The Forgotten Proof: The Existence of God and Universal Consent

During the early modern period, the proof of God's existence based on universal consent (consensus gentium) was widely regarded as the most powerful argument that could be deployed against atheism. Yet from the mid-eighteenth century the argument began to disappear from the roster of arguments for God's existence. Modern readers, moreover, find it difficult to see what makes this a proof at all and wonder why it was ever thought to be persuasive. This article offers a history of the consensus gentium principle, showing why it was long regarded as logically compelling and explaining its relation to the three better-known "classical" proofs of God's existence. Consideration of the varying fortunes of this argument yields important insights into the changing nature and status of proofs for God's existence and especially how these changed during the early modern period. It also shows why the burden of proof has gradually shifted over the past four centuries so that it is now belief in God rather than atheism that is thought to require rational justification. The history of this argument thus sheds light on the emergence of a distinctive feature of secular modernity, in which belief in the existence of God has become just one possibility among others. The article concludes with a brief consideration of modern vestiges of the argument in Rudolf Otto's sense of the numinous, in revivals of Reidian reliabilism associated with reformed epistemology, and in the work of some practitioners of the cognitive science of religion.