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Why are there so many religions?

The short answer

There are many religions, on the Bible's account, because human beings everywhere know enough of God to seek him and are prone to exchange his truth for something they can manage. Paul says God's eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen in creation, that people suppress that truth, and that they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images. That produces both real religion, sacrifice, prayer and moral seriousness in every culture, and real distortion. The same Paul tells Athens that God made every nation from one man and arranged their times and places so that they would seek him.

The fuller answer

The sheer number of religions is itself a piece of evidence, and it cuts two ways. Almost every human culture has prayed, sacrificed, built temples, feared judgment and hoped for something beyond death. That universality is hard to explain if human beings are blank slates about God. It is exactly what the Bible predicts if we are made in God's image, placed in his world, and unable to shake off the knowledge of him. Deuteronomy speaks of the nations being allotted their boundaries under God's rule, and Psalm 96 says the gods of the peoples are idols, while the Lord made the heavens. Many religions, on this account, begin in a real awareness aimed in wrong directions.

Paul says God's invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so that people are without excuse. Religion multiplies because the perception is universal while the response is not. Every culture receives the same sky, conscience and mortality, and every culture builds an answer. Some answers preserve striking amounts of truth: one high God, moral law, sacrifice for guilt, hope of judgment. The Bible can honour those echoes without surrendering its claim, because echoes are what you would expect from a real original heard at a distance.

Paul also names the distortion plainly. People exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Exchange is the engine of religious variety. Take something God made, the sun, an ancestor, the nation, the self, desire, reason, and treat it as ultimate, and a religion grows around it, with priests, rituals and moral codes to match. Paul writes this as tragedy, not contempt: the people doing the exchanging are image bearers suppressing a truth they know, which is why the passage ends in sorrow rather than mockery, and why no Christian may use it as a sneer.

In Athens Paul gives the hopeful half of the same doctrine. God made from one man every nation, determined their periods and boundaries, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. The religions of the world are, in part, that feeling of the way, in the dark, by people God placed within reach of himself. The Christian claim is that in Jesus the one being sought has come near and been found: not a new religion added to the pile, but God answering the search he built into every nation, in a person who can be examined, believed and followed.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (BSB)

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