Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Another wrote, “People aren’t ‘nones’ because they aren’t familiar with religion—they’re nones because they are.”2

Believers and nonbelievers in God alike arrive at their positions through a combination of experience, faith, reasoning, and intuition.

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.

“secular.”

three ways the word is used today.

separation of religion and the state.

secular person is one who does not know if there is a God or any supernatural realm beyond the natural world.

“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 economic prosperity, material comfort, and emotional fulfillment.

a great supporter of the first kind of secularism.

book called The Reason for God,

it does not begin far back enough for many people.

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.

I will compare and contrast how Christianity and secularism (with occasional reference to other religions) seek to provide meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, a moral compass, and hope—all

I 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 res...

Some of the beliefs that I will address are: “You don’t need to believe in God to have a full life of meaning,

“You should be free to live as you see fit, as long as you don’t harm others”

“You become yourself when you are true to your deepest d...

“You don’t need to believe in God to have a basis for moral valu...

“There’s little or no evidence for the existence of God or the tr...

question of whether religious belief is possible in our time.

Washington Post ran an article titled “The World Is Expected to Become More Religious—Not Less.”

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.

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...

a growing opinion among Chinese social scientists that the Christian idea of transcendence was the historic basis for the concepts of human rights and equality.

faith was making something of a comeback in rarefied philosophical circles

Jürgen Habermas, was for decades a defender of the Enlightenment

startled the philosophical establishment, however, with a changed and more positive attitude toward religious faith.

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

Terrible deeds have been done in the name of religion, but secularism has not proven to be an improvement.

It was the horrors of World War II, not science, that discredited eugenics.

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.”17

None of this denies that science and reason are sources of enormous and irreplaceable good for human society. The point is rather that science alone cannot serve as a guide for human society.

All science can do, Kalanithi argues, is “reduce phenomena into manageable units.” It can make “claims about matter and energy” but about nothing else.

no scientific proof for the reality of meaning and virtue,

Secular reason, all by itself, cannot give us a basis for “sacrifice, redemption, and forgiveness,”

second reason why, even in our secular age, religion continues to make sense to people is more existential than intellectual.

It is the sense that we are more and life is more than what we can see in the material world. Steve

Is it possible, then, that art will continue to provoke in people the inescapable intuition that there is more to life than scientific secularism can account for?

a direct experience of the transcendent that goes beyond the fainter intuitions of the aesthetic experience.

Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly call the experience “The Whoosh.”

others who maintain disbelief in God yet have no way to account for the experience rationally.

In biblical accounts of encounters with the divine (see Exodus 3 and 33 and Isaiah 6) the human recipients feel utterly insignificant.

a God whose presence is violently traumatic and lethal yet compelling and attractive at the same time.

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.60

The limits of secular reason, the ordinary experience of transcendence in the arts, and the extraordinary experiences that rend the secular frames even of hardened atheists—all of these explain why religious belief keeps reasserting itself even in the heart of the secular West.

As humanities scholar Mark Lilla has written: “To most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.”

People believe in God not merely because they feel some emotional need, but because it makes sense of what they see and experience. Indeed, we have seen that many thoughtful people are drawn toward belief somewhat unwillingly. They embrace religion because they think it is more fully true to the facts of human existence than secularism is.