How the Modern-Day Culture Suppresses the Knowledge of God: We Have A New God–Identity

Martyn Iles, Answers in Genesis, 1/24

Times change. New generations, new ideas, new technologies—they come and go.

But truth does not change.

The task is to take the same old truth but apply it anew with fresh relevance and power in each generation.

Our culture is changing very quickly. These are times of incredible transformation and generational differences. Whenever I say something like that on a stage, I see heads nodding across the audience—people really feel it.

But it is a change that Scripture foreshadowed in Romans 1.

Romans 1 speaks of the culture where people have removed God from their lives—something it calls “ungodliness.” It describes what comes next.

We read that people reject God by “suppressing the truth.” That is, the truth about God.

The only way they can do this is by denying the witness of creation, because God “has been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So, they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

In other words, the creation is God’s ever-present reminder to a lost world that he exists. It tells us, according to Romans 1, of his eternity, his power, and his divine nature.

It is interesting to observe that these are precisely the issues that scientists and philosophers have had to contend with when they examine creation.

I remember driving along in my car in Australia, and on the radio they were interviewing one of the scientists working on the large hadron collider in Switzerland. They started getting into the details a little and asked him why this kind of science was being done.

The scientist pointed to two problems they were trying to solve. First, what existed before the big bang? Second, what was the source of the big bang’s power?

I marveled that this is exactly the witness of creation described in Scripture—“his eternal power” (Romans 1:20).

But the interview continued. He explained the crucial role their research could play in finding the answer to both of these questions. He explained the theory that it might be contained in a tiny, subatomic particle. My mouth fell open when he called it “the god particle.”

Notice the denial? When confronted with eternity and power, they seek an explanation other than the divine. They look within creation rather than beyond it.

There is not an evidence problem for God. Creation speaks of him so clearly. Rather, there is a spiritual problem—a human problem. There is a refusal to confront the evidence.

Or we might say—to use the language of the passage—there is a suppression of the evidence.

This has been done in many ways over the centuries, but one of the major ways has been the attacks on creation as an act of God and the Bible as a true account of creation.

This is the fruit of the so-called “scientific age”—code for evolutionary naturalism. Those who were seen as great authorities in the scientific realm were able to claim that creation did not, in fact, speak of God, but that science had worked out God was not necessary in creation. Science, they claimed, has disproved the Bible and disproved God.

This means that people were able to look at the wonder of creation—even its testimony to an eternal, powerful, divine being—and say, “God did not do that.” How? Because the big brains of science told us so. They told us that there was another explanation—a smarter, more enlightened explanation. Certainly, the explanation offered by the Bible is not right.

This was the first step in making an “ungodly” society. It was the first step in making a society where people removed God from their lives—a “secular” society, a society devoid of spirituality.

This secular culture is the one Ken Ham, the founders, and the other pioneers of Answers in Genesis spoke of. This is the attack they sought to address. This is the error they sought to reverse.

They stood up against massive odds and massive cultural forces and said, “No. Stop. The answers are, in fact, in Genesis.” And they defended that truth.

They stood for the reality that the Bible is true, science confirms it, God is real, and therefore his gospel is true.

But our culture was never going to stop here. It was always going to keep changing.

Notice that Romans 1 does not say, “Therefore they became atheists.” That is not the ultimate result of ungodliness. Secularism is just a gateway to something else—it simply clears the way for people to find a new god.

That is why Scripture says people “exchange the truth about God” and “worship and serve” something else—and that something else is not science. Science does not have the necessary qualities to be a god—it cannot provide meaning or purpose.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one among the new atheists—a friend of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. She now reports that she is turning to Christianity for exactly this reason. She writes:

I have turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable—indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?

Sadly, however, most are not turning to Christianity to find God. Having rejected him and suppressed the evidence, they now turn somewhere else.

I once heard a preacher propose a hypothetical scenario about aliens. Suppose, he said, aliens were to visit from another planet. Suppose that their mission was to answer certain key questions about the human race, and one of those questions was “What does this people worship?”

They would look at the selfie-filled social media accounts, listen to the emotionally indulgent song lyrics, hear motivational speeches about “you do you” and “follow your dreams” and “you’re worth it”—and they would be assaulted with advertising materials on every street. They would almost certainly conclude, “This people worships themselves.”

Indeed, that is where we are today. We have a new god. Its name is “identity”—our “true selves.”

That was the god of the first rebellious civilization at Babel. They said, “Come, let us make a name for ourselves.” They sought to make the self great—to make themselves the highest value.

Click on Link to Continue Reading

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2024/01/19/how-modern-day-culture-suppresses-knowledge-god/?utm_source=kenhamdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=20240119&mc_cid=bebcce56bb&mc_eid=676d8b3bcc