Here's a stat worth sitting with: roughly 84% of people worldwide identify with a religion, and that number has held up across every continent and century of modern science. The other side will call that cultural inertia, and some of it is. But history rhymes: nearly every civilization, without coordination, has reached for a first cause and a moral order beyond itself. That convergence isn't proof, but it's a pattern that demands explanation. Combine it with the fact that the universe had a beginning and every physical thing we know is contingent, and the most reasonable inference is something necessary behind it all. That's what I'd call God.

The core question isn't whether prayer works in a trial; it's why there's something rather than nothing. My opponent's STEP study is a fair hit, and I'll grant it: if God were a vending machine, that data would be damning. But that's not the claim. A contingent universe with a beginning points beyond itself, and history rhymes: unconnected civilizations kept arriving at a first cause and a moral order. That convergence isn't proof, but it needs a better explanation than "everyone was confused." Asking for lab controls on a philosophical inference is a category mismatch.

Think about how historians weigh independent sources: they don't demand identical accounts, they look for a common event behind them. The world's religions don't agree on details, and I'm not claiming that proves any specific one. But the recurring reach for a necessary first cause is better explained by something real than by universal confusion. And my opponent's "unknown" isn't a competing explanation; it's a placeholder. A universe with a beginning and only contingent things still needs a necessary ground. That's an inference, not a lab trial, and it remains the stronger one.