"I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist"

Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion, “I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist,” encapsulates his existentialist skepticism about divine authority and human purpose. Sartre challenges the concept of an externally imposed order or a divinely selected messenger. By stating that all men are Prophets, he places prophetic authority and meaning-making squarely in the hands of every individual. It is an invitation to take up the creative or revelatory role previously reserved for a select few, those who traditionally communicated God’s will to humanity.

If prophecy, the discovery or declaration of deep truths about existence, morals, or the future, was only available to a chosen, exceptional minority, then it would suggest the operation of a supernatural hierarchy or order, the very thing Sartre’s philosophy rejects. For Sartre, an atheist and a central figure in existentialism, the absence of God liberates human beings to create their own values, to define their own essence through acts of freedom and responsibility. Making everyone a Prophet democratizes this sacred role, indicating that the responsibility, and burden, of interpreting existence, of finding or creating meaning, falls to each person.

By concluding “or else God does not exist,” Sartre tightly binds this responsibility to the question of divine existence itself. If there is a God making sense of the universe, singling out special individuals as mouthpieces, then the rest of humanity is merely passive. But if God does not exist, then each person is condemned to be free, forced to make choices as if their proclamations and actions hold cosmic weight. Either everyone is invested with the authority of a Prophet, or there is no transcendent authority at all. The statement resists comfort or abdication; it prompts individuals to recognize their own inescapable agency and to bear the weighty freedom of crafting meaning in an indifferent universe.