More on Romans in the New Testament

God's Wrath Against Sinful Humanity

18 For God's wrath is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and wickedness of those who in their wickedness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God himself has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse.

This line sticks out to me, because it says that God's power and will are encoded in the natural world. Essentially, if we want to understand God's intentions, we should look to the attributes of the world he created. This problematizes Christian teaching in two ways. First, encouraging us to understand God through natural science will inevitably lead us to conclusions that contradict the teachings of the bible. A major criticism of religion is that it "misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos (Hitchens)." The bible is full of misinformation on the origins and characteristics of the natural world, and these errors are well known and documented. Maybe at one point, observing the natural world reflected, and even validated, the bible's explanations of the nature of life and the earth. But we have progressed up to and beyond this point. Scientific examination reveals that the bible's teaching are WRONG.

However, this passage, exhorting us to "understand and observe by what he made," appears to endorse science in its pursuit to understand the world that God has supposedly created. Unfortunately for Christian teaching, science has enabled us to compile information on the beginnings of the universe and the evolution of life that are undermining the bible's own account of those very things.

As if that wasn't ironic enough, the bible, as always, still has more to give. In light of the fact the the bible is not a source of truth on biological and physical information, this line seals the bibles fate tightly. "For God's wrath is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and wickedness of those who in their wickedness suppress the truth." Is the bible really referring to suppressing the truth as "wicked"? Let me get this straight, the largest source of falsehood and innaccuracy in Western civilization is claiming that it is wicked to supress the truth. For the love of God!