Without Excuse

Are we responsible to know God? The atheist would have us believe that it is our epistemic duty not to believe in God either because there is no God or God is hidden. In the first chapter of Romans, the apostle Paul states that God’s eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceivable “in the things that have been made”—so clearly, in fact, that unbelief is “without excuse.”

It makes sense to ask then, that if God’s attributes and existence are so perspicuous, why do Christians readily agree with atheists and agnostics that there are no clear-cut proofs for God’s existence? To say that one is culpable—without excuse—means that there is knowledge for which one is responsible—for which everyone is responsible. In this essay, Owen Anderson makes clear the case for God from Creation, and why Christian equivocation on that evidence is misplaced and, in the end, unloving.

In this essay, we will learn together why the clarity of God’s existence is so important to Christianity. It is so important that the apostle Paul places this teaching at the very beginning of his explanation of Christian theology in the book of Romans. In Romans 1:18–25, we see that Creation clearly reveals God’s eternal power and divine nature to all, and yet humans rejected this clarity in favor of unbelief.