Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

A “secular age” is one in which all the emphasis is on the saeculum, on the here-and-now, without any concept of the eternal. Meaning in life, guidance, and happiness are understood and sought in present-time economic prosperity, material comfort, and emotional fulfillment.

Another distinction is very common. Individuals could profess to not be secular people, to have religious faith. Yet, at the practical level, the existence of God may have no noticeable impact on their life decisions and conduct. This is because in a secular age even religious people tend to choose lovers and spouses, careers and friendships, and financial options with no higher goal than their own present-time personal happiness. Sacrificing personal peace and affluence for transcendent causes becomes rare, even for people who say they believe in absolute values and eternity. Even if you are not a secular person, the secular age can “thin out” (secularize) faith until it is seen as simply one more choice in life—along with job, recreation, hobbies, politics—rather than as the comprehensive framework that determines all life choices.3

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

Not long ago, leading scholars in Western society were also nearly unanimous in thinking that religion was inevitably declining. They thought the need for religion would go away as science provided explanations and aid against the natural elements better than God ever did.

Habermas has recently startled the philosophical establishment, however, with a changed and more positive attitude toward religious faith. He now believes that secular reason alone cannot account for what he calls “the substance of the human.” He argues that science cannot provide the means by which to judge whether its technological inventions are good or bad for human beings. To do that, we must know what a good human person is, and science cannot adjudicate morality or define such a thing.10 Social sciences may be able to tell us what human life is but not what it ought to be.11

Evidence for Habermas’s thesis comes from recent research on the history of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton University shows that a century ago progressive, science-based social policies were broadly understood to entail the sterilization or internment of those persons deemed to have defective genes.13 In 1926 John T. Scopes was famously tried under Tennessee law for teaching evolution. Few people remember, however, that the textbook Scopes used, Civic Biology by George Hunter, taught not only evolution but also argued that science dictated we should sterilize or even kill those classes of people who weakened the human gene pool by spreading “disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country.”14 This was typical of scientific textbooks of the time.

Habermas writes: “The ideals of freedom . . . of conscience, human rights and democracy [are] the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. . . . To this day there is no alternative to it.”17

Secular, scientific reason is a great good, but if taken as the sole basis for human life, it will be discovered that there are too many things we need that it is missing.

Author and teacher Rebecca Pippert had the opportunity to audit some graduate-level courses at Harvard University, one of which was “Systems of Counseling.” At one point the professor presented a case study in which therapeutic methods were used to help a man uncover a deep hostility and anger toward his mother. This helped the client understand himself in new ways. Pippert then asked the professor how he would have responded if the man had asked for help to forgive her.25 The professor responded that forgiveness was a concept that assumed moral responsibility and many other things that scientific psychology could not speak to. “Don’t force your values . . . about forgiveness onto the patient,” he argued. When some of the students responded with dismay, the professor tried to relieve the tension with some humor. “If you guys are looking for a changed heart, I think you are looking in the wrong department.” However, as Pippert observes, “the truth is, we are looking for a changed heart.”26 Secular reason, all by itself, cannot give us a basis for “sacrifice, redemption, and forgiveness,” as Paul Kalanithi concluded in his final months.

Sometimes this intuition triggers a protest against the way secularism seems to flatten and reduce life so that “all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death.”31

Philosopher Charles Taylor asks if people like Barnes can explain why such art affects them so deeply. There are times when we are “hit” with such experiences of overwhelming beauty that we feel forced to use the term “spiritual” to explain our reaction. Consistently secular thinkers such as Harvard scientist Steven Pinker teach that the origin of our aesthetic sense must be, like everything else about us, something that helped our forebears stay alive and then came down to us through our genes.33 Reductive explanations such as Pinker’s, however, actually make Taylor’s case. Most people, and not just nonreligious ones, will protest “No!”—that beauty cannot be only that. “Here the challenge is to the unbeliever,” Taylor writes, “to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to [great works of art] without impoverishment.”34 I believe Taylor means something like this. If you are being swept up in joy and wonder by a work of art, it will impoverish you to remind yourself that this feeling is simply a chemical reaction that helped your ancestors find food and escape predators, and nothing more. You will need to shield yourself, then, from your own secular view of things in order to get the most out of the experience. It is difficult to get “very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion.”35 Leonard Bernstein famously admitted that when he heard great music and great beauty he sensed “Heaven,” some order behind th...

there are others who maintain disbelief in God yet have no way to account for the experience rationally.44 In the Paris Review Kristin Dombek writes, “I have been an atheist now for more than fifteen years, and I have been able to explain to myself almost everything about the faith I grew up in, but I have not been able to explain those experiences of God so real he entered the bedrooms of his own accord, lit them up with joy, and made people generous. . . . It [was] like you’ve glimpsed the world’s best secret: that love need not be scarce.”45

Atheist Barbara Ehrenreich, best known for her seminal work Nickel and Dimed, wrote a memoir titled Living with a Wild God, which centers on a life-changing mystical experience she had in May 1959 as a seventeen-year-old. She had begun a “quest” at the age of thirteen to find answers to the questions What is the point of our brief existence? and What are we doing here and to what end?46 Ehrenreich was raised by atheist parents, and her efforts to answer these questions were carried out on a strictly rationalistic basis. This led her into what she calls the “morass” of solipsism. She felt there was no way to know right from wrong or true from false.47 But then at age seventeen, on an empty street just before dawn, “I found whatever I had been looking for since the articulation of my quest.” It was an experience that, as others have also said, could not be described. “Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like ‘ineffable’ and ‘transcendent.’”48 There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance. . . . “Ecstasy” would be the word for this, but only if you acknowledge [that it] does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it . . . can...

