Belief in a personal God is both natural and normal; it arises in human consciousness spontaneously and universally. Unbelief requires enormous effort.
Atheism and materialism again and again changed into pantheism for the obvious reason that humans cannot resist the recognition of a Supreme Power. At the very moment they deny the true God, they fashion for themselves a false God. Religion is too deeply rooted in human nature, and God’s revelation speaks too clear a language for them to resist this tendency. Even when in certain periods the tides of religious indifferentism and skepticism run deep and wide, as, for example, in the age of Pericles, Emperor Augustus, the Renaissance, and our own time as well, religion nevertheless always again rises to the surface. People tend rather to adopt the crudest superstition than to stick in the long run with cold and naked unbelief.
Herman Bavinck. Reformed Dogmatics, 2:53+58
