The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

Also, why constantly depict the apostles—the eventual leaders of the early Church—as petty and jealous, almost impossibly slow-witted, and in the end as cowards who either actively or passively failed their master?

All these revisionist histories completely ignore the growing body of careful scholarship that shows there were a very large number of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life who lived on for years.

One possibility I urge them to consider is that the passage that bothers them might not teach what it appears to them to be teaching. Many of the texts people find offensive can be cleared up with a decent commentary that puts the issue into historical context.

I urge people to consider that their problem with some texts might be based on an unexamined belief in the superiority of their historical moment over all others. We must not universalize our time any more than we should universalize our culture.

To reject the Bible as regressive is to assume that you have now arrived at the ultimate historic moment, from which all that is regressive and progressive can be discerned. That belief is surely as narrow and exclusive as the views in the Bible you regard as offensive.

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?

I have one more bit of advice to people struggling with some of the Bible’s teaching. We should make sure we distinguish between the major themes and message of the Bible and its less primary teachings. The Bible talks about the person and work of Christ and also about how widows should be regarded in the church. The first of these subjects is much more foundational. Without it the secondary teachings don’t make sense. We should therefore consider the Bible’s teachings in their proper order.

Don’t worry about gender roles until you figure out what you think about the central teachings of the faith.

If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won’t have an intimate relationship.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.

The first great division was between the eastern Greek and western Roman church in the eleventh century. Today these are known as the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. The second great schism was within the Western church, between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

What is Christianity? For our purposes, I’ll define Christianity as the body of believers who assent to these great ecumenical creeds. They believe that the triune God created the world, that humanity has fallen into sin and evil, that God has returned to rescue us in Jesus Christ, that in his death and resurrection Jesus accomplished our salvation for us so we can be received by grace, that he established the church, his people, as the vehicle through which he continues his mission of rescue, reconciliation, and salvation, and that at the end of time Jesus will return to renew the heavens and the earth, removing all evil, injustice, sin, and death from the world.

All Christians believe all this—but no Christians believe just this. As soon as you ask “How does the church act as vehicle for Jesus’s work in the world?” and “How does Jesus’s death accomplish our salvation?” and “How are we received by grace?” Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians will give you different answers. Despite the claims of many to be such, there are no truly “generic” nondenominational Christians. Everyone has to answer these “how” questions in order to live a Christian life, and those answers immediately put you into one tradition and denomination or another.

These authors are evaluating Christian arguments by what some have called “strong rationalism.”2 Its proponents laid down what was called the “verification principle,” namely, that no one should believe a proposition unless it can be proved rationally by logic or empirically by sense experience.3 What is meant by the word “proved”? Proof, in this view, is an argument so strong that no person whose logical faculties are operating properly would have any reason for disbelieving it. Atheists and agnostics ask for this kind of “proof” for God, but are not alone in holding to strong rationalism. Many Christians claim that their arguments for faith are so strong that all who reject them are simply closing their minds to the truth out of fear or stubbornness.

How could you empirically prove that no one should believe something without empirical proof? You can’t, and that reveals it to be, ultimately, a belief.6 Strong rationalism also assumes that it is possible to achieve “the view from nowhere,” a position of almost complete objectivity, but virtually all philosophers today agree that is impossible. We come to every individual evaluation with all sorts of experiences and background beliefs that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works. It is not fair, then, to demand an argument that all rational people would have to bow to.

Thomas Nagel

I am talking of…the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true…. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God: I don’t want the universe to be like that…. I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God—anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn’t particularly want either one of the answers to be correct.7

Because he rejects strong rationalism, Nagel has, despite his skepticism, wonderful respect toward belief and religion. He differs markedly from the tone and stance of writers like Dawkins and Harris.

The approach I will take in the rest of this volume is called “critical rationality.”10 It assumes that there are some arguments that many or even most rational people will find convincing, even though there is no argument that will be persuasive to everyone regardless of viewpoint. It assumes that some systems of belief are more reasonable than others, but that all arguments are rationally avoidable in the end. That is, you can always find reason to escape it that is not sheer bias or stubbornness. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that we can’t evaluate beliefs, only that we should not expect conclusive proof, and to demand it is unfair. Not even scientists proceed that way.

A theory is considered empirically verified if it organizes the evidence and explains phenomena better than any conceivable alternative theory. That is, if, through testing, it leads us to expect with accuracy many and varied events better than any other rival account of the same data, then it is accepted, though not (in the strong rationalist sense) “proved.”

No view of God can be proven, but that does not mean that we cannot sift and weigh the grounds for various religious beliefs and find that some or even one is the most reasonable.

Lewis gives us another metaphor for knowing the truth about God when he writes that he believes in God “as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”13 Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power, and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it.

We have a longing for love and beauty that nothing in this world can fulfill. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose. Which worldview best accounts for these things?

