Can monotheism be proven?
The question touches on several distinct lines of evidence, and these writers address it from multiple angles — creation, conscience, history, and Scripture itself. They do not claim monotheism can be "proven" in the manner of a mathematical theorem, but they present a powerful convergence of testimony.
The Witness of Creation
The starting point for many of these writers is Romans 1:19-20 — that creation itself declares the one God. F. Hole draws out a striking implication:
F. Hole"Those peoples that are now heathen once knew God. Man's course has not been from polytheism to monotheism, as some dreamers would have us imagine, but the other way round. They have sunk out of light into the darkness. Once 'they knew God' (v. 21), but the fact is, 'they did not like to retain God in their knowledge' (v. 28)."
The historical direction, in other words, is not upward from many gods to one, but downward from the knowledge of one God into the darkness of idolatry. Polytheism is a corruption, not a stepping stone.
William Kelly develops this in his exposition of Paul at Athens. The apostle stood amidst the idolatrous altars of the city and proclaimed the God who made the world — a claim none of their own deities had ever made:
William Kelly"The remarkable fact is that none of the jarring leaders of religion or philosophy claimed for their gods, home or foreign or unknown, to have made the world and all things that are therein. They attributed that wonderful work neither to any one approaching supremacy, nor to all working together in respective spheres to that common end."
"Not one of their divinities claimed to be eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent in self-being. Not one of them said, I AM, or was ever said to be Light morally, or Love in the energy of his nature. Yet there is in every human being, unless he be drunk with superstition or fatally poisoned by scepticism, what has been called God-consciousness, and is forced to own, that God there must be."
The Unity Stamped on Consciousness
Samuel Ridout takes a more philosophical approach, arguing that the concept of one — stamped on human consciousness itself — qualifies man to apprehend the one God:
Samuel Ridout"'The Lord our God is one Lord,' 'To us there is but one God.' There can be no question that this thought of 'aloneness,' of absolute unity, is conveyed as it could be in no other way by this first numeral. ... 'I am the Lord, and there is none else,' 'My glory will I not give to another.'"
"Satan's great effort has been to obliterate this thought from the mind of man, and in the multiplication of heathen deities we see him apparently successful; but even in these heathen mythologies there lurks behind all the fantastic, numberless gods, the one supreme Author and Source of all things. Thus the thought is marred indeed and blurred so as to be practically valueless; but God has stamped this for us upon the very nature of man, so that conscience as well as reason cries aloud that it is true."
Even polytheism, Ridout notes, cannot entirely suppress what it was designed to obscure — behind every mythology there lurks the dim awareness of a single supreme Source.
Israel Among the Nations
A.J. Pollock raises a compelling historical question:
A.J. Pollock"How was it that the Israelites, surrounded by nations practising these debased and evil heathen rites, had such an exalted and elevating conception of the true God? It could only have been by revelation."
"The true knowledge of God is elevating. Mankind is measured by its conception of God. Wherever this conception has gripped a man or a nation, there you find qualities that command respect."
The contrast is stark: the surrounding nations, with all their cultural sophistication, sank into the vilest forms of worship, while tiny Israel held fast to one holy God. This cannot be accounted for by natural development — it required divine revelation.
The Positive Evidences
An 1870 article in The Bible Treasury addresses the broader evidential case. The argument is that the unity of the scriptural system — written across fifteen hundred years by diverse authors — demonstrates a single governing mind:
"Take again the whole body of scripture, a collection of books written by various persons during a period of fifteen hundred years. ... All these develop an immense system ... a unity of design, a completeness of structure ... which proves the unity of the mind of the Being, whose revealing power and controlling thought and knowledge runs through it all from beginning to end."
"I find around me (the sceptic will not deny it) proofs of divine operation, and of a constant law (which is the strongest proof of divine operation) and power, — a vast universe bearing (as a whole and in the minutest part) the proof of the power of God as having created and sustaining it."
The Nature of Opposition
J.N. Darby adds a distinctive argument — that the very character of the hostility directed against Christianity, unlike that directed against any other religion, betrays the conscience's recognition that it is dealing with the true God:
J.N. Darby"The kind of opposition men make to Christianity proves its truth in the main — proves in it the consciousness of a real claim of God on the soul."
"No doubt men have attacked Paganism as false. They have resisted Mohammedanism, though its sword was its principal argument. ... But the constant and laborious exercise of free criticism, the close and sifting examination the Bible has gone through for ages, the anxious research after errors or contradictions within, proves anxiety to shew that it is not what it pretends to be."
"An infidel cannot let God and His truth alone, because it is His truth. He is a zealot against it; for his will is engaged. He is a bitter zealot because his conscience is uneasy."
No one labours with such intensity to disprove a mere fable. The very ferocity of the attack betrays what it tries to deny.
The Final Step
The writers converge on a common conclusion: the evidence for one God is real and substantial — from creation, from conscience, from the unique history of Israel, from the internal unity of Scripture, and even from the character of the opposition raised against it. But the last step is not one of reason alone. As Pollock writes:
"We can be devoutly thankful for all that can be said in support of the inspiration of Scripture. It is given to us of the Lord to help us in the slowness of our faith. We may travel a good way on the road towards the goal, but it is true nevertheless that the last step in the full recognition of the Holy Scriptures, as the Word of God, is one of FAITH."
The obstacle is not insufficient evidence but, as these writers uniformly insist, the will. Man does not lack proof; he lacks willingness to submit to what the proof demands. As the Bible Treasury article puts it: revelation "presented the claims of a holy God, to which the antagonist will of man never would submit."