Religion and believe in God are two things that have never ending thought process that requires genuine belief, or in other words faith in order to truly believe in existence of God. When it comes to philosophical reasoning, hereby in Cosmological argument Aquinas states that all the creations are existent because of some cause, therefore God is the greatest cause which created all other causes. This in turn creates a lot of thoughts that oppose this reasoning, saying that God is not necessarily the answer for major cause, why it can not be energy or matter or something else?
On the other hand, Paley created Design argument in which he compares the world to a watch. Since watch is perfectly made, it has such complicated mechanisms that work interdependently with one another to create bigger purpose of its existence. Similar to watch, world works as all the small parts come together in sophisticated interdependent mechanism in a way that every single thing has bigger purpose of being there. Paley believed that watch has a master who created it, thereby world also needs to have a master that worked on creating it. So he concluded that it must be God who is also considered to be master or main creator.
Philosophy can contribute to understanding religion by illustrating different arguments and perspectives on this topic. For some people philosophical arguments can help to fill in the blanks, understand and appreciate more what is already there. I think that philosophy helps people to not only stay around particular religious belief, as all beliefs only show one side of the story and does not include other opinions in them. Whereas philosophy is somewhat unbiased, it serves as a distinction between believes, helps to become more open minded and acceptable towards what might seem absurd within religious belief one possesses. However, it is important to note that philosophy has nothing to do with faith, whereas I suppose that it has great role in person’s understanding of religion and existence of God. Even though most of the people understand that there are a lot of tricky questions which has no answer, people still believe that God exist – because faith serves as a tool that fill- ins all the spaces between facts and claims.