The Sensus Divinitatis

I freely admit I have very little patience with the modern breed of Atheistic Naturalists. I attended a friend and former professor's philosophy meetup group on a number of occasions, and found myself literally disgusted by the behavior I witnessed as they offered feckless quips to avoid the obvious glaring errors in their ideology, of which there are many, if you know where to look. You encounter the same thing on any of the social media platforms where Christians interact with Atheists. One of the most often used attacks on Christians is the following: "As an Atheist, I have no burden of proof regarding my lack of belief in a God. I'm only making a null statement, while you- the Christian- are making a claim, which by definition requires evidence. Thus the burden of proof is on you to prove God exists, not on me to prove He doesn't." 

While this is an admittedly tired and worn out line, how might we respond to this without rolling our eyes and ignoring yet another silly statement? Let's see.

Is belief in God really as absurd as the Atheistic Naturalist would have it? The answer is a resounding, no. A belief in God is actually the default position of any intelligent person, since such a belief is logical and flows from our natural sense of God. That is, we possess an inherent sensus divinitatis that informs us God must exist, just as our physical senses inform us that the physical world- nature, other people, animal life, etc.- exists. In other words, it is a natural sense in humanity that God exists. Arnobius of Sicca wrote, "In whom has it not been implanted by nature, on whom has it not been impressed, yes, stamped almost in his mother;s womb even, in whom is there not a native instinct, that He is King and Lord, the Ruler of all things that be?" (Aga. Hea. 33)

This is our created instinct. What this means for those offering a hypothesis that God does not exist, is that they are under the same burden of proof as someone who might suggest that animals or trees do not exist. The reason for this is, the one making the claim that animals and trees do not exist (or that God does not exist) is claiming that our senses are faulty, and the data we receive from them cannot be trusted as reality. In other words, the Atheist who is challenging the default position is actually the one tasked with the burden of proof, and he must prove not only our senses to be faulty, but the data received to be untrustworthy, and then move on to prove God does not exist.

Having said that, what emerges from this understanding is that Atheism is actually a disorder of the mind, in which the Atheist distrusts his senses, and prefers a fantasy world wherein there is no God. Or, if we want to be more charitable, we could say that Atheism is a malfunction of the Atheists ability to form a proper understanding of God, as there is an inability to accurately process sensory information. In other words, he has a malfunction of his sense of God, much as blindness or deafness can be a malfunction of the sense of seeing and hearing. Essentially, the Atheistic Naturalist must provide some sort of substantive evidence as to why we should accept his claim that sound does not exist simply because he cannot hear.


It is an indictment on their belief system that Atheistic Naturalists, who will freely say they have no knowledge of a God, then go on to claim that God does not exist, just like the deaf man claiming that sound does not exist simply because he has no experience of sound.

The burden of proof is on the Atheist, not you, Christian.