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Writer's pictureReverendDrBuddy

Similar Instinct

Updated: May 16, 2024


There is one thing common to every human community, indeed, to every human being. It is the instinctive desire to seek God.  Different cultures throughout the ages have their own gods.  The Greeks had Zeus; the Romans, Jupiter; The Canaanites-Phoenicians, Baal; the Hindus, Vishnu and Brahman; the Muslims, Allah; and the Christians, YWHW (Jehovah). Some of the Christian theologians try to avoid the designation of the one God and refer to God as the “Ground of Being” (Tillich), “Being Itself” (Augustine),“the First Mover” (Aquinas), "the Holy Being” (Macquarrie), “the Ultimate Transcendent Truth and Reality” (John Butt).  The Animists worship the Sun, Moon, Tree or any mysterious object.  Even the Atheists who deny the existence of god must believe in the existence of something in order to deny its existence.


The Christian Scriptures has a passage that in some way deals with he subject at hand (Acts 17:16-28).  It appears that while  in Athens, the Apostle Paul noticed that the Athenians worship many idols. However, he came across an altar dedicated “To the Unknown god.” He preached and  debated with Jews, as well as some Epicureans and Stoic philosophers, that the unknown god they worship is “the God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.  From one ancestor he made all the nations to inhabit the whole earth and he allotted the times of their existence and the of places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being:” even as some of your poets have said.


The purpose of this article is not to point the reader to the true God, though that is what the Apostle Paul does in the passage quoted above. It is not to prove that God exists. It is simply an attempt to establish the fact that every human community, indeed, every human being similarly “searches”, “gropes”, longs for a transcendent reality or "god"if you please.

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