What does every person already know about God?

The short answer Settled

That God is, and that he will answer to Him. Creation plainly shows God's eternal power and divine nature, so that no one is without excuse. And every person's conscience bears witness that he is under God's law. It accuses or excuses him, and he shows that he knows the standard every time he judges someone else by it.

What creation shows

Paul begins with God's own act: "God has shown it to them" (Romans 1:19). Then he says what was shown and how: "since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). What creation shows is not a vague sense of something greater. It is God's own power and divine nature, and because it has been shown "since the creation of the world," no generation has been without it.

That witness is not limited to people who have a Bible. David writes that "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1), and "Their line has gone out through all the earth" (Psalm 19:4). At Lystra, speaking to a crowd that had no Scripture, Paul said God "did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons" (Acts 14:17). Job says that even the beasts, the birds, and the fish teach it (Job 12:7-9).

What conscience shows

A person's conscience is the inner sense that judges his own actions as right or wrong. Paul says that people who never had the law God gave through Moses still carry its work inside them. They "show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them" (Romans 2:15). Paul describes it like a courtroom inside the person: a witness, a charge, and a defense.

That inner law is why people without Scripture will still be judged: "as many as have sinned without law will also perish without law" (Romans 2:12). Paul names the day it comes to, "when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ" (Romans 2:16). The secrets God will judge are the very things a person's conscience already knows.

People show they know the standard by using it on others. "In whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things" (Romans 2:1). A person who calls anything wrong is using a standard he did not invent and does not keep.

A quiet conscience proves nothing. Paul says of some that "even their mind and conscience are defiled" (Titus 1:15), and of others that their conscience has been "seared with a hot iron" (1 Timothy 4:2), burned until it no longer feels. Its silence is not a verdict.

The usual objection

Many people hold that there is no good evidence for God. The world is explained by natural causes, and conscience is only a feeling of right and wrong learned from parents and society, which differs from one culture to another and points to no lawgiver. On this view, a person who does not believe is only following the evidence, and a person whose conscience does not trouble him has nothing to answer for.

Scripture answers both halves. The evidence is not missing, because it is the world every person lives in, shown to him by God Himself. And conscience is not only learned, because the work of God's law is written on the heart of people who never had the written law. Neither witness depends on having a Bible, and Paul's verdict on both is the same word: without a defense. Why people still deny what they have been shown is taken up in Isn't unbelief just honest doubt?

The words behind it