Acts 17:22,23 - I see that you are very religious

17:22,23

Paul then takes charge and addresses the people of Athens and seeks to speak to them on their own terms, pointing out the limits of their own reasoning.  First of all he compliments them, saying they are “very religious”. He shows that he is aware of their culture, by having looked “carefully” at their objects of worship. He then notes that he found one altar with the inscription “to an unknown God”. NIV has “So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship - and this is what I am going to proclaim to you”. This seems a rather belligerent way of putting it, the ESV has “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” This is a gentler way of phrasing it, and other translations do more down the ESV line. E.g. NKJV has “Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you:”. Paul is saying that they recognise that they know that they don’t know everything, for they have this “unknown god”. Similarly, a common view today is that because we have science we don’t need religion, or science has proved religion wrong etc. John Lennox’s God’s Undertaker does an excellent job of debunking such notions, but I will just mention two or three points. One is that in quantum mechanics it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle with perfect precision. Cosmology has the problem of “dark matter”. Then Godel’s incompleteness theorem says that in any logically consistent system there will be some things that are true, but cannot be proven to be true. Science and logic themselves reveal their own limitations.