John Locke On Our Knowledge Of The Existence Of A God

John Locke, Essays On the Human Understanding

(London: William Tegg; 37th Edition), pp. 527, 528.

‘We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God.

Though God has given us no innate ideas of himself; though he has stamped no original characters on our minds, wherein we may read his being; yet, having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed with, he hath not left himself without witness; since we have sense, perception, and reason, and cannot want a clear proof of him as long as we carry ourselves about us.

Nor can we justly complain of our ignorance in this great point, since he has so plentifully provided us with the means to discover and know him, so far as is necessary to the end of our being, and the great concernment of our happiness.

But though this be the most obvious truth that reason discovers, and though its evidence be (if I mistake not) equal to mathematical certainty; yet it requires thought and attention, and the mind must apply itself to a regular deduction of it from some part of our intuitive knowledge, or else we shall be as uncertain and ignorant of this as of other propositions which are in themselves capable of clear demonstration.

To show, therefore, that we are capable of knowing, i.e., being certain, that there is a God, and how we may come by this certainty, I think we need go no farther than ourselves, and that undoubted knowledge we have of our own existence.’

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