Augustine, in his Confessions, describes a preconversion experience of God that he could describe only as “the flash of one tremulous glance” that gave him a dazzling but threatening glimpse at something wholly other.54 Later, after he met God through Christ, Augustine’s encounters with the divine were marked by “the union of love and dread” (Confessions XI, 11).

Charles Taylor argues that “fullness” is neither strictly a belief nor a mere experience. It is the perception that life is greater than can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations and, as we have seen, it is the widespread, actual lived condition of most human beings regardless of worldview.60

Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.68

only evangelical Protestants, among all religious bodies in the United States, are converting more people than they are losing—which is exactly what Berger, Casanova, Davie, and other sociologists would lead us to expect.77

anthropologists such as Talal Asad counter that they are actually shedding one set of moral narratives—with its insiders and outsiders, heroes and heretics, and unprovable assumptions about reality—for another.

There are innumerable challenges by atheists on the Internet who say to religious people, “If you want me to believe in God, you must prove his existence.” However, this view of reason is now seen to have insurmountable problems. For one thing, it cannot meet its own standard.

few of our convictions about truth can be proven scientifically. While we may be able to demonstrably prove to any rational person that substance X will boil at temperature Y at elevation Z, we cannot so prove what we believe about justice and human rights, or that people are all equal in dignity and worth, or what we think is good and evil human behavior.

Philosopher Peter van Inwagen points out that the Clifford essay is often assigned in religion classes today but never in classes on epistemology (which addresses how we know what we know). That is because, Van Inwagen says, there are almost no teachers of philosophy in the West who believe in Clifford’s view of reason anymore.11

All of us have things we believe—including things we would sacrifice and even die for—that cannot be proven. We believe them on a combination of rational, experiential, and social grounds. But since these beliefs cannot be proved, does this mean we ought not to hold them, or that we can’t know them to be true? We should, therefore, stop demanding that belief in God meet a standard of universally acknowledged proof when we don’t apply that to the other commitments on which we base our lives.

Twentieth-century thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein have argued that all reasoning is based on prior faith commitments to which one did not reason.14

Ludwig Wittgenstein showed that it is impossible to disprove the claim that the earth is only one hundred years old and that it came into existence with all the marks of being old.15

American philosopher C. Stephen Evans writes, “Science by its very nature is not fit to investigate whether there is more to reality than the natural world.”16 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.

To state that there is no God or that there is a God, then, necessarily entails faith. And so the declaration that science is the only arbiter of truth is not itself a scientific finding. It is a belief.

As eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume has extensively argued, our science is based on beliefs about the universe that can’t be proven or disproven.19

The problem of evil is a good case study of how background beliefs control our supposedly strictly rational thought.

It is only in modern times that we get “the certainty that we have all the elements we need to carry out a trial of God.”24 Only when this background belief in the sufficiency of our own reason shifted did the presence of evil in the world seem to be an argument against the existence of God.

Our background beliefs set up our conscious reasoning to fail to find sufficient evidence for God. So the young James Wood and Barbara Ehrenreich, brilliant young thinkers that they were, found the thesis of the “monotheistic God” wanting. But it wasn’t true that their reasoning had undermined their faith. Instead it was that a new kind of faith, one in the power of human reason and ability to comprehend the depths of things, had displaced an older, more self-effacing kind of faith.

“To insist that the universe be run like a Western democracy was actually a very ethnocentric point of view,” he told me.

Michael Polanyi is convincing that both these positions—of pure objectivism or subjectivism—are self-defeating and ultimately impossible to hold. The objectivists can’t account for the host of values they unavoidably know though they can’t be proven. And the subjectivists make their own assertions meaningless and contradictory. Where do they get the certainty of knowledge necessary to say that no one has the right to be certain? Polanyi’s goal was “to restore the balance of our cognitive powers.”27 Social scientists have argued that we arrive at what we consider to be “truth” through a range of methods including analytic thinking, experience, empathy or “mentalizing,” and intuition.28 Augustine understood that reason and faith work always together and that reason always operates “under the guidance of antecedent belief.”29 The Christian believer is using reason and faith to get to her beliefs just as her secular neighbor is using reason and faith to get to hers. They are both looking at the same realities in nature and human life, and both are seeking a way to make the best sense of them through a process that is rational, personal, intuitive, and social. Reason does not and cannot operate alone. 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.30

Not only can none of these humanistic moral standards be proven empirically, but they don’t follow logically from a materialistic view of the world.

