Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Martin Heidegger argues convincingly in Being and Time that human beings are distinguished from other living things “by their capacity to put their own existence into question. They are creatures for whom existence as such, not just particular features of it, is problematic.”4

The architect of these changes concluded, “I believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.”6 Gawande goes on to ask “why simply existing—why being merely housed and fed and safe and alive—seems empty and meaningless to us. What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? The answer . . . is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.”7

In Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters, the character Masha says that life must have “meaning” and adds, “I think man ought to have faith or ought to seek a faith, or else his life is empty, empty. . . . You’ve got to know what you’re living for or else it’s all nonsense and waste.”8

Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, wrote, “Man is a useless passion.”10 Albert Camus famously argues in The Myth of Sisyphus that human life is absurd. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”11

Inevitable death, then, makes life absurd. He writes: “We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. . . . In the final analysis, every man [is] devoured by the overpowering desire to endure and possess . . . those whom he has loved.”13 Even the steely philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that the secular view—that all human labor, love, and genius are “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system”—results “henceforth” in the “unyielding despair” of the soul.14

Nagel agrees that if you have this expectation that there ought to be meaning, then you might experience life as absurdity. But if you stopped railing at the world for simply being what it is, the sense of angst and absurdity would go away. Life is meaningless only if you insist it be meaningful, he concludes.16

In the modern era we mourned the loss of the Meaning of life, but in the postmodern era, an age of freedom, we say good riddance to the very idea.19

The Solversons are an example of how a family can look unflinchingly into the abyss of the evil and suffering of this life, without sentimentality or naïveté, and experience great tragedy—and yet live a life infused with meaning because of their belief in a divine calling and purpose in life.

There are two questions to ask those who take this remarkably sunny approach to a meaningless universe. Is this a cogent, consistent position? And does it work, practically, for living your life?

when postmodernism denounces all absolute values and inherent meanings in the name of freedom, it “secretly smuggles . . . an absolute into the argument.”26 Why, for example, is freedom so important? Why is that the absolute, unquestioned “good”—and who gets to define it as such? Are you not assuming a value-laden standard that you are using to critique all other approaches to life? And are you not, then, actually giving a universal answer to the Meaning question, namely, that the meaning of life is to have the freedom to determine your own meaning? Are you not, then, doing the very thing you say should not be done? So the postmodern approach to meaning is not very consistent.

He questions whether we can really take anything in life and “construct” a meaning around it of our own. “Nobody actually believes this,” he answers, and gives an example. You could try with all your might to “read” tigers as animals that are coy and cuddly, but if you try to do that, you would “no longer be around to tell the tale,” because to some degree the world is “independent of our interpretations of it.”28

Life isn’t simply what you make it. Often it is what it is. We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits in with the world as it is. So is meaning in life without God practically possible? Public discourse is filled with loud religious voices insisting that life without God is inevitably pointless, bleak, and unworkable. On the other side there are plenty of secular people who insist that they not only have satisfying meaning in life but also have a kind of freedom that religious people do not. Who is right? Can we have meaning in life without any belief in God at all? To be fair to all, I would argue that the answer is both yes and no.

We have defined meaning in life as “making a difference,” but for the secular point of view, in the end, the universe gives you a final answer: Nothing makes a difference.

When secular people seek to lead a meaningful life, they must have discipline to not think so much about the big picture. They must disconnect what their reason tells them about the world from what they are experiencing emotionally. That is getting a feeling of meaningfulness through a lack of rationality, by the suppression of thinking and reflection.

If you believe there is no discovered meaning in life, only created meaning, then if you really start to think globally—about the fact that nothing you do is going to make any difference in the end—you are going to begin to experience the dread or nausea of the modernists. And, of course, you don’t have to think like this—you can put it out of mind—and that is certainly how most people in a secular culture live today. But that is my first point. This is not a very rational way to have meaning in life. Created meaning is a less rational way to live life than doing so with discovered meaning.

