Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

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