The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

Though you could not prove that the fine-tuning of the universe was due to some sort of design, it would be unreasonable to draw the conclusion that it wasn’t.

Without inductive reasoning we couldn’t learn from experience, we couldn’t use language, we couldn’t rely on our memories.

you are assuming the very thing you are trying to establish.

science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature, it can only take it on faith.

“beauty” is nothing but a neurological hardwired response to particular data.

You only find certain scenery to be beautiful because you had ancestors who knew you would find food there and they survived because of that neurological feature and now we have it too.

“love” is simply a biochemical response, inherited from ancestors who survived because this trait helped them survive.

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.

regardless of the beliefs of our mind about the random meaninglessness of life, before the face of beauty we know better.

We not only feel the reality but also the absence of what we long for.

doesn’t the appetite for food in us mean that food exists?

We want something that nothing in this world can fulfill.

Dennett claims that if we have religious feelings it is only because those traits once helped certain people survive their environment in greater numbers and therefore passed that genetic code on to us.

Our ancestors who survived were most prone to detect agents in the brush even when they weren’t there,

evolution is interested only in preserving adaptive behavior, not true belief.

paranoid false beliefs are often more effective at helping you survive than accurate ones.

The principle chore of [brains] is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it…enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

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?

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.

Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

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?

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.

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.

You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.

I’d like to convince the reader that, whatever you may profess intellectually, belief in God is an unavoidable, “basic” belief that we cannot prove but can’t not know. We know God is there. That is why even when we believe with all our minds that life is meaningless, we simply can’t live that way. We know better.

Imagine if someone said to you ‘everyone knows that women are inferior.’ You’d say, ‘That’s not an argument, it’s just an assertion.’ And you’d be right.

Why did the couple keep insisting that humans had this great, unique individual dignity and worth?

don’t believe Milosz is right. I think that people will definitely go on holding to their beliefs in human dignity even when conscious belief in God is gone.

think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know.

Why is it impossible (in practice) for anyone to be a consistent moral relativist even when they claim that they are?

Moral obligation is a belief that some things ought not to be done regardless of how a person feels about them within herself, regardless of what the rest of her community and culture says, and regardless of whether it is in her self-interest or not.

We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.

Such people would have been less likely to survive and pass on their genes.

Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.5

There is no way to derive the concept of the dignity of every individual from the way things really work in nature.

Rights cannot be created—they must be discovered, or they are of no value.

The conspicuous problem with Dworkin’s…secular argument [for rights] is that Dworkin assumes a consensus among human agents that does not exist and never has existed.

Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place….

If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is “moral” and another “immoral” but only “I like this.” If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law? You may say “the majority has the right to make the law,” but do you mean that then the majority has the right to vote to exterminate a minority? If you say “No, that is wrong,” then you are back to square one.

“Who sez” that the majority has a moral obligation not to kill the minority?

Only someone who is religious can speak seriously of the sacred…. We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious, that they are ends in themselves, that they are owed unconditional respect, that they possess inalienable rights, and, of course, that they possess inalienable dignity. In my judgment these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources [i.e. God] we need to say it…. Not one of [these statements about human beings] has the power of the religious way of speaking…that we are sacred because God loves us, his children.

Without God he can’t justify moral obligation, and yet he can’t not know it exists.

We are moral creatures in an amoral world….

You first.

Yet we inescapably believe it is wrong for stronger human individuals or groups to kill weaker ones.

If violence is totally natural why would it be wrong for strong humans to trample weak ones?

There is no basis for moral obligation unless we argue that nature is in some part unnatural. We can’t know that nature is broken in some way unless there is some supernatural standard of normalcy ap...

There is only one way out of this conundrum. We can pick up the Biblical account of things and see if it explains our moral sense any better than a secular view. If the world was made by a God of peace, justice, and love, then that is why we know that violence, oppression, and hate are wrong. If the world is fallen, broken, and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and disorder we see.

deep disharmony between the world your intellect has devised and the real world (and God) that your heart knows exists.

If a premise (“There is no God”) leads to a conclusion you know isn’t true (“Napalming babies is culturally relative”) then why not change the premise?