Oracle of Wisdom Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs

Belief in a Supreme Being is close to universal among Nigerians, but that near-consensus cuts across ethnic and religious lines rather than originating in any one of them: it is documented among Yoruba, Igbo, and other traditions independently of Christian or Islamic contact, and it persists across all three of Nigeria's major religious communities. Because the consensus is so wide, belief in God in Nigeria is usually treated as inherited tradition rather than as a conclusion requiring rational defence. This paper re-casts the four classical theistic arguments — ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral — for a Nigerian readership, testing whether the Western formulations can be restated in terms continuous with theistic reasoning Nigerians already practise, rather than simply imported. Its contribution is twofold: first, it identifies where each argument's structure already resembles indigenous modes of reasoning about the divine, and where it does not; second, it puts the classical case for an unlimited, maximally great God into direct conversation with the "limited God" thesis advanced across the last decade in contemporary African philosophy of religion, a debate existing Nigerian scholarship on these arguments has not engaged. The paper argues that rational justification for theism is available to Nigerian thinkers, but that the classical arguments require critical re-casting, not mere restatement, to do genuine philosophical work in their new context.

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