This month I’ve been editing the video lectures of a philosophy course in my day job, and I’ve gotten into discussions on God’s existence. There are a couple natural problems with knowing God. One is that he is a metaphysical being, who by nature transcends the senses. We cannot know and observe God the same way we would anything in the created world. He is beyond us. He is invisible and without form. We think of the Holy Spirit as a breath because we have few metaphors to go by. God as a being is hard to describe.

Because God is beyond us, because he is the creator and we the created, we have epistemic distance with him. There’s only so much we can know about him because we can’t comprehend him.

He is also a person, who may choose to go unseen. This is a simple point for any person. If our environment allows it, we can hide from each other. If our environment doesn’t allow it, we can choose to sit the corners of the room and not talk to each other. People are intelligent beings who choose to communicate or stay silent. Since God is not a force of nature but an eternal being, he could choose for his own reasons to remain unknown to his creation.

There are some who ask why God doesn’t make his presence obvious. Why are agnostics even given room to breathe? Wouldn’t it be better if we all knew there was a God and couldn’t doubt? Responding to this, some argue that God maintains a distance from us in order to allow for our free will. He wants us to love him freely, not under compulsion. I can understand the appeal of this argument; many people put a lot of stock in human free will, but does this argument fit with the world as the Bible describes it?

God created the first couple in a perfect garden and spoke to them personally. We don’t know what that looked like, but it seems to be as relational as two people talking—no distance maintained out of respect for the free will of the created. And Adam and Eve chose the knowledge of good and evil over the divine being they spoke to earlier that day.

Jesus said, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19 ESV).

This turns the question of God’s self-revelation back to us. It isn’t that he hasn’t done enough to reach us; it’s that we are running away. We stop our ears. We shut our eyes. We actively “suppress the truth” that we were created by God for his glory.

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.

(Romans 1:18–20 ESV)

It would be more correct to say that God isn’t holding back out of respect for our free will but that we love darkness.

Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash