If there is such good evidence for the existence of the Biblical God, why don't more people believe in him? Are we just all 'suppressed'?!

It is a fair question, and the 'suppression' language has been used badly, sometimes as a way of avoiding the argument altogether. But the question has an answer, and part of that answer is uncomfortable for Christians too.

1. Numbers measure culture, not truth. Almost everyone once believed the sun circled the earth, and the consensus was not evidence. Belief tracks education, family, country, and access to information at least as much as it tracks argument. If headcount settled truth, the method would prove far too much in every direction.

2. The prevalence argument cuts both ways. By raw numbers, theism wins: the great majority of humans who have ever lived have believed in some divine reality, and roughly two-thirds of the world today is religious. So prevalence cannot be used against belief without also being used for it. Either way, it does no work in the argument.

3. Romans 1 is a claim about will, not IQ. Paul says people 'suppress' the truth, which means holding something down rather than failing to notice it. That is a claim about resistance, not stupidity, and it is a theological claim that has to be argued rather than assumed. Used as a trump card, it is just an insult with a verse attached. Paul’s actual words are that what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them (Romans 1:19-20).

4. The diagnosis includes the diagnostician. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9), and John says the problem is preferring darkness (John 3:19-20). Christians are not exempt from that diagnosis; it is the reason they say they need grace. A doctrine of universal bias is not a weapon aimed only outward.

5. Much unbelief is honestly intellectual. Some people have never heard a decent argument for God, some were given bad ones, and some carry a serious objection like the problem of evil or the behavior of their childhood church. Treating every unbeliever as a rebel is both uncharitable and false, and it is one reason the church loses arguments it should win.

6. Disagreement is often about priors. Two historians can examine the same documents and reach different conclusions because they disagree about what counts as possible before they start. That happens in cosmology and in criminal law, not only in theology. The disagreement is real, but it is not always a disagreement about the data.

7. Even eyewitnesses did not believe. John reports that though Jesus had done many signs before them, they still did not believe in him (John 12:37). If spectacle produced faith, the incarnation would have ended the debate. It did not, which is itself data about how belief works.

8. Hiddenness can be purposeful, within limits. Scripture says God is found by those who seek him (Jeremiah 29:13) and that he arranged the times and places of human life so that people might reach for him and find him (Acts 17:26-27). A God who never left room for trust would leave no room for relationship either. This is the weakest link in the case, and the divine hiddenness argument is a serious one; it should be met, not waved away.

9. Belief is not proportioned to evidence alone. Jesus says that if anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God (John 7:17). That is a claim you can test in your own experience: the conclusions we want and the conclusions we can live with are not always the same, and we all know it about ourselves.

10. The question needs asking in both directions. Why do so many careful, well-informed people believe, including converts from atheism who had every social reason to stay where they were? That fact needs an explanation as much as the other one does. Any account that only explains one direction is not an account, it is a polemic.

So the answer is not that unbelievers are stupid or lying. It is that belief is not a simple function of evidence, in either direction, and that the evidence is offered as sufficient rather than coercive. That is a claim you can test by reading the arguments instead of counting the demographics.

Sources: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith; Blaise Pascal, Pensées; Alvin Plantinga; J.L. Schellenberg (critic).

Related challenges:
• IF God exists, He’s maniacal. If He WANTED to forgive sin, He’s 'all-powerful' and 'all-loving' – He could just, SHAZAM, forgive sin. Instead, He sends down His only Son to be slaughtered and murdered to take care of the sin problem. Now THAT’S evil!
• I hear a lot about “intelligent design.” Has this now proven God and falsified evolution?
• How would you respond to Victor Stenger’s stinging assertion that religious argument leads universally to dismal failure and untold suffering?