Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

The ground rules of the group assume neither that any religion nor that secularism is true. Instead, multiple sources are consulted—personal experience, philosophy, history, sociology, as well as religious texts—in order to compare systems of belief and to weigh how much sense they make in comparison with one another.

Many objected to the view that secularism was a set of beliefs that could be compared with other systems. On the contrary, they said, it was merely a sensible assessment of the nature of things based on a purely rational evaluation of the world. Religious people try to impose their beliefs on others, but, it was said, when secular people make their case, they just have facts, and people who disagree are closing their eyes to those facts.

We will compare the beliefs and claims of Christianity with the beliefs and claims of the secular view, asking which one makes more sense of a complex world and human experience.

A secular society is one in which there is a separation of religion and the state. No religious faith is privileged by the government and the most powerful cultural institutions.

A secular person is one who does not know if there is a God or any supernatural realm beyond the natural world. Everything, in this view, has a scientific explanation.

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 economi...

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.

In this book I will be using the word “secular” in the second and third ways and will be offering often sharp critiques of these positions. I am, however, a great supporter of the first kind of secularism. I do not want the church or any religious institution to control the state nor for the state to control the church.

A truly secular state would create a genuinely pluralistic society and a “marketplace of ideas” in which people of all kinds of faith, including those with secular beliefs, could freely contribute, communicate, coexist, and cooperate in mutual respect and peace.

They would stretch to understand the other side so well that their opponents could say, “You represent my position in a better and more compelling way than I can myself.”

Some will not even begin the journey of exploration, because, frankly, Christianity does not seem relevant enough to be worth their while.

I will strongly challenge both the assumption that the world is getting more secular and the belief that secular, nonreligious people are basing their view of life mainly on reason. The reality is that every person embraces his or her worldview for a variety of rational, emotional, cultural, and social factors.

will be arguing that Christianity makes the most emotional and cultural sense, that it explains these life issues in the most trenchant ways, and that it gives us unsurpassed resources for meeting these inescapable human needs.

These assumptions are not presented to us explicitly by argument. Rather, they are absorbed through the stories and themes of entertainment and social media. They are assumed to be simply “the way things are.”4 They are so strong that even many Christian believers, perhaps secretly at first, find their faith becoming less and less real in their minds and hearts. Much or most of what we believe at this level is, therefore, invisible to us as belief.

In other words, as long as education levels rise and modernization advances religion has to die out. In this view, people feel they need religion only if they are untutored in science, history, and logical thinking.

However, this hasn’t happened as advertised. As the Pew study proves, religion is on the rise, and the emergence of the more strident and outspoken “new atheists” may be in fact a reaction to the persistence and even resurgence of vibrant religion.4 Nor is the flourishing of faith happening only among less educated people. Over the last generation philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Alvin Plantinga have produced a major body of scholarly work supporting belief in God and critiquing modern secularism in ways that are not easy to answer.

Belief in God makes sense to four out of five people in the world and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

There are two good answers to the question of why religion continues to persist and grow. One explanation is that many people find secular reason to have “things missing” from it that are necessary to live life well. Another explanation is that great numbers of people intuitively sense a transcendent realm beyond this natural world.

Through her help, I came to see that faith was making something of a comeback in rarefied philosophical circles where secular reason—rationality and science without any belief in a transcendent, supernatural reality—has increasingly been seen as missing things that society needs.

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 The dream of nineteenth-century humanists had been that the decline of religion would lead to less warfare and conflict. Instead the twentieth century has been marked by even greater violence, performed by states that were ostensibly nonreligious and operating on the basis of scientific rationality. Habermas tells those who are still confident that “philosophical reason . . . is capable of determining what is true and false” to simply look at the “catastrophes of the twentieth century—religious fascist and communist states, operating on the basis of practical reason—to see that this confidence is misplaced.”12 Terrible deeds have been done in the name of religion, but secularism has not proven to be an improvement.

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

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.”

“Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. . . . Science does not [and cannot] teach brotherly love.”19 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.

Paul Kalanithi had also found that, in Habermas’s phrase, the completely secular point of view had too many things “missing” that he knew were both necessary and real. Kalanithi refers in passing to forgiveness as one reason he left secularism behind.

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.”

