Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Because science’s baseline methodology is to always assume a natural cause for every phenomenon, there is no experiment that could prove or disprove that there is something beyond this material world.

In short, no one can purge him- or herself of all faith assumptions and assume an objective, belief-free, pure openness to objective evidence. There is no “view from nowhere.”

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?

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.

The contrast could not be starker. In traditional cultures the heroic narrative is self-sacrifice. You are your duties, and your self-worth depends on the honor that is bestowed upon you by your community for discharging them. In Western cultures the new heroic narrative is self-assertion. You are your individual dreams and desires, and your self-worth depends on the dignity you bestow on yourself, because you have asserted your dreams and desires regardless of the opposition you may have had from the community.