"The heavens are telling the glory of God."  So goes the initial chorus of Handel's "The Heavens are Telling," drawn from the opening lines of Psalm 19.  This is quite a challenging phrase, really, for it asks us to look at the sky and conclude that God is out there, that God is speaking, that God exists.  When we couple this with Paul's contentions in his letter to the church in Rome that God's invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and glory are "understood" through what has been made, we have quite a dilemma.  We are faced with asserting that we ought to be able to conclude that in looking at the creation, and only the creation, God exists.




     For a person who already believes in God, this is of course is easy.  Consciously or not, she has trained her mind to do it.  For an unbeliever, however, it's not so easy.  It asks her to make an inference on the basis of the sensory data before her.  But we all perceive sense data differently; what we perceive depends on what is already in our brains.  Hence, to insist that we ought to "understand" that God is there on the basis on sensory evidence is, for some, a stretch.
     On the other hand, how else can a transcendent presence make itself known except through a medium that immanent creatures will understand?  If we're not looking for God, well, we will likely never find him.  Yet if we are looking for God, we ought to look at our world, for it is in the world that we and God come together in epistemological unity.
     And we understand.