He believed that we are happy only if we make our meaning in life something greater than our happiness.36 Royce therefore believed that finding meaning in life could be done only if we rejected individualism. “The individualist puts self-interest first, seeing his own pain, pleasure, and existence as his greatest concern.”

Taylor argues that individualistic created meaning leads inevitably to a “soft relativism,” because, it is thought, no one should challenge the meanings or values of anyone else as being wrong. And this in turn leads to what he calls “extraordinary inarticulacy” about what our society’s ideals should be.40

For example, we may believe that it is wrong to starve the poor, but in a culture of created meanings we are unable to say why it is so. Your meaning in life might be to help the needy, but my meaning in life might be to get rich by trampling on them. How, in the context of self-created meanings, can you explain why my chosen meaning in life is wrong? How can you do that without telling me that there is different meaning I ought to have? On what basis will you do that?

Terry Eagleton notices that the common secularist proposal to create your own meaning sounds suspiciously like the consumerism of late-modern capitalism. “Capitalist modernity” he says, turns everything into a private commodity. Things that used to be communally held and accomplished achievements—from child rearing to listening to a concert to prayer and worship—are now seen as private choices that can be measured, priced, and consumed by you according to your tastes and convenience.44 “The meaning-of-life question was now in the hands of . . . the technologists of piped contentment, and chiropractors of the psyche.”45 Ironically, then, those who say that they are free to create their own meaning might be less liberated and more captive to consumerist, individualist culture than they think.

When secular people create their meanings, however, it must be around something located inside the material world. You might be living for your family or for a political cause or for career accomplishments. To have a meaningful life, therefore, life must go well. But when suffering disrupts this, it has the power to destroy your very meaning. The secular approach to meaning can leave you radically vulnerable to the realities of how life goes in this world.

Frankl discovered that the only way for the prisoners’ humanity to survive was to relocate the main meaning of their lives to some transcendent reference point, something beyond this life and even this world. All other religions and cultures outside of secular society do this.

Anthropologists have observed that all nonsecular cultures give their members resources for actually being edified by suffering. Though not welcoming it, they see it as meaningful and help toward the ultimate goal. Only secular culture sees suffering as accidental and meaningless, just an interruption or destruction of what we are living for. And so our society makes it difficult to fully affirm the goodness of all life, even life in the midst of affliction.53

The knowledge of our impending death, he concluded, takes love away and so makes life meaningless. Many people find Camus to be too gloomy, but the older one gets, the more one feels the force of his words. If you believe death really is the end of love, then you will not want to think about it too much as you get older. However, if you believe, as Christians do, that death is actually the entrance into greater and endless love relationships, then thoughtful reflection will only make it easier to face whatever is coming. Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world at preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational and communal, but also less durable.54

Part of the richness of the Christian life lies in the ways Christianity gives Meaning that are distinct from not only secularism but from other religions as well. Unlike the concept of karma, Christianity teaches that suffering is often unfair, not merited by actions from a former life. Unlike Buddhism, Christianity teaches that suffering is a terrible reality, not an illusion to be transcended with stoic detachment. Unlike ancient fatalism, such as the Greek Stoics, or other shame-and-honor cultures, Christianity finds nothing particularly noble about suffering—it should not be welcomed. Yet unlike secularism, Christianity teaches that suffering can be meaningful, that it can make you something great.

Christians believe that the Logos is not a concept to be learned but a person to be known. And therefore we don’t believe in a meaning we must go out and discover but in a Meaning that came into the world to find us. Embracing him by faith can give you a purposeful life that is death camp proof.

the more prosperous a society grows, the more common is depression.3

He argues that modern research shows some external circumstances do correlate with increased satisfaction. In particular, love relationships are important, and therefore the advice of emotional detachment may actually undermine happiness.8 Philosopher Alain de Botton agrees that loving relationships are fundamental to happiness. Indeed, he thinks our quest for the external goods of status and money is really just another quest for love.9

