Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

While acknowledging that in the United States and Europe the percentage of people without religious affiliation will be rising for the time being, the article distilled the research findings, namely, that in the world overall religion is growing steadily and strongly. Christians and Muslims will make up an increasing percentage of the world’s population, while the proportion that is secular will shrink.

Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, is quoted: “‘Sociologists jumped the gun when they said the growth of modernization would bring a growth of secularization and unbelief. . . . That is not what we’re seeing,’ he said. ‘People . . . need religion.’”1

New York Times article about the meaning of life writes: When the Hubble space telescoped [sic] pointed to a black spot in the sky about the size of an eraser head for a week it found 30,000 galaxy [sic] over 13 billion years old with many trillions of stars and many many more trillions of inferred planets. [So] how significant are you? . . . You are not a unique snowflake, you are not specials [sic], you are just another piece of decaying matters [sic] on the compost pile of this world. Nothing of who you are and what you will do in the short time you are here will matter. Everything short of that realization is vanity. So celebrate life in every moment, admire its wonders, [and] love without reservation.33

However, if we are just a decaying piece of matter in a decaying universe and nothing more significant than that, how does it follow that we should live a life of love toward others? It doesn’t. Why shouldn’t we live as selfishly as we can get away with? How do beliefs in individual freedom, human rights, and equality arise from or align with the idea that human beings came to be what they are through the survival of the fittest? They don’t, really. Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov sarcastically summarized the ethical reasoning of secular humanism like this: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.”34 The second clause does not follow from the first. If it was natural for the strong to eat the weak in the past, why aren’t people allowed to do it now?

Christianity provided not merely a general idea of equality but also the resources for an understanding of “natural” human rights.

Nietzsche’s point is this. If you say you don’t believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not.59 Why, for example, should you look at love and aggression—both parts of life, both rooted in our human nature—and choose one as good and reject one as bad? They are both part of life. Where do you get a standard to do that? If there is no God or supernatural realm, it doesn’t exist.

If there is no transcendent reality beyond this life, then there is no value or meaning for anything.64 To hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak, but then to insist that nonetheless every person has a human dignity to be honored—is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary.

All of these background beliefs are instilled in a variety of implicit ways, and they become an important part of the supportive tissue that helps Christianity make sense. If they give way, so may faith in the explicit doctrines. For example, a person might have a tacit belief that “if I’m a Christian, and God loves me, there’s a limit to how badly life can go for me.” Such an idea is not part of formal Christian doctrine. Indeed, the life of Jesus, the suffering servant, contradicts it. Yet it can seem to be a necessary inference from some Christian texts and teachings and it can be absorbed from the attitudes of others in a community. Then, if the believer’s life begins to go terribly wrong and this tacit belief begins to crumble, all the other teachings of the faith can seem unconvincing as well.

Rather than unfairly asking only religious people to prove their views, we need to compare and contrast religious beliefs and their evidences with secular beliefs and theirs. We can and should argue about which beliefs account for what we see and experience in the world. We can and should debate the inner logical consistency of belief systems, asking whether they support or contradict one another. We can and should consult our deepest intuitions.

Anyone can say, “I feel this is right to do, and so that is how I will act.” The “moral source” in this case is a feeling within. However, on the secular view of reality, how can anyone ever say to anyone else, “This is right (or wrong) for you to do, whether you feel it or not”? You can never say that to someone else unless there is a moral source outside them that they must honor.

If there is no God, however, it creates a great problem in that there doesn’t appear to be an alternative moral source that exists outside of our inner feelings and intuitions. Therefore, while there can be moral feelings and convictions without God, it doesn’t appear that there can be moral obligation—objective, moral “facts” that exist whether you feel them or not.

Therefore, neither the evolutionary nor the constructivist theory allows that there is such a thing as an objective moral absolute, fact, or obligation. It means that though we may feel that murder and rape are wrong, we feel that way only because they are impractical to our selfish interests—either to our physical survival or our social well-being. They are not truly “wrong,”

If there is no God, then either original matter sprang from nothing, or original matter has always existed without a cause, or there is an infinite regress of causes without a beginning. Each of these answers takes us out of the realm of science and the universe we know. They are nothing short of miracles, for science knows nothing of beings or physical processes that spring out of nothing or that have no beginning.

If you cannot accept that objective, moral absolutes and obligation are illusions, then you, like Nagel, will have to concede that there must be something beyond this physical, material world that accounts for them, even if you cannot be sure what it is.

This, then, leads us to a question. If we can’t trust our moral and religious sensibilities to tell us truth—if evolution has given us those illusions simply to help us adapt to our environment—then why should we trust our reasoning capacities to tell us truth? It is not really fair to apply the knife of evolutionary skepticism to our morality and religion and not use it on our reason.

Christianity explains the “beauty paradox” as our recognition that the world around us is good but it has been corrupted. The ugliness isn’t inherent, and in fact it doesn’t belong to it original design.

If your premise that there is no God leads most naturally to conclusions you know are not true—that moral obligation, beauty and meaning, the significance of love, our consciousness of being a self are illusions—then why not change the premise?

Richard Bauckham, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, argues that these assumptions are highly unlikely, because good historians in the ancient world ordinarily interviewed eyewitnesses and documented it by naming them in their work. This is exactly what the Gospel writer Luke claims at the beginning of his work to have done. He says that he is recounting the events “just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:2).15 Bauckham and others show how often the names of eyewitnesses—Simon of Cyrene, his sons Rufus and Alexander, Cleopas, Malchus, and others—are embedded in the Gospels, according to the accepted historiographical custom of the day.

Particularly impressive to readers over the centuries has been what one writer has called “an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ.”19 That is, in him we see qualities and virtues we would ordinarily consider incompatible in the same person. We would never think they could be combined but, because they are, they are strikingly beautiful. Jesus combines high majesty with the greatest humility, he joins the strongest commitment to justice with astonishing mercy and grace, and he reveals a transcendent self-sufficiency and yet entire trust in and reliance upon his heavenly Father. We are surprised to see tenderness without any weakness, boldness without harshness, humility without any uncertainty, indeed, accompanied by a towering confidence. Readers can discover for themselves his unbending convictions but complete approachability, his insistence on truth but always bathed in love, his power without insensitivity, integrity without rigidity, passion without prejudice.

So, as has often been said more eloquently than I can say it here, Jesus might have been a deranged demagogue or a charlatan, or perhaps the Son of God, but he couldn’t simply have been a great teacher. His claims do not leave that option open to us. A merely good human being would not say such things. His statements about himself, “if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men.”27

Here is a man who claimed to be God yet who lived a life so great that he became the only person to convince a sizable part of humanity that he was. How do we account for that? I’ve argued that we can’t be indifferent to such a claim. We can’t resolve the issue by saying he was only a great teacher, because his declarations don’t allow that. We can’t respond that he never made such claims because of the historical evidence. We can’t be content with the explanation that he was deranged or a fraud because of the evident wisdom, greatness, and impact of his life on his followers and because of the case for the Resurrection. This leaves us with the final possible explanation, namely, that he is who he said he is.

He saw that rationality alone could not give people a basis for moral obligation. Why should people make sacrifices for others, especially if they could not see how it benefited them? Not only that, Gilkey saw an intractable inclination to selfishness and cruelty in the human heart that simple appeals to moral ideals could neither dislodge nor even enable people to see in themselves.