For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 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. Rom 1:18-20
Before we delve into why they are without excuse for their disbelief, we need to review how we establish proof of anything. For believers, this means identifying the reasons (arguments) for the hope that is within us. 1 Peter 3:15 Fair enough. Yet it also involves identifying the logical fallacies driving arguments that oppose God. Charismatics tend to cringe at the idea. “Listen!” They say. “I already know that I know so who cares?!” While some believers are repelled by intellectual arguments, the fact that these arguments exist at all is in itself proof of God’s existence.
World View
While you may not have given it much thought, everyone has a worldview. It is a paradigm – a conceptual model of reality. This includes but is not limited to ideas about God, and the origins of life. Every worldview can be reduced to one or more empirically unprovable presuppositions. That the phone I am holding will fall to the ground if I let go is an empirically provable presupposition. In contrast, “God exists.” Or “God does not exist.” are empirically unprovable presuppositions. Hence both are statements of faith. The question that follows any two opposing statements of faith is,
Which of them has the most logical supporting evidence?
Some might view this as splitting hairs. However, millions of young people are being argued out of their faith by falsehoods framed as proven facts.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am not rejecting alternative forms of knowledge. Spiritual discernment, prophecy, revelation, dreams, visions, or any other supernatural encounter with God and His truth can be equally valid. Rather I am establishing what Paul means by
they are without excuse.
God is the author of the laws of logic, mathematics, and science that govern His creation. It was the revelation that It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter Prov 25:2 that drove mankind to discover science which means knowledge in the first place.
Presuppositionalism
If you are a 2 Tim 3:16-17 Bible-believing follower of Christ then you are by definition a presuppositionalist. The presupposition is that All scripture is God-breathed and therefore inerrant. Can we prove this empirically? No. Or at least not yet. We are being intellectually honest when we admit that we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 Cor 5:7
In contrast, Atheists normally claim intellectual superiority over those who walk by faith. Perhaps the most famous of these is Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. When asked how atheists should respond to Christians he said, “Mock them!” Because “religion “subverts science and saps the intellect”.
Ironically, he calls himself a “cultural Christian” today. 🤔
Having listened to Dawkins for years I think this is hilarious. However, the most pertinent point to grasp is that ALL purely intellectual atheists are intellectually dishonest. Richard Dawkins is the perfect example in that he would never admit that his firmly held “there is no God” presupposition is in fact, a statement of faith. Even more important is that the above video illustrates the sleight of hand that so many atheists use in debating theists. Instead of making an argument for what they do believe, atheists redefine terms and argue for what they don’t. Here Dawkins arrogantly assumes the right to redefine the term Christian. Yet, only God and His word can define a follower of Christ.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Mark 16:16
This narcissistic, self-aggrandizing nitwit has led countless students away from God. He is a quintessential representation of the spirit of anti-Christ. He actually believes that
he can claim to be Christian without believing in Christ.
If that sounds mean, consider this. I call Dawkins a nitwit because what Islamic extremists would do to him here on earth is nothing compared to what he will face in eternity if he doesn’t repent and believe.
Proof
Just as only God can define God. Only empirically proven facts can define empirical truth. Everything else amounts to faith in a presupposition.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Heb 11:1.
The good news is that genuine faith is backed by evidence such that it becomes evidence itself. The more evidence we gather, the stronger our faith and hope grow. People like Richard Dawkins listen to my subjective personal testimony then mock me and say I am nuts. But subjective does not mean untrue. As believers, we tend to confirm our subjective experiences by correlating them with similar experiences reported by others. That’s great if our faith increases. If frustration and confusion arise it is probably because we are treating subjective truth as if it were objective. Correlation is never proof of cause in itself. Hence, an atheist might simply say it is expected that we would align with, and build consensus with other mentally ill people. Can Holy Spirit confirm our subjective truth claims in the hearts and minds of unbelievers? Certainly. Yet we must understand. The fact that someone debates our subjective truth is not what Paul said will leave them without excuse.
We need to understand and acknowledge this if we claim to love unbelievers.
Those without excuse namely vehement atheists almost always validate their presupposition by using the subjective nature of our experiences against us. First, they point out the subjective nature of spiritual experience itself. We present what we think is supporting evidence but is really just more subjective truth. Then they claim we are delusional. If we take the bait, they trick us into arguing that we are not. The harder we try, the more frustrated we become. At that point, the atheist mocks us. We step into guilt, shame, and condemnation because we feel stupid. Or we get offended and warn them they are going to hell. We repeat the experience a few times until we give up and stop talking about God to strangers. If only we would grasp and understand that we plant and water. 1 Cor 3:5-9 That is all. The best we can hope is that our subjective testimony and objective evidence we are about to present will inspire others to,
Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Psalm 34:8
It’s important to think deeply about what Paul means when he says, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.
