The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

The method of induction requires generalizing from observed cases to all cases of the same kind. Without inductive reasoning we couldn’t learn from experience, we couldn’t use language, we couldn’t rely on our memories. Most people find that normal and untroubling. But not philosophers! David Hume and Bertrand Russell, as good secular men, were troubled by the fact that we haven’t got the slightest idea of why nature-regularity is happening now, and moreover we haven’t the slightest rational justification for assuming it will continue tomorrow. If someone would say, “Well the future has always been like the past in the past,” Hume and Russell reply that you are assuming the very thing you are trying to establish. To put it another way, science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature, it can only take it on faith.