Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

The reality is that every person embraces his or her worldview for a variety of rational, emotional, cultural, and social factors.

Belief in God makes sense to four out of five people in the world and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

Terrible deeds have been done in the name of religion, but secularism has not proven to be an improvement.

science can explain love and meaning as chemical responses in your brain that helped your ancestors survive. But if we assert, which virtually everyone does, that love, meaning, and morals do not merely feel real but actually are so—science cannot support that.

Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov sarcastically summarized the ethical reasoning of secular humanism like this: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.”

And ironically, Royce argued, individualism undermines individual happiness. We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.”38

Without socially shared discovered meaning we have no basis for saying to somebody else: “You need to stop doing that!”

the knowledge of our sin softens our hearts.

So in late-modern secularism (sometimes called postmodernism), we are no longer seen as free because we are God’s creation, nor because of our rationality and free will, nor because of unfolding historical processes moving the human race toward inevitable progress. Those had been the bases of freedom in the past, argued by Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, respectively.9 Instead, for postmodern secular thinkers today, freedom is based on the discrediting of each of those very ideas.10 We are considered to be free because there is no cosmic order, there is no essential human nature, and there are no truths or moral absolutes that we must kneel to.

We unavoidably, to some degree, belong to one another. “No man is an island. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

Even in our supposedly relativistic culture, value judgments are made constantly, people and groups are daily lifted up in order to shame them, public moral umbrage is taken as much as ever.

If you believe the Gospel and all its remarkable claims about Jesus and what he has done for you and who you are in him, then nothing that happens in this world can actually get at your identity.

How did they keep hope alive? As Eugene D. Genovese and other historians of slavery have made clear, “it would be absurd to attribute to slaves a belief in progress.” It was Christianity, Genovese showed, that gave them “a firm yardstick” with which to measure and judge the behavior of their masters and “to articulate a promise of deliverance as a people in this world as well as the next.”

“They mock people for betting their lives on the existence of God by sheer faith, but then they bet the ranch that afterwards there will be nothing, no judgment, nada. How can they be sure of that?”

Anyone who tries to claim that atheists are either individually or as a whole less moral than others will run up against common sense and experience.

Dostoyevsky does not say that without God there can be no moral feelings or moral behavior. He says that without God there can be no moral obligation, that everything is “permitted,” allowed.

He says that the fine-tuning argument is strong enough that scientists put forth the multiverse thesis even though there is neither a shred of evidence for it nor any way to test it.7 In other words, either you have to take a great step of faith to believe there is a God who designed the universe or you must take a great step of faith to believe there is not.