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

In A Brief History of Thought Luc Ferry tells the story of how the Christian faith grew and supplanted classical Greco-Roman culture and pagan thought in the West.38 One reason it did so was because “Christianity gave to the world . . . [ideas that] . . . many modern ethical systems would adopt for their own purposes.”39 One was that of human equality. The Greek worldview rested “entirely on the conviction that there exists a natural hierarchy. . . . Some men are born to command, others to obey.” But “in direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”40 Max Horkheimer writes that, while Greek thought gave us a partial idea of a limited democracy only for the highborn and educated, the biblical idea of “God’s creation of man in his own image and Christ’s atonement for all mankind” strengthened the Western idea of the value of the individual “immeasurably.”41

While it is popularly thought that human rights were the creation of modern secularism over and against the oppressiveness of religion, the reality is that this concept arose not in the East but in the West, and not after the Enlightenment but within medieval Christendom. As Horkheimer in the 1940s and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s recognized, the idea of human rights was based on the biblical idea of all people being created in God’s image.42

Cambridge historian Henry Chadwick argued that Augustine “marks an epoch in the history of human moral consciousness.”47 For the first time the supreme goal of life was not self-control and rationality but love. Love was required to redirect the human person away from self-centeredness toward serving God and others. Augustine’s Confessions laid the groundwork for what we would call psychology in a way that non-Christian classical thought could not have done.48 The older idea of the body being bad and the soul good—of the emotions (resident in the body) as bad and reason as good—changed under Christianity.

“Salvation” for the Greeks had to do with philosophical contemplation, something only people with training and leisure could do. For Christians, however, salvation came through dependent, trusting faith that Jesus had saved them, doing what they could not do. That was something anyone could do. In this sense it was much more egalitarian than other kinds of ancient and classical thought.

For the Greeks, the claim that the “universal cosmic order” could be identified with an individual human being was “insanity.”51 For Christians, however, it meant a radical “personalizing” of the universe. It was the unprecedented idea that the power behind the world was love, a personal God.52

Convictions about the value and equality of every person and the importance of loving the weak arose only in a society that believed in a universe with a personal God who made all to have loving communion with him. Modern secularism has largely kept these moral ideals of biblical faith while rejecting the view of the personal universe in which those ideals made sense and from which they flowed as natural implications.55 No one has made this point more forcefully than Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s great insight was simple. If there is no God and supernatural realm, and this material world and life are all there is, then “there does not exist any perspective higher than life itself.” There is no transcendent reality beyond or outside of this life that can serve as a standard by which to determine what parts of the world are right or wrong. There is no point of view privileged enough to escape being part of the same “tissue of forces” in which everything else exists.

Nietzsche wrote: “Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true.”57

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

In his book Beyond Good and Evil he mocks the philosophy of the utilitarians—those who promote human rights and compassion as simply practical wisdom, the best way to pursue “the greatest good for the greatest number.” How, he asks, can you promote unselfish behavior using selfishness as the motivation?61 It won’t work, and “rights talk” will simply be the way whatever party is in power keeps itself there.

Dworkin startled many people, however, by saying that belief in humanistic values was an act of religious faith.

The humanistic beliefs, then, of most secular people should be recognized as exactly that—beliefs. They cannot be deduced logically or empirically from the natural, material world alone. If there is no transcendent reality beyond this life, then there is no value or meaning for anything.64

Nietzsche’s “Man of the Future” has not abolished God at all. “Like the Almighty, he rests upon nothing but himself.” We see that there is no truly irreligious human being. Nietzsche is calling people to worship themselves, to grant the same faith and authority to themselves that they once put in God. Even Nietzsche believes. “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.”68 We have seen that the secular humanism Nietzsche despised lacks a good grounding for its moral values.69 However, the even greater dangers of Nietzsche’s antihumanism are a matter of historical record. Peter Watson details how Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.70

people neither adopt nor discard faith in God through pure, objective reasoning, because no such thing is possible. We also have seen that moral values are always grounded in faith assumptions with a cultural history.

Nothing about individual liberty, human rights, or civilizational progress follow automatically from the fact that God is dead.”

Sessions goes on to urge Christians to show greater humility too, to forgo their triumphalism, and to stop thinking they can win the field strictly through rational proofs and arguments. “If you can begin to pull your religion out of that abyss, there’s no telling what a powerful countercurrent it might become.”71

neither secularism nor Christianity has the main “burden of proof.” Western secularity is not the absence of faith but a new set of beliefs about the universe.72 These beliefs cannot be proven, are not self-evident to most people, and have, as we shall continue to see, their own contradictions and problems just as other religious faiths do.73 One significant problem is that modern secularism’s humanistic values are inconsistent with—even undermined by—its belief in a material-only universe. The other problem we have addressed is that many secular people base their nonbelief on a rigid and simplistic view of reason. They will not acknowledge that there are different, contested approaches to rationality and that all of them include the exercise of faith. Empirical reason can prove neither the claim that there is a supernatural, transcendent reality nor the claim that there is none. That does not mean there is no way to weigh and evaluate such philosophical or religious statements. It means only that using demanding, demonstrable, unquestionable proof for them is inappropriate.