Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

by Timothy J. Keller

metanarratives try to explain all reality, which can lead to the hubris that sees all opponents and dissidents as antirational or dangerously deluded. But the biblical story, while giving us many fundamental insights about human nature and purpose, nevertheless leaves much “intractable to comprehension.” Psalms such as Psalm 88 give us prayers by suffering believers that sometimes end in darkness without clear resolution or answers. Job’s friends smugly think they have the ways of God so figured out that they know sufferers are always being punished for some sin. This simplistic view leads them to divide the world into the good people and the bad people and to explain away “the real intractability of the evils of history.” Their dogmatism leads them to condemn and dismiss people who don’t agree with them. However, at the end of the book of Job, they are condemned by God. God alone has the full perspective on things. We see only in part.

the biblical story is not the kind of neat, “comprehensive explanation of reality” that leads believers to the proud position that they have all the answers.40

in the New Testament, when Jesus Christ encounters a respected male and a socially marginal woman (John 3 and 4) or a religious leader and a tax collector (Luke 18) or a religious teacher and a fallen woman (Luke 7), it is always the moral, racial, sexual outsider and socially marginalized person who connects to Jesus most readily.

Christians are not saved by summoning up their strength and accomplishing great deeds but by admitting their weakness and need for a savior.

Most metanarratives say: “Here’s how to win through. Pull yourself together, master yourself. Master the situation. Be strong. You can do it.” But Jesus says, essentially, “You can’t do it. You must rely on me.”

If all this surprises you, it may mean that you have bought into a completely mistaken idea, namely that Christianity is about how those who live moral and good lives and consequently are taken to heaven.

a professed Christian who is not committed to a life of generosity and justice toward the poor and marginalized is, at the very least, a living contradiction of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God,

believers in God have argued that God’s existence cannot be proven empirically, as if he were a physical object. Instead, many religious philosophers have argued that God’s existence can be inferred logically.

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V. interesting footnote

Theory X is more reasonable than theory Y if it explains the data (what we see) better than theory Y. This, of course, is not final proof of the kind that can be concluded in a laboratory. But most of our theories about waves and particles, about light and molecules, are established like this. In a similar way, the arguments for God contend that belief in God makes more rational sense of the world than nonbelief because it accounts for the data—what we see and know about the world.

If there is no God, then either original matter sprang from nothing, or original matter has always existed without a cause, or there is an infinite regress of causes without a beginning. Each of these answers takes us out of the realm of science and the universe we know. They are nothing short of miracles, for science knows nothing of beings or physical processes that spring out of nothing or that have no beginning.

Ironically, then, there is an agreement that modern science is completely insufficient to explain the existence of the world. Whatever brought it about must have been something extranatural or supernatural. So even those who think they are denying this argument for a supernatural divinity are still supporting

No. Too much of a leap. Not a valid inference.

as long as you don’t beg the question and assume that God could not possibly exist, then the fine-tuning of physics makes much more sense in a universe in which there is a creator and designer. It is improbable that all the physical constants just happened to be perfectly tuned for life on their own. It would be more reasonable to conclude it was something intended and designed.6

the fine-tuning argument is strong enough that scientists put forth the multiverse thesis even though there is neither a shred of evidence for it nor any way to test it.7 In other words, either you have to take a great step of faith to believe there is a God who designed the universe or you must take a great step of faith to believe there is not. That’s a testimony to the strength of the argument.

Nagel believes that human “consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science” to explain reality.14

In Nagel’s famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” he says that a being has conscious mental states if there is something it is like to be that being, for that being.15

it is very hard to explain how the ability to do complex mathematics and abstract philosophy was a capacity that helped our ancestors survive.17

Steven Pinker, a convinced materialist, has been forced by these arguments to agree. He is not sure why these capacities developed.18

no one can account scientifically for the link between brain events and thoughts. Though we know that chemical processes in the brain are involved in thoughts, that does not prove that they are fully created by them.

If we can’t trust our moral and religious sensibilities to tell us truth—if evolution has given us those illusions simply to help us adapt to our environment—then why should we trust our reasoning capacities to tell us truth? It is not really fair to apply the knife of evolutionary scepticism to our morality and religion and not use it on our reason.

