Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”

almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones.

religious people have significantly more children,

the most secular societies are maintained through the immigration of more religious peoples.

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.

In an interview with New Humanist, Kaufmann was asked whether secularism might turn the tide and “do a better job of winning over [people].” He answered: “Religion does provide that enchantment, that meaning and emotion, and in our current moment we [secularists] lack that.”83

Secularism in the twentieth century has not proven it can give moral guidance to technology or the state.

Faith, however, is not produced strictly by emotional need, nor should it be.

but because faith in God makes more sense of life than nonbelief.

Saint Augustine says to God in his Confessions, that “our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”

“deconversion” stories.

some patterns can be discerned.

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.

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.”

simply what was left after science and reason subtracted their former belief in the supernatural.

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

I want to strongly challenge this view.

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.

many who have thought this view out to its logical conclusion have seen it to be deeply problematic.

He fell into a kind of intense, radical agnosticism, unable to know that anything existed outside of his own self and mind.

Barbara Ehrenreich

William Kingdon Clifford, the British mathematician and philosopher, crystallized exclusive rationality in his famous essay “The Ethics of Belief” (1877). He wrote, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence,” and by “sufficient evidence” he meant empirical verification

what is the empirical proof for that proposition? Another problem

few of our convictions about truth can be proven scientifically.

even the criteria for proof are widely contested.

But it is impossible to claim that we should believe only what is proven and

All of us have things we believe—including things we would sacrifice and even die for—that cannot be proven. We believe them on a combination of rational, experiential, and social grounds. 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?

So reason and proof must start with faith in reason and belief in some particular concept of proof.

even more faith involved in ordinary rationality than that.

Heide...

Merleau-...

Wittge...

have argued that all reasoning is based on prior faith commitments to whi...

reason depends on the faith that our cognitive senses—our eyes and ears, our minds and memories—are not tricking us. Yet there is no noncircular way to establish that.

Stephen Evans

Because science’s baseline methodology is to always assume a natural cause for every phenomenon, there is no experiment that could prove or disprove that there is something beyond this material world.

deeper beliefs about the nature of being, traditionally called “ontology,” are unavoidable and yet empirically unprovable.

Hume

Polanyi

every individual act of human knowing works on two levels—“focal awareness,” in which the knower gives direct attention to an observed object, and “subsidiary awareness,” in which the knower employs a host of assumptions that are tacit and not recognized as we use them.20 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.

tacit knowledge, of which we are barely aware, shapes our conscious reasoning more than we know.

The problem of evil is a good case study of how background beliefs control our supposedly strictly rational thought.

The book of Job, for example, presents the outrageousness of undeserved suffering as well as any ancient text, yet in no way does it present it as an objection to the existence of God.

Charles Taylor explains why modern people are far more likely to lose their faith over suffering than those in times past.

our belief and confidence in the powers of our own intellect have changed.

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.

Polanyi

shows that even skeptical doubt always contains an element of belief.

doubt and belief are ultimately “...