Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update

When it came to proofs for God's existence, none was more popular or more important than the "consensus gentium" (the agreement of the nations). "At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Henry Lee observed that ‘the first and most popular Argument, which is generally brought for proving the Existence of God, is, the universal Consent of Mankind’. John Stuart Mill could still endorse this assessment almost 200 years later, stating that ‘no argument for the truth of theism is more commonly invoked or more confidently relied on, than the general assent of mankind’."

And it made sense to use this argument. The list of true atheists (those who philosophically denied the existence of a god or metaphysical higher power) was vanishingly small. Less than a handful in all of human history. It was evident to all that to exist at all was to believe in God. For most of history, it wasn't even an "argument" per se, rather it was a "principle," even the first principle, necessary for all other knowledge, logic, or reasoning to exist.

"The principle was, in fact, common even among classical philosophers. Plato observed that ‘it looks easy enough to speak the truth in saying that gods exist …. All mankind, Greeks and non-Greeks alike, believe in the existence of gods.’ Aristotle remarked similarly that ‘all men have a conception of gods, and assign the highest place to the divine’. We encounter a more developed argument in the Stoic philosophers Cicero and Seneca, who show a concern to refute the claim that the gods were a political invention. Both thinkers insisted that belief in the gods was natural rather than conventional. In a passage that made an almost obligatory appearance in early modern discussions, Cicero linked universal consensus, innateness, and necessary truth: ‘Belief in the gods has not been established by authority, custom, or law, but rests on the unanimous and abiding consensus of mankind; their existence is therefore a necessary inference, since we possess an instinctive or rather an innate concept of them.’"

"It is also significant that after the brief statement of each ‘proof’ Aquinas concludes with a common formula: ‘and this everyone understands to be God’; ‘to which everyone gives the name God’; ‘this all men speak of as God’, and so on. For Aquinas, ‘everyone’ thus already holds that God exists, consistent with his earlier remark that all have implanted within them knowledge of God, albeit ‘in a general and confused way’.

The function of the ‘proofs’, then, is not to provide rational evidence for a proposition that might otherwise be in doubt  – not, in other words to satisfy some ‘ethics of belief’ requirement about the existence of God – but to provide insights into a conception of God that is held universally, if vaguely."

"In the eighteenth century’s best-selling multi-volume work of physico-theology, 'Le spectacle de la nature', Noël Antoine Pluche similarly proposed, on his title page, that a central goal of physico-theology was ‘the formation of the minds of the youth’. Pluche explicitly rejected the goal of proving the existence of God as ‘at best unprofitable and needless’ since in reality there are no atheists. The point of the exercise was not to offer a demonstrative proof, but ‘to open our Eyes, and receive Instruction’."

Descartes would challenge this paradigm, and though in the end he would affirm the general idea of God's existence, it was as an argued for "idea" of God instead of a given innate principle. Locke would famously go further by denying innate "principles" altogether with his "tabula rasa." According to Locke, minds are born with a propensity to understand ideas/principles, but the ideas/principles must be presented to them .

No apologist uses the consensus gentium argument today. It strikes our ears more like an odd anthropological fact than a proof of anything substantial. It's important here to note this social change itself. "The demise [of this argument] signals how the burden of proof has gradually shifted over the past four centuries so that belief in the existence of God, rather than atheism, is thought to require rational justification."