a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be quite
false. The fact of a certain belief being universal only warrants the
assumption that the belief itself has a cause, but it tells us nothing
whatever concerning its truthfulness. The truth here is that the
argument from universality dates its origin from a stage of human
culture suitable to the god idea itself, a stage when very little was
known concerning the workings of the mind or the laws of mental
development. Otherwise it would have been seen that all the universality
of a belief really proves is the universality of the human mind--and
that means that, given an organism of a certain kind, it will react in
substantially an identical manner to the same stimuli. Thus it is not
surprising to find that as the human organism is everywhere
fundamentally alike, it has everywhere come to the same conclusions in
face of the same set of conditions. A man reacts to the universe in one
way, and a jelly fish in another way. And universality is as true of the
reactions of the latter as it is of those of the former.

And this means that a delusion may be as widespread as truth, a false
inference may gain as general an acceptance as a true one. What belief
has been more general than the belief in witches, fairies, and the like?
But we see in the prevalence of these and similar beliefs, not a
presumption of their truth, but only the grounds for a search after the
conditions, social and psychological, which gave them birth.

The truth is that the conditions which give rise to the belief in gods
are found in all ages, and no one would be more surprised than the
Atheist to find it otherwise. But here, precisely as in the case of good
and bad spirits, the vital question is not that people have everywhere
believed in the existence of supernatural beings,[1] but an
understanding of the conditions from which the beliefs themselves have
grown. That alone can determine whether in studying the god idea we are
studying the acquisition of a truth or the growth of a fallacy.

Next, while it may be granted, at least provisionally, that the belief
in supernatural beings is universal, against that has to be set the fact
that the whole tendency of social development is to narrow the range of
the belief, to restrict the scope of its authority, and to so attenuate
it that it becomes of no value precisely where it is supposed to be of
most use. The belief in God is least questioned