“…since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I love engaging with optical illusions. I especially like the kind where you can’t see something at first, but then, when your brain has wrapped itself fully around what’s really there, you can’t not see it. Sometimes it takes a little work to get to the place where you can really see—and sometimes you need help from someone else who can already see to adjust your mind and eyes accordingly—but that moment when you finally get it is always a pretty sweet one. Thinking about it, the world is kind of like an optical illusion. It looks one way at first glance, but once you see what really is, you just about can’t not see it anymore. This is where Paul goes next. Let’s join him.

Let’s start with a point that is unfortunately far less obvious than it should be. Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God (or any other supernatural being). Science by definition is an exploration of the natural world. It is limited to empirical methods to discover empirical truths. When you go beyond empiricism, you are leaving the realm of what science can speak to with the kind of confidence it has available to it when it stays properly rooted. Of course, this doesn’t stop scientists from using scientific terms to declare absolute correctness on philosophical truths, but we’ll leave that aside for now. The point here is this: When you move from the natural into the realm of the supernatural, science may still be a helpful partner in terms of providing some broad parameters within which an argument can be accepted as reasonable, but philosophy and theology will move over into the driver’s seat of the argument.

What science can offer, though, is a set of observations about the natural world that must be assessed and interpreted in terms of their philosophical implications on our lives. This assessment, though, happens with the guidance of a particular assessor’s worldview beliefs. Now, there are some observations that are so demonstrably irrefutable (gravity, for instance) that the range of reasonable sounding philosophical implications is going to be pretty small, but there are still others that lend themselves to a much broader array of explanations.

Another element we must consider here is that what we can know about the natural world is always developing. The nature of our ability to assess and describe the world around us has been regularly improving in its depth, detail, and sensitivity for most of human history. We make observations and then create more sensitive and accurate instruments that allow us to make more sensitive and accurate observations.

Take the cell, for instance. In the mid-19th century, when certain philosophical interpretations of natural observations were being formed that have had an enormous impact on almost every single aspect of our lives in the generations since, our knowledge of cells was fairly well limited to the fact that they existed. Using microscopes that were about as powerful as what are today inexpensive toys you can buy for toddlers who are interested in doing some science, we could see them and make out a couple of the larger blobs inside of them, the largest of them we called the nucleus.

Although our observations were wildly limited in terms of the still-not-fully-understood complexity actually present in cells, we didn’t know this at the time. In the hubris that has marked every generation, however, we confidently took our limited observations and used them to extrapolate out to much larger explanations of how the broader natural world must work, explanations that were rooted in certain philosophical and theological worldview beliefs, whose philosophical and theological implications have had an impact on history sense that the adjective “profound” doesn’t even begin to touch.

In fact, these observations were picked up and championed by philosophically and theologically like-minded individuals who used them to put in place barriers on what kinds of observations could be considered as rational and scientific. For more than 100 years, if a scientist wasn’t willing to operate within a certain ideological framework defined by these observations which were tremendously limited by modern standards, their work wasn’t going to be considered scientific and any conclusions they drew from their work were going to automatically be discounted as irrational and unscientific. Even scientists who didn’t share the underlying worldview assumptions of those initial observations, but who wanted their work to be considered by colleagues felt the need to limit their own observations of the natural world to the narrow parameters of the barriers, and even sought to reinterpret their worldview assumptions through the lens of these barriers.

The point here is that all of this is the result of worldview. Worldview forms the lens through which we interpret and understand the empirical observations we make about the natural world. Worldview, though, also forms the boundaries within which we make those empirical observations. This means that certain worldview beliefs will limit us to only making certain kinds of observations and only interpreting them in certain ways. There’s a reason, for instance, that for all of the scientific and mathematical discoveries made in places like ancient China or India or Egypt or Greece or Arabia, modern science as we know it today only developed in a certain part of the world in a certain historical era: Christian Western Europe.

Okay, but what does any of this have to do with what Paul is saying here? Because science can only offer observations about the natural world, and because worldview forms the lens through which we understand and interpret those observations, the real question when seeking to understand the world around us is which set of worldview beliefs makes the most sense of the observations we have made? What Paul is arguing here is that the Christian worldview is the only one that makes good sense of the observations available to us. When we examine the world around us, Paul argues, the conclusion that God exists is utterly inescapable. Furthermore, many of the basic aspects of God’s character are equally inescapable. The world so clearly proclaims the existence and nature of God, in fact (a fact which Paul insists was God’s doing in the first place), that the claim that we didn’t know He existed, what He is basically like, and how we should live in light of that is utterly inexcusable.

