3. The Natural Knowledge of God.
We must now inquire whether there is an an­swer to such a question for man; and if so, what
kind of certainty we are allowed to attain.
In his Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul found himself confronted precisely with these
problems, and he responded with a philosophi­cal reflection based on facts presented by the
history of religions.
In the megalopolis of Rome, the Babylon of that age, he encountered the type of moral
decadence that comes from the total loss of tradition: people were deprived of that interior
evidential character that in other times had been offered to man from the outset of his
life by usages and customs.
Where nothing can be taken for granted, everything becomes possible, and nothing is impossible
any longer.
Now there is no value capable of sustaining man, and there are no inviolable norms.
All that counts is man's ego and the present moment.
The traditional religions are merely comfortable facades without any spirituality; all that
remains is a naked and crude cynicism.
The apostle offers a surprising response to this metaphysical and moral cynicism of a
decadent society dominated only by the law of the jungle.
He declares that, in reality, this society knows God very well: "What can be known about
God is plain to them."
He then backs up this affir­mation: ''Ever since the creation of the world his invisible
nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made."
And Paul draws the conclusion: "So they are without excuse."
According to the apostle, the truth is accessible to them, but they do not want it, because
they refuse the demands that the truth would make on them.
In this context, he says that they "by their wickedness suppress the truth."
Man resists the truth that would demand a submission expressed in giving glory and thanks
to God.
For Paul, the moral decadence of society is nothing more than the logical consequence
and the faithful reflection of this radical perversion.
When man prefers his own egoism, his pride, and his convenience to the demands made on
him by the truth, the only possible outcome is an upside-down existence.
Adoration is due to God alone, but what is adored is no longer God; images, outward ap­pearances,
and current opinion have dominion over man.
This general alteration extends to ev­ery sphere of life.
That which is against nature becomes the norm; the man who lives against the truth also lives
against nature.
His creativity is no longer at the service of the good: he devotes his genius to ever
more refined forms of evil.
The bonds between man and woman, and between parents and children, are dissolved, so that
the very sources from which life springs are blocked up It is no longer life that reigns,
but death.
A civilization of death is formed.
The description of decadence that Paul sketches here astonishes us modern readers by its contemporary
relevance.
However, he is not content merely to de­scribe this state of affairs.
There were many who did so in his days, and they display a perverse form of moralism that
ends in taking pleasure precisely in the negative behavior it condemns.
On the contrary, the apostle's analysis leads to a diagnosis and, hence, takes the form
of a moral appeal: at the origin of all these negative things lies the negation of the truth
in favor of what is convenient--or rather, of what is profitable.
The starting point in man is a resistance to the evi­dential character of the Creator
that is present in his heart as the sign of a Being who looks at him and sumnions him.
Paul is far from regarding atheism, or an agnosticism that is lived out as
atheism, as an innocent position.
In his eyes, it is always the fruit of a refusal of that knowledge which is in fact offered
to man; man is unwilling to accept the conditions attached to this knowledge.
Man is not condemned to remain in un­certainty about God.
He can "see" him, if he listens to the voice of God's Being and to the voice of his creation
and lets himself be guided by this.
Paul knows nothing of an atheism gov­erned by purely idealistic motives.
What are we to say to this?
Clearly, the apostle is playing in this passage on the contradiction between philosophy and
religion that existed in antiquity.
Greek philosophy had arrived at the knowledge of the one single foundation of the universe,
the Spirit who alone is worthy of the name of "god", even if this knowledge existed in
contradictory forms and was insuffi­ciently detailed.
But the energy that had sus­tained its critique of religion soon cooled down, and although
this critical attitude was in fact an essential element in Greek philosophy, it increas­ingly
turned to the justification of the worship of the gods and of the adoration of state
power.
It was therefore an obvious fact that "the truth" was "kept a prisoner".
In this sense, Paul's diag­nosis is well founded, when we bear in mind the historical
situation he is addressing.
But despite this, can we really say that his affirmations possess a value that goes beyond
this specific historical constellation?
Certainly, we would need to modify the details.
Nevertheless, Paul's words are essentially painting the picture, not of some particular
historical situation, but of the permanent situation of humanity, of man, vis-a-vis God.
The history of religions is coex­tensive with the history of humanity.
As far as we know, there has never been an epoch in which the question of the One who
is totally other, the Divine, has been alien to man.
The knowledge of God has always existed.
And everywhere in the history of religions, in vari­ous forms, we encounter the significant
conflict between the knowledge of the one God and the attraction of other powers that
are considered more dangerous or nearer at hand and, there­fore, more important for
man than the God who is distant and mysterious.
All of history bears the traces of this strange dilemma between the non­violent, tranquil
demands made by the truth, on the one hand, and the pressure brought to make profits and
the need to have a good relationship with the powers that determine daily life by their
interventions, on the other hand.
Again and again, we see the victory of profit over truth, although the signs of the truth
and of its own power never disappear completely.
Indeed, they continue to live, often in surprising forms, in the very heart of a jungle full
of poisonous plants.
But is this true even today, in a totally non­religious culture, in a culture of rationality
and of the technology it harnesses?
I believe that the answer is Yes.
For even today, the question man poses inevitably goes beyond the sphere of tech­nological
rationality.
Even today, we do not limit ourselves to the question: "What can I do?"
We also ask: "What ought I to do, and who am I?"
There are of course cosmological evolutionist systems that elevate the non-existence of
God to the level of an obvious truth of reason and claim thereby to demonstrate that the
truth is precisely that there is no God.
But this type of general theory of knowledge betrays its own method­ological character
in essential points: the enor­mous gaps in our knowledge are filled by a series of mythological
"theatrical props" with a ficti­tious rationality that will not deceive anyone.
It is an obvious fact that the rational character of the universe cannot be explained rationally
on the basis of something irrational!
This is why the Logos that is at the origin of all things remains more than ever the best
hypothesis, although this is of course a hypothesis that demands that we give up a position where
it is we who are in charge and that we take the risk of assuming the position of humble
listeners.
Even in our days, we cannot say that the tranquil evidential character of God has been eliminated;
but we must admit that it has been made more than ever unrecognizable by the violence that
power and profit inflict on us.
In this way, the contempo­rary situation is fundamentally marked by that same tension
between opposite tendencies which runs through the whole of history.
On the one side, there is the interior opening up of the human soul to God; but on the other
side, there is the stronger attraction of our needs and our immediate experiences.
Man is the battlefield where these two contend with each other.
He is not capable of sloughing off God com­pletely, nor does he have the strength to set out on
the journey toward him.
On his own, he is not capable of constructing a bridge that could establish a concrete relatjonship
with this God.
We can continue to affirm, with .Saint Thomas, that unbelief is contrary to nature, but we
must at once add that man is not able to clear up wholly the strange chiaroscuro that weighs
down the questions concerning the eternal realities.
If a genuine relationship is to come into existence, God must take the initiative: it
is he who must come to meet man and address him.