It was a dark day when Adam and Eve fell into sin. That one sin condemned them to life without God.

Man’s natural knowledge of God is limited

It also contaminated their spirits and left them without a perfect knowledge of God. You see the effects of sin when Adam and Eve hid from God among the trees of the garden. Didn’t they know that God was all-seeing, all-knowing? Sin acted like a virus on a hard drive and erased the information they really needed to know about God. Our first parents passed down this ignorance of God to every one of us.

You see this ignorance in almost everything you read about God in the popular press. An article in Time magazine quotes a sampling of human opinion:

“A young Washington scientist suggests that ‘God, if anything, is hydrogen and carbon. Then again, he might be thermonuclear fission, since that’s what makes life on this planet possible.’ To a streetwalker in Tel Aviv, ‘God will get me out of this filth one day. He is a God of mercy, dressed all in white and sitting on a golden throne.’ A Dutch charwoman says: ‘God is a ghost floating in space.’ Screenwriter Edward Anhalt (Becket) says that ‘God is an infantile fantasy, which was necessary when men did not understand what lightning was. God is a cop-out.’ A Greek janitor thinks that God is ‘like a fiery flame, so white that it can blind you.’ ‘God is all that I cannot understand,’ says a Roman seminarian. A Boston scientist describes God as ‘the totality of harmony in the universe.’ Playwright Alfred muses: ‘It is the voice which says, “It’s not good enough”—that’s what God is’ ” (April 8, 1966).