God Is Obvious
It is common to hear unbelievers insisting that they reject the truth because it has not be made obvious to them. Without the revelation of God through prophetic messages as recorded in scripture, there are many things we cannot know about him. However, nature itself reveals some basic truths about God as well.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
Romans 1:19-20
Creation itself demonstrates order. Though many reject the objective moral laws in life, they still recognize that there are objective physical laws. It doesn’t matter if you can believe you fly, if you jump out of a plane you better have a parachute or reality will come at you with a great deal of force! We don’t live in a chaotic, random universe where gravity may cease or even reverse itself at any moment.
To believe that order came spontaneously from disorder goes against all observable reality. So if it’s so obvious that there is a creator, why do some reject that?
Excuses For Sin
Anyone who has watched a family member’s life spiral into self-destruction from insobriety, sexual immorality, etc… knows that the reality of moral law asserts itself with the same certainty as physical laws.
The further from God’s prescription for man a lifestyle wanders, the more self-destructive it becomes. The destruction is usually less sudden and often less violent. It doesn’t even result in a shortness of lifespan, but yet it’s obvious to a third party that life is lost. Thankfully, God has also graciously granted repentance so that, if a man stuck in a sinful spiral repents at any point he can be saved from death.
The main difference is, it is according to nature to follow physical laws but the sons of Adam are, by nature, bound in service to sin. They long to be free of the reality that, just like freefalling from high in the air, eventually will reassert itself.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Romans 1:18
Natural man rejects the truth about the righteousness of God and his coming judgement (the ministry of the Spirit in the world [John 16:8-11]) because he longs for a world where judgement never catches up to him.
It’s not that the truth isn’t obvious. It’s that people live in denial.
Symptoms of Denial
With reality staring us all in the face, if one is going to deny it they’re going to have to come up with different explanations for everything.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Romans 1:21-23
Throughout history, those who were running from God invented all sorts of explanations for what they can see. They have claimed infinite regression (be it turtles standing on the backs of turtles holding up the universe or a cosmic font of infinite energy which endlessly spawns alternate universes) to avoid the truth that there is an infinite, personal being who created the universe. They have claimed that the universe itself is eternal and was never created to begin with (steady=state models).
Because they ascribe God’s eternal power and divine nature to those things which were created to explain away the evidence, the judgement isn’t so much supernatural as it is giving man over to his own nature.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
Romans 1:24-25
Homosexuality is explicitly given as an example, but every sort of immorality blooms in a world of pagan deflection of the truth.
The Truth Divides
Some place power in rocks, believing crystals will heal them. Yet even many of those who think that’s superstition have no problem with it. Yet mention God as creator of everything and having all power and often the claws come out.
The world has no problem with alternative explanations for our creation, sustaining, and purpose even if they don’t find them believable. Nobody who is an atheistic materialist is writing lengthy works about the absurdity of witchcraft. Suppressing the truth happens either way.
Yet, ultimately, the wages of sin (death) catch up to every man whether he believes it will or not. Denial of the truth in no way makes it less true. Because the goal of those who reject Christ is to deny anyway, Christians must understand that no amount of facts and proof are going to convert anyone.
Only God, who restores hearts, can turn the hardened heart back into one which can feel the need for him. We cannot win them over with fine speeches or even irrefutable proofs. In the words of one such unbeliever:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons (emp. mine)
