Paganism and the True and Innate Knowledge of the Triune God

The Apostle Paul records something interesting in Romans 1:18-23: "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things."

In this passage, Paul is referring to the knowledge of God which all men have, through the Law of God recorded in each man's conscience (Romans 2:15), reinforced by god's revelation of Himself in His works of creation (Psalm 19:1-4): "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." 

As Paul tells us in the Romans passage above, the inherent knowledge of God is received with hatred. The unregenerate man seeks to escape his awareness of God and our accountability to Him. One way in which he does so is to replace the true, triune God with mute idols in the forms of men and animals (see also Isaiah 44:9-20). Therefore, the existence of paganism is not a neutral historical event; it happened exactly because men are sinners under the wrath of God, that we know our condition, and we crave some solution that will quiet our consciences. In the case of paganism, the effort is to quiet our consciences while being able to continue in our deception of autonomy from the true God, who yet rails against the unregenerate man in his conscience. 

And Paul was not speaking from mere theory, but from his experience in the pagan world of Greco-Roman culture (Acts 17:16-34). "The religion he [Paul] proclaimed was preeminently that of a sinner - adapted in all its provisions to the spiritual necessities of a fallen being under the righteous government of God. The altars around him were dumb, yet pregnant, witnesses that the wants which the Gospel undertook to relieve were not the fictions of fancy, nor the creatures of superstition, but the urgent demands of the soul" (James Henley Thornwell, "The Necessity and Nature of Christianity").