“If humankind had not fallen, and we had been born through parents of original goodness, there would be no need to argue about whether God exists. People would naturally know from birth. Babies begin sucking as soon as they are born, when they sense their mother’s breast in front of them. Do they need to learn how to suck while in the womb? They automatically know how to do it. If human beings had not fallen, they would naturally recognize and cultivate their relationship with God.” (CSG 20-306)
The arguments for God’s existence — the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the argument from design — are all symptoms of the Fall. They would be unnecessary if Adam and Eve had reached perfection and become the parents of humankind. Children would have been born into a world where God’s presence was as obvious as a parent’s voice.
The Fall did not just damage the relationship — it severed the transmission. Instinctive God-awareness cannot be passed down a lineage that was cut from God’s.
For apologetics and evangelism
This reframes the atheist’s challenge: “I don’t feel God; therefore He probably doesn’t exist.” The Unification response is: that absence of feeling is not evidence of God’s non-existence but evidence of the depth of humanity’s separation. The fact that we long for God without being able to find Him instinctively is itself evidence that something was severed.
Analogy: a child separated from their parents at birth may grow up with no memory of them, but the absence of memory does not mean the parents were never real.
The practical implication
Faith is not about overcoming the natural human state. It is about recovering a state that was natural before the Fall. The goal is not argument or intellect — it is restoring the capacity to feel God’s presence with the cells, as True Father describes: “the issue is how we reach the state in which we can experience these things.”