"In The Dust of Death Os Guiness makes this point by describing a comedy skit performed by the German comedian Karl Vallentin. In this routine the comic comes onto a stage illuminated only by one small circle of light. He paces around and around this circle with a worried face. He is searching for something. After a while a policeman joins him and asks what he has lost. 'I've lost the keys to my house,' Vallentin answers. The policeman joins the hunt, but the search eventually appears useless.'Are you sure you lost it here?' asks the policeman.
'Oh no!' says Vallentin, pointing to a dark corner. 'It was over there.'
'Then why are you looking here?'
'There's no light over there,' answers the comic.
If there is no God or if there is a God but the failure to know him is God's fault, then the search for knowledge is like the search of the German comedian. Where the search should be made, there is no light; and where there is light there is no point in searching. But is this the case? The Bible declares that the problem is not God's but ours... God can take, and actually has taken, steps to reveal himself to us, thereby providing us with the missing key to knowledge."
There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity [divinitatis sensum]. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty... The final goal of the blessed life, moreover, rests in the knowledge of God [cf. John 17:3]. Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him
ReplyDelete~John Calvin