He is speaking specifically about the objective proof of God. That proof has grown exponentially since Paul’s day as Daniel so aptly predicted.
…Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase. Dan 12:4
Those who are without excuses are not accountable for rejecting our testimony. They are accountable for rejecting the proof that was in front of them the entire time. They are accountable for the sorcery and lies to which they cling because they love their sin and their rebellion. Those without excuse do not want God to be God. In the words of a very honest atheist Thomas Nagel,
“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
–The Last Word – 1997
Thomas Nagel is a perfect example of what is in the heart of every committed atheist. These are those whom Paul says are without excuse. Any purely intellectual atheist will change their mind when faced with the objective proof of God that modern science provides. The problem is that many believers remain totally unaware of how much genuine scientific confirmation of our faith exists.
What follows is a list of evidence for the reader to explore at their leisure. While not exhaustive, the list contains some of my favorite arguments and evidence for the truth that Holy Spirit has already confirmed in the hearts of genuine believers.
Cosmological Argument
Something can not come from nothing. Those claiming it can have yet to provide the smallest shred of supporting evidence. Hence it remains a bad presupposition – an unsupported statement of faith.
Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Once again, Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics which no atheist would dispute says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Saying that things exist without a cause amounts to saying that reactions do not require a precipitating action.
The universe began to exist. No scientist anywhere would seriously postulate that the universe has always existed. Finding and recreating the moment it began is the primary goal of the Hadron Collider known as CERN in Switzerland.
Therefore, the universe has a cause. That cause would have to be outside space and time otherwise known as creation. Because something can’t come from nothing and every reaction has a precipitating action or force outside itself that set it in motion.
At the end of the day, the Cosmological Argument is a bullet-pointed breakdown of what most people call common sense. Common sense is what Paul means by …clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. Here is another example.
Intelligent Design
Imagine you were an alien landing in a forest on Earth. Trees, plant life, and birds were all you saw as you walked for miles. Suddenly you found a wristwatch buried in the leaves. You investigate further by taking the back off and notice all the miniature circuitry, the battery that powers it, and the tiny LED display. Obviously, you conclude that the watch is an aberration, the product of a random act of nature. That sounds logical.
Right?
Of course not. Comonsense tells us that complexity always indicates design. Design requires an intelligent designer. Still, many reprobates continue to argue the point. None would dispute that if it takes 23,000 engineers and three billion lines of code to run Google, the largest repository of knowledge and information on earth, it would be dumb to dispute the existence of intelligent designers behind Google. If that is the case it is just as dumb to dispute the intelligent designer of a cell weighing less than several ten-thousandths of a gram and requiring what amounts to two billion lines of code using four amino acids, adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) to operate.
Prayer
At this point, many might assume that prayer could only be relegated to the realm of subjective truth. While the impact of prayer on the external world remains subjective, there is some fairly solid objective evidence regarding prayer’s impact on the one who is praying.
Most will remember the geologic layers they learned about in junior high or Middle School Earth Science.
The layers allegedly proved the earth is millions of years old. The existence of coal was one major proof point. While you won’t hear about it from secular sources, coal was formed during the Mt Saint Helen’s eruption in 1980. In addition to the linked article above the YouTube channel Is Genesis History is a fantastic source for scientific evidence of the Biblical story of creation.
Fine Tuning
That the earth’s position just happened to be so perfectly fine-tuned to support life defies the laws of mathematical probability. In fact, the mathematical probability of fine-tuning being a random event is 1 times 10 to the minus sixty power. Just to add context, a mathematical impossibility begins at 10 to the minus fifty power.
To give you some perspective the odds of your being struck by lightning in the United States in your lifetime is 1.5 times 10 to the minus 4 power.
The Primordial Slime
The probability of life occurring randomly out of what Evolutionary Biologists call the primordial slime is in the same range of impossibility. John Lennox is an amazing scientific Christian apologist who has successfully debated the likes of Richard Dawkins and others on the mathematical and scientific accuracy of the Bible.
That’s a whole lot to chew on.
As believers, we know the ultimate proof that God exists is found amidst our relationship with Him and in all the mighty subjective confirmations He gives within our hearts where eternity is written. Ecc 3:11 Again, we don’t provide evidence to prove God exists. Rather we provide it so that those who have been sold a fake scientific narrative can see that the science that claims to prove the nonexistence of God is not science at all. True science beholds his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, which have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made and are awed by them. True science is worship. The evidence we present causes sincere truth seekers to question what they have been told such that they open their hearts and call out to God and He will answer. Isa 65:24  Then they can taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Psalm 34:8
Those who reject God do so because they don’t want there to be a God; they don’t want the universe to be like that.” It is for this reason that they are