Christians do not claim that their faith gives them omniscience or absolute knowledge of reality. Only God has that. But they believe that the Christian account of things—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—makes the most sense of the world. I ask you to put on Christianity like a pair of spectacles and look at the world with it. See what power it has to explain what we know and see.

That is why, if God exists, we would expect to find that he appeals to our rational faculties. If we were made “in his image” as rational, personal beings, there should be some resonance between his mind and ours. It also means that reason alone won’t be enough. The Playwright can only be known through personal revelation. That is why we have to take a look at what the Bible says about God and the human condition.

In the Christian view, however, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ himself. If there is a God, we characters in his play have to hope that he put some information about himself in the play. But Christians believe he did more than give us information. He wrote himself into the play as the main character in history, when Jesus was born in a manger and rose from the dead. He is the one with whom we have to do.

Though there cannot be irrefutable proof for the existence of God, many people have found strong clues for his reality—divine fingerprints—in many places.

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga believes that there are no proofs of God that will convince all rational persons. However, he believes that there are at least two to three dozen very good arguments for the existence of God.1 Most readers who take the time to think through Plantinga’s list will find some items compelling and others not. However, the accumulated weight of the ones you find appealing can be very formidable.

Scientist Francis Collins puts this clue in layman’s language in his book The Language of God: We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.3

Again, Collins puts it well: When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants—the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.—that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people.

Stephen Hawking concludes: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.” Elsewhere he says, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”7

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.

As a proof for the existence of God, the regularity of nature is escapable. You can always say, “We don’t know why things are as they are.” As a clue for God, however, it is helpful.

Bernstein and Danto are testifying to the fact that even though we as secular people believe that beauty and love are just biochemical responses, in the presence of great art and beauty we inescapably feel that there is real meaning in life, there is truth and justice that will never let us down, and love means everything.

Another prominent artist who is apparently telling us the same thing is John Updike. In his short story “Pigeon Feathers” a young teenager says to this mother, “Don’t you see, if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.” Later, in the presence of the beauty of pigeon feathers, of their texture and color, he is overwhelmed by a certainty that there is a God behind the world who will allow him to live for eternity.

St. Augustine in his Confessions reasoned that these unfulfillable desires are clues to the reality of God. How so? Indeed (as it was just objected) just because we feel the desire for a steak dinner doesn’t mean we will get it. However, while hunger doesn’t prove that the particular meal desired will be procured, doesn’t the appetite for food in us mean that food exists? Isn’t it true that innate desires correspond to real objects that can satisfy them, such as sexual desire (corresponding to sex), physical appetite (corresponding to food), tiredness (corresponding to sleep), and relational desires (corresponding to friendship)? Doesn’t the unfulfillable longing evoked by beauty qualify as an innate desire? We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship, or success can satisfy. We want something that nothing in this world can fulfill. Isn’t that at least a clue that this “something” that we want exists?15 This unfulfillable longing, then, qualifies as a deep, innate human desire, and that makes it a major clue that God is there.

I don’t believe Dawkins or other evolutionary theorists realize the full implications of this crucial insight. Evolution can only be trusted to give us cognitive faculties that help us live on, not to provide ones that give us an accurate and true picture of the world around us.23

However, according to evolutionary biology laws of reason would have to make sense to us only because they help us survive, not because they necessarily tell us truth.

Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it’s only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?

What is not fair is to do what so many evolutionary scientists are doing now. They are applying the scalpel of their skepticism to what our minds tell us about God but not to what our minds are telling us about evolutionary science itself.

To a friend, Darwin wrote that: the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.26

It comes down to this: If, as the evolutionary scientists say, what our brains tells us about morality, love, and beauty is not real—if it is merely a set of chemical reactions designed to pass on our genetic code—then so is what their brains tell them about the world. Then why should they trust them?

The first clue is the very existence of the world, the Big Bang.

The second clue is the fine-tuning of the universe, the one-in-a-trillion-trillion chance that our universe supports organic and human life.

Another clue is the regularity of nature.

Another clue is the clue of beauty and meaning.

Oh, but we do, and that’s the final clue. If we believe God exists, then our view of the universe gives us a basis for believing that cognitive faculties work, since God could make us able to form true beliefs and knowledge. If we believe in God, then the Big Bang is not mysterious, nor the fine-tuning of the universe, nor the regularities of nature. All the things that we see make perfect sense. Also, if God exists our intuitions about the meaningfulness of beauty and love are to be expected.

If you don’t believe in God, not only are all these things profoundly inexplicable, but your view—that there is no God—would lead you not to expect them. Though you have little reason to believe your rational faculties work, you go on using them. You have no basis for believing that nature will go on regularly, but you continue to use inductive reasoning and language. You have no good reason to trust your senses that love and beauty matter, but you keep on doing it.

C. S. Lewis puts this vividly: You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air o...

The theory that there is a God who made the world accounts for the evidence we see better than the theory that there is no God. Those who argue against the existence of God go right on using induction, language, and their cognitive faculties, all of which make far more sense in a universe in which a God has created and supports them all by his power.