The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

On the cross he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours.

“Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?”

It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition.

God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.

I think we need something more than knowing God is with us in our difficulties.

They need to believe that the death of their loved ones has led to new life, that the injustice has led to greater justice.

resurrection—not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted.

My joy had been greatly magnified by the nightmare.

When you find it again (having thought it was gone forever) you cherish and appreciate it in a far deeper way.

Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.

that it will make it not only possible to forgive

When we image things we only expect after death, in heaven, we are glorifying God when we allow him to bring the kingdom through us.

In this view, “freedom” means that there is no overarching purpose for which we were created.

It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.

To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything…. There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

Proponents of this view point out that many urban neighborhoods contain residents of different races and religious beliefs who nonetheless live and work together as a community.

the sanctity of personal choice.

Every account of justice and reason is embedded in a set of some particular beliefs about the meaning of human life

that is not shared with

ever...

Every human community holds in common some beliefs that necessarily create boundaries, including some people and excluding others from its circle.

Each is based on common beliefs that act as boundaries,

Neither community is being “narrow”—they are just being communities.

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Here is a far better set of tests: Which community has beliefs that lead its members to treat persons in other communities with love and respect—to serve them and meet their needs?

We should criticize Christians when they are condemning and ungracious to unbelievers.

When Africans become Christians, their African-ness is converted, completed, and resolved, not replaced with European-ness or something else.

We emphasize the arts, value racial diversity, stress the importance of working for justice in the city for all its inhabitants, and communicate in the language and with the sensibility of our city-center culture. Most of all we stress the grace of a Savior who ate with people the establishment called “sinners” and loved those who opposed him.

amusement at seeing human beings try but fail to be Godlike, is a very Christian way of looking at things.

There is no “Christian culture” the way there is an “Islamic culture” which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco….

Freedom to determine our own moral standards is considered a necessity for being fully human.

This is a restriction, a limit on your freedom. There are many other things you won’t be able to do with the time you invest in practicing.

You’ve deliberately lost your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.

This does not mean that restriction, discipline, and constraint are intrinsically, automatically liberating.

In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests.

Such careers are straitjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanize us.

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.

Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities.

“Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?” They would invariably say, “Yes, of course.”

Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is ‘there’ that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?”

Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one,

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.

dependent on some cause outside of itself.

“even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be created by an intelligent being, this would not suggest that this being is the God of the Bible.”4 That is perfectly right. If we are looking at this as an argument proving the existence of a personal God, it doesn’t get us all the way there.

God who intended to create beings like us.”

“Fine-Tuning Argument”

Though there’s not a shred of proof that there are many universes, there’s also no way to prove that there aren’t.

Though you could not prove he had cheated, it would be unreasonable to conclude that he hadn’t.