Most people, if they really learn how to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning can really satisfy. I am not speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages or trips and so on; I am speaking of the best possible ones. There is always something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, that just fades away in the reality. The spouse may be a good spouse, the scenery has been excellent, it has turned out to be a good job, but “It” has evaded us.19

“hedonic treadmill.”21

Nietzsche, who argued that modern people help the needy out of a sense of moral superiority.24

As we heard from Martin Heidegger, what makes you a human being and not an animal is that you want joy, meaning, and fulfillment. If you decide that fulfillment, joy, and happiness are not there, and you harden your heart against hope, you can dehumanize yourself.

As a nineteen-year-old, Augustine read Cicero’s dialogue Hortensius. This work considered the paradox that every person “sets out to be happy [but] the majority are thoroughly wretched.”27 Cicero concluded that the extreme scarcity of human contentment might be a judgment of divine providence for our sins. He counseled his readers not to seek happiness in the pursuit of material comfort, sex, or prosperity but rather to find it in philosophical contemplation. The book was electrifying to the young Augustine.28 One of his lifelong projects became to discover why most people are so discontent and bereft of joy. He concluded that our discontent has both a functional cause and an ultimate source. The functional cause of our discontent is that our loves are “out of order.” Augustine taught that we are most fundamentally shaped not as much by what we believe, or think, or even do, but by what we love. “For when we ask whether somebody is a good person, we are not asking what he believes or hopes for, but what he loves.”29

Augustine believed all sin was ultimately a lack of love.30

“You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”35

You harm yourself when you love anything more than God.

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desires: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.37

Consider this: If you live a long life, it will tear you up to see the people who matter most to you put into the ground one by one. If your greatest source of contentment and love is your family, that will be intolerable. But if you learn to love God even more than them, your greatest source of consolation, hope, joy, and value will not be diminished by grief. Indeed, the sorrow will drive you to drink deeper from it. You will not find yourself empty, and you won’t always be hardening your heart in order to deal with how your losses tear you up. The love of God can never be taken from you, and in his love, the Bible says, you live with loved ones forever.42

Miroslav Volf puts it, “Attachment to God amplifies and deepens enjoyment of the world.”44 It does not diminish it.

Don’t love anything less; instead learn to love God more, and you will love other things with far more satisfaction.

Keep in mind that outside of salt and a couple of minerals, everything we eat has died so that we may live. If you are eating bread, not only did the grain die, but the bread has to be broken into pieces.

Authority is inherently suspect; nobody should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave.”3 Charles Taylor gives his own expression of the secular moral order: “Let each person do their own thing, and . . . one shouldn’t criticize the others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The [only] sin which is not tolerated is intolerance.”4

Today as a culture we believe freedom is the highest good, that becoming free is the only heroic story we have left, and that giving individuals freedom is the main role of any institution and of society itself. It is, we could say, the baseline cultural narrative of our Western culture.13

Freedom has come to be defined as the absence of any limitations or constraints on us. By this definition, the fewer boundaries we have on our choices and actions, the freer we feel ourselves to be. Held in this form, I want to argue that the narrative has gone wrong and is doing damage.

The modern definition of freedom is the ability to do whatever we want. However, how does that definition work when your wants are in conflict with each other?

There is, then, not just one thing called “freedom” that we either have or do not have. At the level of lived life there are numerous freedoms, and no one can have them all.

The question is not, then: How can this man live in complete freedom? The proper question is: Which freedom is the more important, the more truly liberating?

if you want the varied set of freedoms that come with being a top performer in athletics or the arts, you will need to accept enormous constraints on your life.

Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others. It is not the absence of constraints but it is choosing the right constraints and the right freedoms to lose.

You are, then, not free to do whatever you choose. That is an impossible idea and not the way freedom actually works. You get the best freedoms only if you are willing to submit your choices to various realities, if you honor your own design.

If we need other people—and we do—then there is some shared responsibility for and to others, and we don’t really belong only to ourselves.