29 Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.
30 God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent
31 because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.”
-Acts 17: 29- 31 (NAB)

I was amazed at how the scientific world shifted from the “God-centered” to the “there is no God” sensibilities over the years.

I was checking one of my favorite sites in the web, agthinktank.com (which is now closed down), when I came across a link entitled, “How God and Science Mix.” It was a post from another site which talks about the concept of God and some people’s aversion to it. The post is a reaction to a work written by a particle physicist by the name of Lawrence M. Krauss. It may also be for other intellectuals like him who think God and scientific knowledge could not or would not ever mix.

Krauss wrote an article published by the Wall Street Journal explaining how God and science don’t mix. In it, Christian belief in God, Jesus Christ and miracles was openly mocked.

I remember on my years of study as an aspiring chemist (that was before I decided to be a pastor) that there was a time when all the best scientists and intellectuals were devout believers- Blaise Pascal, Johannes Kepler, Michael Faraday and Isaac Newton for example. Now it seems that all we have are scientists and intellectuals whom the Bible rightfully brands as fools for believing there is no God.

So I decided to preach at church about people’s concept about God and how it affects their everyday life. A quick yet careful search at my previous readings from Scripture led me to Acts 17: 29-31.

In verse 29, Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, informs us of the concept of people during that time about God. It was the glorious days of the Greco-Roman Empire and every city in Imperial Rome boasts about its own god or goddess crafted in gold, silver or stone and worshipped by the people in magnificent temples.

This particular event happened in Athens which is then the academic center of the world. It was the city of the great philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle- men who established patterns of thought which affected human learning for centuries.

In this city Paul ministered to three groups of people- (1) the religious men in the synagogues who were mostly Jews and some new Christians; (2) the traders whom he met in the agora or market places of the city and (3) the philosophers who are mostly Epicureans and Stoics.

All three have specific notions about God.

The Jews believe in the one true God who created the universe and have chosen them to be His own people through a covenant with their Patriarch, Abraham.

The new Christians added a new dimension to that belief. They believed that God sent His Son Jesus Christ who died on the cross and rose again miraculously from the grave to become Savior of the world.

The tradesmen were mostly uncaring and they were the ones who had idols for gods and goddesses in the Parthenon famed to be the temple of their deities.

The Epicureans were atheists and materialists. They denied the existence of God and the miraculous or the supernatural. They were descendants of the existentialists of our day.

The Stoics, on the other hand, were pantheists. They believe that God was not a separate entity from all of creation. He is in the rocks, in the sea, and in the air- He is in every material thing that existed. They were descendants of the fatalists and of the new age advocates of our time.

Thus, pondering over this portion of scripture led me to realize that man’s conceptual formulations about God cannot just be based on human reasoning. In short, God is sometimes not what we think He is unless, of course, what we think is based on something trustworthy like the Bible.

God is too great for man’s limited mind to grasp. He cannot be known unless He makes Himself known to us and He does that through Jesus Christ who is the subject of His Word.

Didn’t the Athenians erect an altar dedicated to “an unknown God” and Paul made Him known to them by proclaiming to them the good news about Jesus Christ (Acts 17: 22-31)?

The Jews and the new Christians were right and the others were wrong.

The known gods of the Athenians were not able to fill the God-shaped vacuum in their hearts. It is something that only the one true God through Jesus Christ who was unknown to them can fill.

Curiously, Luke did not use the Greek word, “theos” which, is used for God in the New Testament to refer to the Athenians’ pantheon of gods and goddesses. He instead used the Greek word, “daimon” for them which when literally translated means “demon.”

The implication is clear. The God we refer to using our human logic and reasoning may not be the one true God of the Bible. He may not be “theos” as Luke suggests. He may be a “daimon.”

When the Big Bang Theory explaining the origin of the universe came up, the atheistic tendency of the scientific community was threatened. They needed to account for what instituted such “big bang.” They have no choice except to believe that an uncaused cause of everything actually exists. That uncaused cause (whoever or whatever that is) instituted the big bang which led to the creation (or should I say evolution?) of the universe.

So now they believe that “a god” initiated the creation of the universe and everything in it. The “god” they are referring to, however, is not the personal God we know from the Bible who interacts with His creation but “a god” who is impersonal- “a god” who detached himself from creation after initializing the process necessary to make it happen. Another “daimon” if I may say and a modern day one as such.