There’s a particular half of a verse that conservative Christians seem to be quite fond of that I most recently saw on the local “Highway Evangelism” billboard on my way home from the Northwest Freethought Convention a few weeks ago:

The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1a NIV)

It definitely wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this, but my initial reaction this time was that it’s offensive. It’s certainly far more offensive than any of the atheist billboards that have every been put up anywhere. Then I thought about it a little more and it’s not offensive, it’s laughable.

To have a little fun with it, I’m going to do a little theologizing (a term that my fellow theology majors and I were fond of in college). It’s a well accepted hermeneutical practice to consider the historical context of a passage to discern the modern meaning of it. This is going to be fun. 🙂

The culture that Psalm 14 was written in was very superstitious and pre-scientific. Not even the Greeks had developed any observation/experiment based science yet. In a time without the scientific method, evolutionary theory, germ theory, psychology, and physics the most logical explanation for everything from mental illness to the origins of the universe would be the personification of the mysterious unknown, what ancients and modern people alike call God or gods. With the understanding of the day, it would be a very unsupportable position to say there is no god and people would be justified in calling such a person a fool.

Even at the time of the founding of the United States, the natural philosophers, people like Franklin and Jefferson, had no naturalistic models or explanations for “creation”, so they took the logical position of personifying the unknown origin of life and the universe as “Nature’s God” (not to be confused with the Christian God) while knowing that the evidence that would be expected for an actively involved deity was not present, hence why the deistic god is uninvolved and uninterested in the affairs of the world. These men were certainly not fools, they were brilliant thinkers who advanced understanding and followed the evidence where it led.

Most scientists take it a step further today, looking out into the cosmos and at the development of life on this earth they do not see the work of a creator, they see the imperfect progress of natural forces with theories to explain them that were not available to the ancient Hebrews or even the natural philosophers of a few centuries ago. Not only is there no evidence to support the belief in a god, but the very evidence that would be expected is not present. Furthermore, looking at the scientific advances of the last five hundred years there is no longer any reason to personify the unknown, instead we can study it and seek to understand and explain it.

Just like how the fools of a few millennia ago were the ones who rejected the scientific understanding of their day for untenable positions, the fools today reject the scientific understanding of today for untenable – and long since falsified – positions. If we were to account for the culture in which Psalm 14:1a was written in and reword it for our culture, it would go something like:

The fool says in his heart,
“There is a god.”