Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

if the believer’s life begins to go terribly wrong and this tacit belief begins to crumble, all the other teachings of the faith can seem unconvincing as well.

When the background belief is disproven, the foreground beliefs all seem less compelling.

part of Polanyi’s “subsidiary awareness,” the loss of which, if it is unexamined, can lead to the loss of the whole faith.

Today he is willing to say that coming to a secular, materialist viewpoint is “a matter of a new, more or less equally faith-based story eclipsing the old one’s explanatory power.

one moral outlook gave way to another.”

Sessions concludes by calling for secular people to be more cognizant of the fact that their viewpoint is a “construal,” a way of interpreting reality, and not simply the only objective, factual account of reality.

Sessions goes on to urge Christians to show greater humility too, to forgo their triumphalism, and to stop thinking they can win the field strictly through rational proofs and arguments.

neither secularism nor Christianity has the main “burden of proof.” Western secularity is not the absence of faith but a new set of beliefs about the universe.72 These beliefs cannot be proven, are not self-evident to most people, and have, as we shall continue to see, their own contradictions and problems just as other religious faiths do.73

Sum of the first part of the book

significant problem

secularism’s humanistic values are inconsistent with—even undermined by—its belief in...

many secular people base their nonbelief on a rigid and simpli...

Pascal

Rather than unfairly asking only religious people to prove their views, we need to compare and contrast religious beliefs and their evidences with secular beliefs and theirs. We can and should argue about which beliefs account for what we see and experience in the world. We can and should debate the inner logical consistency of belief systems, asking whether they support or contradict one another. We can and should consult our deepest intuitions.

I hope, to show that Christianity makes the greatest sense in every way—emotionally, culturally, and rationally.75 In the process, I hope to show readers that Christianity offers far greater and richer goods for understanding, facing, enjoying, and living life than they had previously imagined.

no more fundamental question than What is the meaning of life?

Thomas Nagel

wonders if the “Meaning-capital-M” question comes from too great a sense of our own importance.1

think about the meaning and purpose of life,

nearly three fourths of people across the globe say that they do often or sometimes.

first sense

purpose.

Something has meaning if there is intent...

signifi...

if it acts as a sign pointing to something...

the two senses can come...

So 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.

The psychological need for this is inarguable.

we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.”7

Heidegger says that humans are the only living beings who wonder about the meaning of life.

not something that bothered people in ancient times the way it has bothered us today.

We want to find meaning in things but the universe does not cooperate.

To Camus, death is not a gateway into another life but a “closed door.” All our greatest hopes are frustrated by it.

Inevitable death, then, makes life absurd.

Cosmopolitan secular people today tend to cringe at the phrase “the meaning of life”

If the universe is truly indifferent and meaningless, why think it ought not to be that way?

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 meaningf...

Stephen Jay Gould

It is, in this view, liberating to believe there is no Meaning to life.

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...

Or do we? And who is “we”?

they are neither modern people struggling with a lack of purpose nor postmodern people who feel they are free to forge the meanings that they prefer. What makes the difference is their belief that their life tasks have been given to them by “the Lord” and a final approval exists for those who have not sought their own path but been faithful to the call.

modern authors

reveal “the persistent need for meaning and the gnawing sense of its elusiveness.”

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.

Stephen Jay Gould says that a purposeless cosmos means we are liberated to construct our own individual meanings for our lives.

our own purposes, and they’re real.24 Postmodern culture

understands any claim that there is a Meaning to all life to be a form of bondage.

we get to forge and make our own meanings.