Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

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.