Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (3 page)

The upshot is that humans are surrounded by evidence for God simply because we are all made in the image of God, live in God’s universe, and are upheld by God’s common grace. “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36).

This may explain why young children in every culture have a concept of God. Psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale University reports that “when children are directly asked about the origin of animals and people, they tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults who raised them do not.”
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In other words, children tend to hold a concept of God even if their parents are atheists.

Psychologist Justin Barrett at Oxford University reports similar findings. Scientific evidence has shown that “built into the natural development of children’s minds [is] a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose.” Even if a group of children were put “on an island and they raised themselves,” Barrett adds, “I think they would believe in God.”
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It appears that we have to be educated out of the knowledge of God by secular schools and media.

Suppressing the Evidence

These findings from psychology may cast new light on what Jesus meant when he urged his followers to “become like children” to enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:3). Calvin taught that all people have an innate sense of the divine (
sensus divinitatis
). Yet if general revelation impinges on all human consciousness, why don’t all people acknowledge God? What is Paul’s answer? He says we “suppress the truth” taught by general revelation. Let’s pull out the verses showing how Paul develops the next point in his argument:

We all suppress the evidence for God from creation.

Romans 1:18—[They] suppress the truth.

Romans 1:21—Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.

Romans 1:28—They did not see fit to acknowledge God.

Why do people suppress the evidence for God? The God described in the Bible goes against the grain of today’s popular notions of spirituality. Many people may be receptive to the idea of a non-personal spiritual force that they can tap into. They might be willing to consider a great pantheistic pool of spirituality of which they are a part. But they are far less comfortable with the concept of a living, active, personal God who knows them, wants to interact with them, and has his own views about what they are doing with their lives.

Encountering
this
God can be like stumbling in the dark against something warm and lumpy, only to discover that you’ve bumped into another person you didn’t know was there. You may be startled, and perhaps a little frightened. C. S. Lewis puts it colorfully. “There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God’!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? … Worse still, supposing He had found us?”
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Suppose what you thought was a non-personal spiritual force, which could safely be treated as an inanimate object, turns out instead to be a transcendent Person—with a legitimate moral claim on your life? What do people do when they hear the footstep of the real God?

Their first reaction, Paul says, is fear and denial. They “suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18).

The concept of denial or suppression is said to be one of the most distinctive discoveries of modern psychology. Research has found that humans tend to suppress thoughts that are painful, disturbing, or traumatic. Today we casually use the pop psychology phrase “You’re in denial” to mean someone is refusing to admit a problem or face an unpleasant fact.
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Yet the idea that people often stifle or suppress what they know is nothing new. The Bible taught it long before the rise of modern psychology. Romans 1 says that fallen, sinful humans have a strong tendency to deny what we know about God—or what we should know.

Tug of War

It may sound unusual to say there are things about God that we “should” know, as though it were a moral requirement. Yet in many situations we are morally responsible for what we know. If you are a witness in a court of law, you must solemnly swear to tell everything you know—“the whole truth”—about the crime. If you hold anything back, you may be charged with a crime yourself (obstruction of justice).
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Or if you are arrested, you cannot argue that you did not know the law. Courts operate by the principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you try to avoid liability by closing your eyes to the facts, you may be charged with “willful blindness.” For example, people arrested for transporting illegal drugs have claimed that they did not know what was in the package. Courts have ruled that the defendant
should
have known and was responsible for finding out.
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We apply the same principle outside the courtroom. If a student says he didn’t know his homework was due on Thursday, that is no excuse. It was his responsibility to know the due date.

The branch of philosophy that focuses on the nature of knowledge is called epistemology. We have an epistemic duty to acknowledge what we know and conform our lives to it. When we fail in that duty, we commit an “epistemological sin.”

These examples clarify what Paul says in Romans 1. At the heart of the human condition, we might say, is an epistemological sin—the refusal to acknowledge what can be known about God and then to respond appropriately: “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom. 1:21). They engage in willful blindness.

The great drama of history is the tug of war between God and humanity. On one hand, God reaches out to humanity to make himself known. On the other hand, humans desperately seek to avoid knowing him. In the words of theologian Thomas K. Johnson, we “can take the account of Adam and Eve hiding from God behind a bush or tree as a metaphor for the history of the human race.”
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How Humans Hide

How do humans try to hide from God? What is the next point in Paul’s dissection of human motivations? They avoid God by creating idols. Those who reject the Creator try to find a God substitute in creation. Paul highlights the underlying dynamic by using the word
exchanged
:

We all create idols to take the place of God.

Romans 1:23—[They] exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Romans 1:25—They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.

The most fundamental decision we all face over the course of our lives is what we will recognize as the ultimate reality, the uncaused source and cause of our existence. Everything else in our worldview depends on that initial decision. The Bible speaks of this foundational choice in terms of who or what we worship. We must all answer the challenge Joshua issued to the Israelites as they were poised to enter the Promised Land: “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15).

