I have spent the last several weeks discussing how a materialist view of the universe fails to explain the world we experience everyday of our lives. While materialism may be important to the atheist scientist, it is white noise to the majority of people who are obsessed with spiritual fulfillment. The daily angst of our fellow man is not generated by the need to fuel a biological machine for better survival, but rather by the desperate attempt to fill a spiritual gas tank that always seems to be running on fumes. Our atheist friends represent a minority, and while their arguments may sharpen our understanding of God, they don’t address the immensely more important question; who is this God in whom most people believe? Mere belief in the existence of God does not save; therefore, if we focus all of our energies in this area alone we merely create a cadre of deists still trying to reason their way through good and evil guided by the historically unsubstantiated claim that they can do it without a savior. We need to redirect our apologetic vigor and follow Paul’s example as he spoke to the Athenian philosophers on Mar’s Hill, because it isn’t a lack of religiosity that afflicts us; it is a lack of divine focus.

Paul began by appealing to the religious nature of his audience, a shared spiritual restlessness that compelled them to seek God. He pointed out, however, that their once-earnest search had come to a dead end. They had clearly grown weary of their previously sincere efforts to find the divine, and lazily ended up covering all their spiritual bases by building an altar to an unknown god. Paul applauded their spirituality, but made it clear they were hedging their deistic bets. The beauty of the unknown god was that it gave them a false sense of divine security by fostering the belief that they had covered all possible god alternatives, while simultaneously creating a deity so conveniently vague that they didn’t have to worry about any theological baggage or obligation.

Our current religious climate is no different from that of the Athenians; our hillsides are strewn with multiple altars to anemic deities trying to lay claim to the title of the unknown god. Despite fresh coats of paint applied by a never-ending series of modern religious gurus, these idols are the same deistic pretenders from Paul’s day. New Age religion could be considered the first truly green religious movement because it’s so good at recycling old pieces of junk. If you take a closer look, you will see these gurus are just trying to cash in on our shared religious nature by rebuilding the altar to the unknown god, temporarily filling our spiritual hole without any tangible obligation. As humans, however, we know deep down that there are no free lunches and religion without obligation is just deceptive self-worship.

It’s quite interesting to listen to the conversations people have about the identity of God. They theorize about His nature and list the attributes they find most appealing. Instead of finding God, they end up hiring a divine “yes” man to approve of their own selfish agenda. We need to be honest with ourselves because when we construct the most appealing God all we are really doing is giving a nod and a wink to our own divine ambitions. When we set the rules of divine engagement we aren’t seeking a God, but rather creating one in our own image. God either is, or he isn’t, and if He is, then He is greater than us and cannot be defined by our own Godlike pretensions. Sadly, instead of knocking on the divine door to find the true God, we end up ringing our own doorbell and worshipping the God within. When we ask the real God to stand up, we brazenly end up being the first out of the chair.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us (Acts 17:26-27)