If you ask the average person in the Western world whether they believe in God, you’ll usually get one of three responses: ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’. Statistically, most people in Australia – somewhere around 55-60% – think there is a god of some sort. Yet a growing number of people are convinced there is no god (atheism). And there is also a significant group of people who aren’t convinced either way (often called agnostic).
In the Apostle Paul’s most famous work, Romans, we find a nest of astounding claims that fly in the face of these categories. Essentially, Paul asserts that all people know that God certainly exists. In other words, all people have pre-conscious knowledge of the existence and reality of an eternal, personal, powerful, Creator God. No matter how hard we try to suppress or deny it, the reality of this God-knowledge bubbles to the surface of our living, thinking and speaking. This claim is even more radical when you realize that Paul is not talking about a generic idea of a god, but specifically about the trinitarian God of the Bible. That God is the God we know exists. He is called ‘God’ because he’s the only true God. And yet, according to Paul, every single person is in willful rebellion against this God. Even though we’ve been made in God’s image and have knowledge of Him deeply woven into the fabric of our beings, we seek to suppress the truth about Him in order to take control of our lives.
Here’s how Paul puts it . . .
“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:18-25; NIV)
Essentially, though all people know that God certainly exists, we suppress the truth about Him to chase after god-substitutes. We want happiness and fulfilment apart from God’s loving rule over us. Our hearts have deep needs that we seek to meet in everything other than the God who made us. Consequently, our hearts become ‘darkened’, meaning the deepest parts of us are confused, conflicted, and self-focused. St. Augustine said our hearts are incurvatus in se – “turned in on themselves”. Instead of our hearts loving and enjoying the true God, we ‘worship and serve created things’ to meet our deepest needs. And it can be anything: money, sex, food, alcohol, family, careers, nature, politics, sport, education, computer games, music, or man-made gods which are worshipped in other religious systems.
Everyone worships and serves something. Everyone makes something their ultimate concern. And Paul says by nature all people worship and serve something other than the God they know exists. We are literally living “in denial”.
Below is the testimony of Dr. J. Budziszewski, professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas. At one time, he denied the existence of God. Not anymore. Here’s what he says about his conversion to Christianity, and how he came to realize that he’d been “suppressing the truth” about God . . .
I have already noted in passing that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast. Human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God, they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down stubborn pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students … now that’s sin!
It was also agony.
You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s laws is “written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.” [Romans chapter 2]. The way ‘natural law’ thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. Well, I was unusually determined not to know them, therefore, I had to destroy my mind! I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good…denies the reality of persons… and denies that his commitments are in any sense in his control?!
Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all of the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how many he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I thought I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes.
But I was the fool.
How then did God bring me back? I came, over time, to feel a greater and greater horror about myself. Not exactly a feeling of guilt. Not exactly a feeling of shame…just horror…an overpowering sense that my condition was terribly wrong. Finally, it occurred to me to wonder why, if there were no difference between the wonderful and the horrible, I should feel horror. Letting that thought through, my mental sensors blundered. You see, in order to take this sense of horror seriously (and by now I couldn’t help doing it), I had to admit that there was a difference between the wonderful and the horrible after all.
Dr Budziszewski’s testimony powerfully illustrates the lengths that our hearts and minds go to, in order to suppress the truth about the God we know certainly exists. And yet, despite our attempts to erase the true God (and his moral requirements) from our lives, the issue of God never goes away. For truly, without God we cannot make objective sense of human rights, morality, justice, purpose, truth, and love. The fact is, we are God’s loved image-bearers who need our Creator to truly make sense of life, and ourselves. It is this God who so compellingly has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ – the one who said, “I am the light of the world.” (Jn. 8:12).
[POSTSCRIPT: I will leave it to the reader to decide whether those commenting on this post are doing so consistently with the values and presuppositions which are implied by the worldview they espouse.]
spes clara 