The Ten Commandments likewise begin by addressing the question of worship: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3). Why does this commandment come first? Because all the other commandments hinge on it. They explicate what it
means
to worship the biblical God, living out his truth across the whole of life. The commandments spell out the kind of people we become when we are in relationship with God.

An atheist professor once told me that the Bible teaches polytheism because the first commandment speaks of “other gods.” He said the biblical God just wanted to be the top god over a panoply of other deities. But the Hebrew phrase
before me
actually means
in my presence
or
in my sight
. God is saying, Get your idols out of my sight! Do not bring your phony gods into my presence!

The first commandment may seem outdated if we think of idols as statues of wood or stone. But Scripture treats the topic of idolatry far more subtly. An idol is anything we want more than God, anything we rely on more than God, anything we look to for greater fulfillment than God. Idolatry is thus the hidden sin driving all other sins.

For example, why do we lie? Because we fear the disapproval of people more than we want the approval of God. Or because we value our reputation more than we value our relationship with God. Or we are trying to manipulate someone into giving us something we think we need more than we need God. The more visible sin (lying) is driven by an invisible turn of our hearts toward something other than God as the ultimate source of security and happiness.

This explains why, as psychologist David Powlison says, “idolatry is by far the most frequently discussed problem in the Scriptures.”
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In the Old Testament, the prophet Habakkuk describes people whose idol is their military power: “whose own might is their god.” Painting a vivid word picture of the enemy’s military as a “dragnet” for sweeping up whole societies, Habakkuk says “he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his dragnet” (Hab. 1:11, 16).

In the New Testament, Paul treats idolatry with the same penetrating psychological insight. Writing to members of the church in Ephesus, he urges them not to be sexually immoral, impure, or covetous—then adds what may seem a surprising twist: For that “person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world” (Eph. 5:5
NLT
). The hidden sin beneath the others is the tendency to make an idol of “the things of this world.” We sin because we want something in the created world more than we want the Creator.
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When Good Gifts Are False Gods

We tend to equate idols with things that are forbidden or intrinsically evil. But things that are intrinsically good can also become idols—
if
we allow them to take over any of God’s functions in our lives. “The trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol,” writes Martin Luther. “That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.”
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I was once invited to give a presentation to a group of Christian artists on how the arts have often functioned as a substitute religion. The nineteenth-century poet Arthur Symons observed that literature became “itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual.”
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The arts are a good gift from God, but like any other good thing, they can be used as a substitute for God.

The artists at the conference then began to disclose their personal idols. One said, “I came to see that my family was my idol. We always told one another, ‘Family is everything.’” Another said, “For me, it was my marriage; my relationship with my husband had become the most important thing in my life.” Marriage and family are good; they are part of God’s original creation. But they are too limited to provide the ultimate meaning and purpose of our lives.

For some people, the greatest source of security and self-worth may come from professional achievements, sexual attractiveness, or physical pleasure. Writing to the Philippian church, Paul describes people whose minds are “set on earthly things,” whose “god is their belly” (Phil. 3:19). They are driven by sheer physical appetite, even if they cover their cravings under a veneer of sophistication.

John Calvin defines idolatry as worshipping “the gifts in place of the giver himself.”
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The way to uncover idols in your life is to ask whether any gift has become more important to you than the Giver.

Idols Have Consequences

So here is Paul’s diagnosis of the human condition so far: God is constantly reaching out to people with evidence of his existence through general revelation. But humans are constantly suppressing those truths by creating idols.

This pattern of suppression creates an acute internal tension. On one hand, people are aware of the evidence for the biblical God from general revelation. On the other hand, they keep creating surrogate gods in a desperate attempt to suppress that evidence. To borrow a term from psychology, humans are trapped in cognitive dissonance, the mental stress of harboring concepts that contradict one another.

How does God break us out of the trap? He responds in a way we might not expect: He ratchets up the tension. He allows us to live out the consequences of our idols in order to intensify the cognitive dissonance—and ultimately to press us to the point of making a decision. In Paul’s words, God “gives people up” to experience the consequences of their choices:

God gives us up to the consequences of our idols—to a “debased” mind.

Romans 1:21—Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking.

Romans 1:28—Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.

What
are
the consequences of serving idols? Paul’s answer starts with the inner life: “They became futile in their thinking.” “God gave them up to a debased mind” (Rom. 1:21, 28). The Greek word for mind is
nous
, but it has a much richer meaning than the English word. It can be translated reason, understanding, or intellectual intuition. (The same word is at the root of the Greek term for repentance,
metanoia
, which means to change one’s
nous
—not just the mind but a whole-person transformation.) The church fathers often translated
nous
as the faculty for evaluating and directing the course of one’s life: “the eye of the soul.” So it is no great stretch to translate the word as worldview, the convictions by which we direct our lives.

Today the word
debased
has a primarily moral connotation, meaning wicked or degenerate. But in the original Greek, the word meant counterfeit money. So a debased worldview is one that offers a counterfeit god. It makes false promises. It gives misleading answers to the questions of life.
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