Now that she had every evidence that there was at least the “possibility of a nonhuman agent . . . some mysterious Other . . . could I still call myself an atheist?”50 She decided she could. Why? She says that her experience bore no resemblance to the “religious iconography” she had grown up with.51 First, this Presence did not seem to be solicitous toward humans at all. “The most highly advertised property of the Christian . . . God [is] that he is ‘good.’” But her experience had connected her with something “wild,” unconditioned, even dangerous and violent, not anything she could consider nice or good.

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.

If this life is all there is, why do we long so deeply for something that doesn’t exist and never did? Why are there so many experiences that point beyond the world picture of secularism, even by those who do not welcome such perceptions? And if this life is all there is, what will you do with these desires that have no fulfillment within the closed secular frame?

Many ask: Why do people feel they need religion? Perhaps now we see that the way this question is phrased doesn’t explain the persistence of faith. People believe in God not merely because they feel some emotional need, but because it makes sense of what they see and experience.

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”63 Countries such as China are becoming more religious (and Christian) even as they modernize.

University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of “the crisis of secularism” and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.66 Why? There are two basic reasons. One has to do with the trends of retention and conversion.

Kaufmann shows that almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones. Secularization, he writes, “mainly erodes . . . the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established.”67 Therefore, the very “liberal, moderate” forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.

The second main reason that the world will become more religious is that religious people have significantly more children, whereas the more irreligious and secular a population, the less often marriage happens and the smaller the families.69 This is true across the world and holds within every national group, within every educational level, and within every economic class. So, for example, it is not the case that religious people have more children because they are less educated. Religious people, when they become more educated and urban, continue to out produce their less religious counterparts “by a landslide.”

As Kaufmann and others show, the most secular societies are maintained through the immigration of more religious peoples.72

It turns out, then, that the individualism of modern culture does not necessarily lead to a decline in religion. Rather, it leads to a decline of inherited religion, the sort one is born into.75 Religion that wanes comes with one’s assigned national or ethnic identity, as in “You are Indian, so you are Hindu; you are Norwegian, so you’re Lutheran; you are Polish, so you’re Catholic; you are American, so you should be a good member of a Christian denomination.” What is not declining in modern societies is chosen religion, religion based not on ethnicity or solely on upbringing but on personal decision.76 For example, 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

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. Most who have lost their faith say that they are simply following the dictates of rationality. But 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.

Charles Taylor calls this narrative the “subtraction story.”6 People claim that their secular outlook is simply what was left after science and reason subtracted their former belief in the supernatural. Once that superstition was gone, they were able to see things that had been there all along—that reason alone can establish truth, and the “humanistic values” of equality and freedom. However, each of these ideas is a new belief, a value-laden commitment that can’t be empirically proven. 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.

The first set of beliefs that many secular people adopt is what I will call “exclusive rationality.” 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.

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? Another problem is that 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.

The only things that would be “ethical” to believe in would be things that could be proven in a laboratory.

An additional problem is that even the criteria for proof are widely contested. That means that even statements of agnosticism can contain declarations of belief about rationality.

So reason can make a case that it is the way to truth only by appealing to itself.

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.

So reason and proof must start with faith in reason and belief in some particular concept of proof. However, there is even more faith involved in ordinary rationality that that. 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.

Evans argues, then, that both the statement “there is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and the statement “there is a transcendent reality beyond this world” are philosophical, not scientific, propositions. Neither can be empirically proven in such a way that no rational person can doubt.17 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.”

Polanyi shows that all people have innumerable beliefs about reality and relevance that come to us through bodily experience, authorities we trust, and communities we are part of. These beliefs pass into us and we hold them as tacit knowledge, barely conscious beliefs, and “paradigms” of reality.21 So we always come to observe anything with a “preunderstanding” of existing beliefs, expectations, and values that controls what we see, what seems plausible, and what does not.22

Often we find certain arguments compelling mainly because of our background beliefs, and when these beliefs shift, usually not through argument but through experience and intuition, it makes arguments that formerly felt strong begin to feel weak.

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.”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.

It is assumed, not proven, that a God beyond our reason could not exist—and therefore we conclude that he doesn’t exist. This is, of course, a form of begging the question. Our background beliefs set up our conscious reasoning to fail to find sufficient evidence for God.