Culpable Ignorance

Quoting from Greg Bahsen’s Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, Chapter 18, Summary On Apologetics Method: Chapters 13-17:

The unbeliever’s way of thinking is characterized as follows:

• a. By nature the unbeliever is the image of God and, therefore, inescapably religious; his heart testifies continually, as does also the clear revelation of God around him, to God’s existence and character.
• b. But the unbeliever exchanges the truth for a lie. He is a fool who refuses to begin his thinking with reverence for the Lord; he will not build upon Christ’s self-evidencing words and suppresses the unavoidable revelation of God in nature.
• c. Because he delights not in understanding but chooses to serve the creature rather than the Creator, the unbeliever is self-confidently committed to his own ways of thought; being convinced that he could not be fundamentally wrong, he flaunts perverse thinking and challenges the self-attesting word of God.
• d. Consequently, the unbeliever’s thinking results in ignorance; in his darkened futile mind he actually hates knowledge and and can gain only a “knowledge” falsely so-called.
• e. To the extent that he actually knows anything, it is due to his unacknowledged dependence upon the suppressed truth about God within him. This renders the unbeliever intellectually schizophrenic: by his espoused way of thinking he actually “opposes himself’ and shows a need for a radical “change of mind” (repentance) unto a genuine knowledge of the truth.
• f. The unbeliever’s ignorance is culpable because he is without excuse for his rebellion against God’s revelation; hence he is “without an apologetic” for his thoughts.
• g. His unbelief does not stem from a lack of factual evidence, but from his refusal to submit to the authoritative word of God from the beginning of his thinking.