Speaking of John C. Wright

here he is, engaging in a fascinating conversation with a guy who wants God to be more obvious.

It’s a little known point in our theologically illiterate culture, but the Church does not regard the question of God’s existence as a matter of “faith”. His existence can be known, according to the Church, by the light of natural reason and it doesn’t require “faith” so much as unhindered common sense to get that far. Recall that the Faith was born into a world in which all the contemporaries of the apostles believed in the existence of God. That God exists was not what they were asking their fellow Jews to accept by faith. Rather, they were asking them to accept by faith the proposition that this God had become man, died for their sins, and been raised to life for their justification. The notion that the *existence* of God is a matter of “belief” would have been nearly unintelligible to them. His existence was obvious and obviously implied by what we see all around us. The great obstacle for the Church in antiquity was not resistance to the possibility of the supernatural, but a confused reading of the data which (outside of Israel) almost invariably led to the conclusion of polytheism, not atheism.

That confusion, like the even more profound confusion that is atheism, is the result, not of a God who won’t give us any evidence for his existence (A universe is a pretty big piece of evidence), but of our darkened intellect. Naturally, we blame him for that. It’s an old human habit.