Yeah, but Paul made this declaration hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We know so much more now than we did then. After all, didn’t I just make the point that the artificial limits of Darwinism are suspect at least in part because the theory was formed on the basis of observations that, on the basis of modern standards are antiquated and ill-informed? Well, let’s quickly assess Paul’s claim against modern standards.

From a strictly scientific standpoint, we don’t know how the universe got it. We’re even less sure of how life got started. But our best observations to date have revealed that the scientific parameters necessary for the world to exist at all, let alone like it does are remarkably narrow. Actually, that doesn’t even begin to cover it. When you add up all of the different physical constants that describe the world as it presently exists, and which – to our knowledge – have always described the world, the odds of the universe just accidentally happening into existence are small to a degree that our brains can’t process. They’re not completely zero, but the distance between them and zero is so tiny that we can’t measure it. The whole thing is, to use the phrase that has become common in describing this natural phenomenon, finely tuned to a degree that is all but impossible for us to grasp.

There’s no good argument to be made philosophically speaking, that the universe had to exist, so necessity doesn’t work as an explanation for its existence. But chance is so laughably inadequate given the odds against it all just happening as to make anyone suggesting it as an option appear to be either irrational or else so committed to a purely naturalistic set of worldview beliefs as to be an unreasonable debate partner on the issue.

The same situation unfolds when we zoom in from the existence of the universe in the first place to the existence of life as we know it. Thanks to the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick back in the 1960s, we understand that life requires information. Lots of information. Vast amounts of information. The DNA molecule as well as a handful of other sources in the cell (as we have more recently discovered) contains this information.

As much as cells are the building blocks of life, proteins are the building blocks of cells. Proteins are the result of a string of amino acids that are lined up in a very specific order. The information for these specific lineups of amino acids is contained within the DNA molecule. If you don’t have the right information, the amino acids don’t line up properly, which means the proteins can’t fold properly, which means the cells don’t operate properly, and life isn’t possible. What you begin to run into here, though, is the chicken and egg problem for how the initial proteins that allowed for the existence of the first single-celled life first folded up. While it is appealing for folks operating from certain worldview standpoints to appeal to chance here, modern research has revealed that, like with the existence of the universe in the first place, chance is woefully, laughably inadequate as an explanation. Necessity is equally (if not even more significantly) flawed. No, the fact is that based on our repeated and uniform experience going back thousands of years, when we come across a set of information that is both specified and complex has only ever had a single source: a mind; a designing intelligence, if you will.

Worldviews that don’t allow for the existence of the supernatural cannot adequately explain how the universe and the life within it got here. Forget an adequate explanation, they cannot offer any kind of an explanation beyond “we don’t know.” Far from being a position that is somehow more humble or more honest, though, when one worldview can offer an explanation that can account for the existence of the universe and the life within it that lines up with our observations, and another only shrugs its shoulders in willful ignorance, it begins to appear that worldview-driven stubbornness is more of the issue than and honest desire to find the best explanation for the available observations.

No, the truth is that in spite of a few generations of thinking we could explain the world and life as we know it just fine without any kind of a reference to anything that even smacked of “God,” the more we learn today about just how complex and detailed it all is, the harder it is to escape the conclusion that Paul was right. What can be known about God is evident among us because God has shown it to us. We didn’t like or otherwise quit accepting some of His earlier revelations, so He has enabled us to receive new ones that are more suited to our times. All the same, His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. We can understand what is made a whole lot better than Paul and his predecessors ever could, but the conclusions we are increasingly reaching aren’t much different from his.

As a result, anyone who claims to either outright disbelieve in God or to not know enough to accept His existence and identity is without excuse. They are without excuse and will one day be held accountable for their refusal to embrace reality as God created it. This is the hard news of the Gospel. Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll wade through some more of Paul’s indictment in the first three chapters of Romans before landing with both feet on the hope that only the Gospel offers. Strap in, because it’s going to be a wild ride.