Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued well that overpopulation and exorbitant birthrates are major contributing factors to world poverty.71 Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think there is no opposite problem. Cultures that do not have a replacement-level birthrate die out as they are displaced by other populations and cultures. As Kaufmann and others show, the most secular societies are maintained through the immigration of more religious peoples.

liberal religious bodies will continue to lose members, who are swelling the numbers of the secular and unaffiliated, while traditional, orthodox religions will grow.73 This is hard for cultural elites to grasp, since liberal religions are the only ones that secular thinkers believe are viable.

The Book of Mormon the main characters are missionaries with traditional views, but in the end they come to regard the stories of their scripture as only metaphors which lead us to love and make the world a better place. Certainties about the afterlife and even God are unnecessary. This “all horizontal and no vertical” liberal religion plays well to secular American audiences, but as the sociologists have shown, it is the kind of faith that is dying out most quickly in the world.74 Meanwhile, the faiths that rely on conversion are growing exponentially.

So why read this book? One reason is practical. In this chapter I have not addressed whether religion is true. I have only sought to make the case that it is by no means a dying force. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book Not in God’s Name, concludes that “the twenty-first century will be more religious than the twentieth.

Secularism in the twentieth century has not proven it can give moral guidance to technology or the state. Many intuit faintly or strongly that we human beings and our loves and aspirations cannot be reduced to matter, chemistry, and genes. Finally, citing the low birthrates of secular countries, he argues that religion provides a basis for the growth rather than the decline of human communities. We need, then, to jettison the view that religious belief is not worthy of our attention because it is becoming irrelevant.

people come to faith in God through a mix of rational, personal, and relational reasons.

Saint Augustine says to God in his Confessions, that “our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”85 In other words, if you are experiencing unquiet and dissatisfaction in your life, they may be signs of a need for God that is there but which is not recognized as such. That is Augustine’s theory. It would be worth your time to explore whether or not he is right.

They decided that the universe shows no trace of the traditional God. If for a moment they worried that life without God would be purposeless, they soon discovered thoughtful nonbelievers who were much more passionately committed to justice and equality than most religious people they knew. They concluded that human beings don’t need God to lead a good life and build a good world for all to live

Deconversion accounts often testify to a desire for a world no longer divided endlessly between true believers and infidels. Newly secular persons feel they are now more accepting of all people.

“A Good Life Without God” argues that without the influence of religion we will finally be able to achieve “a tolerant, open society where [there is] mutual respect and equality for all people, no one view of the universe but lots of views, and all people will be able to realize their potential.”

Behind these stories, however, lies a deeper narrative, namely, that religious persons are living by blind faith, while secular and nonbelievers in God are grounding their position in evidence and reason.

To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws the lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places.

They assume that belief is mainly a matter of faith while nonbelief is mainly based on reason.

Exclusive rationality is the belief that science is the only arbiter of what is real and factual and that we should not believe anything unless we can prove it decisively using empirical observation.

This view of reason is fundamental to the secular claim that religion simply cannot prove its claims that there is a God and a supernatural realm.

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. According to Clifford’s thesis, we should not believe something unless we can prove it empirically. But what is the empirical proof for that proposition?

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. If we used the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject belief in God, no one would be able to justify much of anything.

For example, there would be no way to empirically prove that a miracle has occurred since a scientist would have to assume, no matter what, that no natural cause had been discovered yet. If there actually had truly been a supernatural miracle, modern science could not possibly discern it.

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.

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.”

Wood, who was raised in an evangelical Christian home, says that the cruelty and evil of actual human life would make life pointless even if God exists.23 Wood calls this objection to the existence of God “so obvious and so old,” but that isn’t really the case.

Ancient people were arguably much more acquainted with brutality, loss, and evil than we are. Their literature—and the book of Job is only one example—is filled with laments about inexplicable suffering. Yet there is virtually no ancient thinker who reasoned from such evil that, therefore, there couldn’t be a God. Why does this argument against God’s existence seem so rational and convincing today?

Charles Taylor explains why modern people are far more likely to lose their faith over suffering than those in times past. He says it is because, culturally, our belief and confidence in the powers of our own intellect have changed. Ancient people did not assume that the human mind had enough wisdom to sit in judgment on how an infinite God was disposing of things. 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.”

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 a...

When he learned the biblical teaching that we are saved only by undeserved grace, not by our moral character, he realized that there was no reason why an atheist might not be a far better person than a Christian.

He had a Chinese friend who did not believe in God, but who said that, if he existed, God certainly would have a right to judge people as he saw fit. He then realized that his doubt about hell was based on a very white, Western, democratic, individualistic mind-set that most other people in the world did not share. “To insist that the universe be run like a Western democracy was actually a very ethnocentric point of view,” he told me.

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.

Many would describe themselves as “liberal humanists” who are committed to science and reason, to progress and the good of humanity, and to the rights, equality, and freedom of every individual human being.

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.

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.

given the secular view of the universe, the conclusion of love or social justice is no more logical than the conclusion to hate or destroy. These two sets of beliefs—in a thorough-going scientific materialism and in a liberal humanism—simply do not fit with one another.

In that sense, the concept of crime against humanity is a Christian concept and I think there would be no such thing in the law today without the Christian heritage, the Abrahamic heritage, the biblical heritage.”

modern “ideals of freedom . . . of conscience, human rights and democracy” come from the Bible’s teaching on justice and love, and that secular society has found no good alternative way to ground these ideals.

“Christianity gave to the world . . . [ideas that] . . . many modern ethical systems would adopt for their own purposes.”

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.”

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.

Christianity, then, saw the battle for human virtue as no longer one of head versus heart (becoming more rational), nor mind over matter (getting more technical mastery over the world). The battle was over where to direct the supreme love of your heart. Will it be toward God and your neighbor, no matter who that neighbor is? Or will it be toward power and wealth for yourself and your tribe?

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.

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.

And these new views of the importance of the body and the material world laid the foundation for the rise of modern science. The material world was no longer understood as an illusion or simply something to be spiritually transcended. Nor was it just an incomprehensible mystery but, according to the Bible, it was the creation of a personal, rational being. Therefore it could be studied and understood by other personal, rational beings.

In response, someone might say, so what? Even if we no longer believe in God or the Bible, is there any problem with just keeping the moral values if we like them? In many ways, there is.

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 Why, for example, should you look at love and aggression—both parts of life, both rooted in our human nature—and choose one as good and reject one as bad? They are both part of life. Where do you get a standard to do that? If there is no God or supernatural realm, it doesn’t exist.

Nietzsche observes presciently that the English-speaking world would try to abandon belief in God yet maintain the values of compassion, universal benevolence, and conscience. But he predicts that in societies that reject God, morality itself will eventually become “a problem.”60 It will be harder and harder to justify or motivate morality, people will become more selfish, and there will be no way but coercion to control them.

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?

When secularists endorse human dignity, rights, and the responsibility in order to eliminate human suffering, they are indeed exercising religious faith in some kind of supranatural, transcendent reality.

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.

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 enor...

to have meaning in life is to have both an overall purpose for living and the assurance that you are making a difference by serving some good beyond yourself.

Why might the relinquishment of meaning be liberating? To say life itself has meaning would assume that there is some moral standard of “right living and being” to which we all must conform. That would mean there is a single right way to live and be, and that would mean the loss of our freedom to determine for ourselves how to live. If the Meaning of life exists, then we are not free to create that meaning for ourselves.

I want to argue that such created meanings are much more fragile and thin than discovered meanings. Specifically, discovered meaning is more rational, communal, and durable than created meaning.