No Real Atheists

Since we live in a world where everything reveals God, no one can ultimately escape the reality of His existence. Today, Sinclair Ferguson demonstrates how Christians can respond to professing atheists and point them toward the truth.

This week, we’ve been thinking about divine revelation. The word the New Testament uses is apokalupsis, the word that gives us the alternative title for the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse of John. It means “unveiling,” disclosing something to us that otherwise would be hidden from us. And yesterday, I was commenting on the fact that God reveals Himself in everything that He has made. As Paul says in Romans 1:19, His invisible attributes become visible to us in the created order. Isaac Watts wrote a hymn about this, “I Sing the Almighty Power of God.” And its last verse captures this: “There’s not a plant or flower below but makes your glories known, and clouds arise and tempest blow by order from your throne.”

I often think in this connection of some words of the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck. He writes in his Reformed Dogmatics: “According to Scripture the whole universe is a creation and hence also a revelation of God. In an absolute sense, nothing is atheistic. There is no atheistic world and there are no atheistic people, nor are there atheistic persons.” I know that sounds a staggering claim, but actually it’s just a paraphrase of what Paul says in Romans 1:19–21, isn’t it? If everything there is—apart from God—has been made by God, well then, the words of Psalm 139 are true in this particular sense: Even if you take the wings of the morning and travel at the speed of light to the furthest part of the earth to flee from God, when you land, you will still be confronted by the same revelation of God in creation that you were trying to escape from. It’s as though God had planted quiet voices in everything in creation to make them say, “There is no last exit from My revelation.”

I wonder if you see what that means. It’s exactly what Isaac Watts wrote. Nothing is atheistic. “There’s not a plant or flower below but makes God’s glories known.” And since that is the inescapable environment in which we live, as Bavinck goes on to say, “There are no real atheists. There are only hiding atheists.” Now, I’m sure Herman Bavinck wasn’t denying there are people who call themselves atheists. And actually, I think we would probably have to concede that there are people who deceive themselves so fully that they believe themselves to be atheists.

But I want you to notice the implications of this, and we’ll need to talk more about this tomorrow. If God’s revelation of His eternal power and glory are so real that nothing is atheistic in the absolute sense, and if nobody can escape it—so that ultimately there are no real atheists— then those of us who are Christians know something about non-Christians and atheists that they may well be denying about themselves. And this is what Paul says in Romans 1:21. They know that God is. They can deny it to us. They may even deny it to themselves. But ultimately, deep down, they cannot escape the reality.

Now, why is this important for us as Christians to know? Here are a couple of reasons. The first is that since this is a God-revealing world, it isn’t actually possible to live in it without that being the basis for everything you do. And this means that atheists can never really be consistent with their first principles, or at least the first principles they profess to have. They must always be borrowing from the implications of the existence of God and His revelation. Otherwise, nothing makes sense. Nothing is ultimately explicable. Our lives fail to make sense. Our loves fail to make sense. And we have to make up everything as we go along.

Now, I think it’s important to see nobody can actually live consistently with that presupposition. Nobody lives that way. If you think for ten minutes about living that way in which nothing makes sense, in which there is no foundation for rationality, I think you will soon be driven to despair. But there’s something else I think that we need to know, and that is that atheists are all inconsistent. They all borrow or steal from the implications of God’s existence and from His creation in order to live. And so inevitably there are what I call “loose threads” in their lives, inconsistencies. And one of our responsibilities as Christians is to spot these inconsistencies, to gently pull on the loose thread, and to help unravel the falsehood that they have professed to believe in order that we may begin to point them to the true and living God, and to pray that as their lives, inconsistent as they are, unravel, they too will begin to seek God.