Nagel writes, “Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability and in doing so undermines itself.”24

as David Bentley Hart writes, when we find something intensely beautiful, it is seldom because of its utility.

that moral obligation, beauty and meaning, the significance of love, our consciousness of being a self are illusions

Woah woah woah that's not what the atheists are saying!

Ultimately, nonbelief in God is an act of faith, because there is no way to prove that the world and all that is within it and its deep mathematical orderliness and matter itself all simply exist on their own as brute facts with no source outside of themselves.

Jesus himself is the main argument for why we should believe Christianity.

Today a greater percentage of the world’s population than ever before is Christian, and Christianity adds to its ranks over fifty thousand persons a day, or just under nineteen million new people a year.3

today most of the most vital and largest Christian populations are now nonwhite, non-Western.

scholarly books in recent years have made a strong case for the trustworthiness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life.9

“all scholars agree that Gospel traditions must originally have been formulated by disciples of Jesus and others who encountered him, witnessed the events, and remembered his teaching.”10

While it is true that, for example, European fairy tales were freely altered by many anonymous handlers, anthropologists have now studied oral traditions across many cultures and discovered that this was not always the practice. When a community was remembering some shared historical origin account, the stories often had to be passed down without change.12

Most crucially, because the Gospel accounts were written down not after centuries of transmission (as in the case of European fairy tales) but within the lifetimes of people who had been eyewitnesses to the events, they are better characterized as oral history or historical testimony rather than as oral tradition.13

the Gospels were written too early to be legend-encrusted folklore. They are rather eyewitness histories.

Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd, in their formidable volume The Jesus Legend, point to a number of the features of the Gospel accounts—“the claims of Jesus’s identity … [as] that of Yahweh-God and that he should receive worship, the notion of a crucified messiah, the concept of an individual resurrection, the dullness of the disciples, the unsavory crowd Jesus attracted.” Eddy and Boyd call these all highly “embarrassing aspects” of the Jesus story for Christians.

“It is hard to understand how this story came about in this environment, in such a short span of time, unless it is substantially rooted in history.”18

This creates a great conundrum for anyone trying to understand this most influential figure in world history. Jesus is one of the very few persons in history who founded a great world religion or who, like Plato or Aristotle, has set the course of human thought and life for centuries. Jesus is in that tiny, select group. On the other hand, there have been a number of human persons over the years who have implicitly or explicitly claimed to be divine beings from other worlds. Many of them were demagogues; many more of them were leaders of small, self-contained sects of true believers. What is unique about Jesus is that he is the only member of the first set of persons who is also a member of the second.

In the whole history of the world, there is only one person who not only claimed to be God himself but also got enormous numbers of people to believe it. Only Jesus combines claims of divinity with the most beautiful life of humanity.

as has often been said more eloquently than I can say it here, Jesus might have been a deranged demagogue or a charlatan, or perhaps the Son of God, but he couldn’t simply have been a great teacher. His claims do not leave that option open to us. A merely good human being would not say such things. His statements about himself, “if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men.”27

The historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is formidable and has been laid out recently with massive scholarly support by N. T. Wright in The Resurrection of the Son of God and by many others as well.31

This chapter certainly does not make the full case for believing the Christian faith. A good number of very powerful objections to the Christian faith have been posed over the years, and they require thoughtful, extensive, and well-worked-out responses. Perhaps the strongest is the argument against the loving, all-powerful God of the Bible based on the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Another has to do with both the record within the Bible of God’s commanding holy war, as well as the record of religion and Christianity promoting violence in subsequent world history. Another objection is to the biblical teachings on judgment and hell. Other objections arise around the Bible, including its relationship to science. I have written a book, The Reason for God, that gives answers to these objections, but there are many other volumes that should be consulted.

it is quite rational to believe in God and Christianity. There are lots of good reasons to do so.35

What obliged a person to be rational? If you argue that to be rational is simply to be in your best interests, well, you are appealing to no higher value than selfishness. So why shouldn’t the person act selfishly? Rationality and logic, then, were insufficient to bring human beings to agreement and to move them to action that promoted the social good. Something else was needed.