The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

My thesis is that if you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs—you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.

“The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”

For a highly altered, fictionalized account of an event to take hold in the public imagination it is necessary that the eyewitnesses (and their children and grandchildren) all be long dead. They must be off the scene so they cannot contradict or debunk the embellishments and falsehoods of the story. The gospels were written far too soon for this to occur.

It would have been impossible, then, for this new faith to spread as it did had Jesus never said or done the things mentioned in the gospel accounts. Paul could confidently assert to government officials that the events of Jesus’s life were public knowledge: “These things were not done in a corner,” he said to King Agrippa (Acts 26:26). The people of Jerusalem had been there—they had been in the crowds that heard and watched Jesus. The New Testament documents could not say Jesus was crucified when thousands of people were still alive who knew whether he was or not. If there had not been appearances after his death, if there had not been an empty tomb, if he had not made these claims, and these public documents claimed they happened, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground. The hearers would have simply laughed at the accounts.

Why would any Christian make up the account of Jesus asking God in the garden of Gethsemane if he could get out of his mission? Or why ever make up the part on the cross when Jesus cries out that God had abandoned him? These things would have only offended or deeply confused first-century prospective converts. They would have concluded that Jesus was weak and failing his God. Why invent women as the first witnesses of the resurrection in a society where women were assigned such low status that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court?13 It would have made far more sense (if you were inventing the tale) to have male pillars of the community present as witnesses when Jesus came out of the tomb. The only plausible reason that all of these incidents would be included in these accounts is that they actually happened.

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? Richard Bauckham makes similar arguments about the depiction of Peter’s denial of Jesus, even to the point of his calling down a curse on his master (Mark 14:71). Why would anyone in the early church want to play up the terrible failures of their most prominent leader? No one would have made such a story up, and even though it is true, Bauckham reasons that no one but Peter himself would have dared to recount it unless Peter himself was the source and had authorized its preservation and propagation.14

We have a sense that the world is not the way it ought to be. We have a sense that we are very flawed and yet very great. 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.

I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.

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.

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

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. He sums up his view when he writes: Everything we value—from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion—we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection.17

There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world…. Or consider the alternative…it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss…. All right then—it is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave…lobotomized, go back to the creek, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.19

The gospel, however, makes it possible for someone to escape the spiral of bitterness, self-recrimination, and despair when life goes wrong. They know that the basic premise of religion—that if you live a good life, things will go well for you—is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet he had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.

There is one more thing to keep in mind. As Pascal put it, “I [believe] those witnesses that get their throats cut.” Virtually all the apostles and early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it is hard to believe that this kind of powerful self-sacrifice would be done to support a hoax.

Why did Christianity emerge so rapidly, with such power? No other band of messianic followers in that era concluded their leader was raised from the dead—why did this group do so? No group of Jews ever worshipped a human being as God. What led them to do it? Jews did not believe in divine men or individual resurrections. What changed their worldview virtually overnight? How do you account for the hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrection who lived on for decades and publicly maintained their testimony, eventually giving their lives for their belief?

Let’s not forget, however, that first-century people felt exactly the same way. They found the resurrection just as inconceivable as you do. The only way anyone embraced the resurrection back then was by letting the evidence challenge and change their worldview, their view of what was possible. They had just as much trouble with the claims of the resurrection as you, yet the evidence—both of the eyewitness accounts and the changed lives of Christ’s followers—was overwhelming.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things is passed away. (Revelation 21:4) And when we get there, we will say, I’ve come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I’ve been looking for all my life, though I never knew it! And it will by no means be the end of our story. In fact, as C. S. Lewis put it, all the adventures we have ever had will end up being only “the cover and the title page.” Finally we will be begin “Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.”12