely believing in God but meeting him - being addressed, convicted, comforted, overwhelmed. Does that vast body of testimony count as evidence? Stated crudely ("people experience God, so God exists") it is too quick. The serious versions are disciplined. The Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne proposes a Principle of Credulity: if it seems to you that something is present, it probably is, absent special reason to doubt - the very default by which we trust ordinary perception. William Alston argued in Perceiving God that forming beliefs from apparent awareness of God is a self-monitoring "doxastic practice," no more question-begging than trusting our senses.

Three objections deserve their full strength. Neuroscience locates experiences in the brain (Newberg's scans; Persinger's "God helmet"). But every experience has a neural correlate - seeing a tree lights the visual cortex without making the tree a hallucination - and a 2005 Swedish double-blind team led by Pehr Granqvist found Persinger's magnetic effect vanished on replication. Freud's charge that religion is wish-fulfillment commits the genetic fallacy and fits poorly the many unwelcome experiences, like the conviction of sin.

The strongest objection is diversity: traditions report incompatible objects. This is a real limit, honestly conceded - it means religious experience cannot by itself settle which God is real. But it does not show nothing transcendent is encountered, and it leaves the experiencer's own warrant largely intact. So this is evidence, not proof: defeasible, and one strand in a cumulative case rather than a club to compel a skeptic. Yet it remains a genuine data point that any complete worldview must reckon with rather than wave away.