Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Belief in God makes sense to four out of five people in the world and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.7 The immediate question is, then, why? Why does religion still grow amid so much secular opposition?

People believe in God not merely because they feel some emotional need, but because it makes sense of what they see and experience.

Last Sunday in each of the nations of Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa there were more Anglicans in church than there were Anglicans and Episcopalians in all of Britain and the United States combined.

Contemporary secularity, then, is not the absence of faith, but is instead based on a whole set of beliefs, including a number of highly contestable assumptions about the nature of proof and rationality itself.

Religion is not the place where the problem of man’s egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God’s grace takes place. Insofar as human pride may win the battle, religion can and does become one of the instruments of human sin. But insofar as there the self does meet God and so can surrender to something beyond its own self-interest, religion may provide the one possibility for a much needed and very rare release from our common self-concern.23