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.

In the first half of this volume we will review the seven biggest objections and doubts about Christianity I’ve heard from people over the years.

Then in the second half of the book we will examine the reasons underlying Christian beliefs.

Liberals’ individualism comes out in their views of abortion, sex, and marriage.

Conservatives’ individualism comes out in their deep distrust of the public sector and in their understanding of poverty as simply a failure of personal responsibility.

In his book A Rumor of Angels Berger recounts how the twentieth century had uncovered “the sociology of knowledge,” namely that people believe what they do largely because they are socially conditioned to do so.

What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing.

I think we need something more than knowing God is with us in our difficulties. We also need hope that our suffering is “not in vain.” Have you ever noticed how desperate the families of lost loved ones are to say that? They work to reform laws or change social conditions that led to the death. They need to believe that the death of their loved ones has led to new life, that the injustice has led to greater justice.

Dostoevsky put it perfectly when he wrote: I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

The Supreme Court has enshrined this view in law when it opined “the heart of liberty” is to “define one’s own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe.”

Inspired by Foucault, many say that all truth-claims are power plays. When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people. Foucault was a disciple of Nietzsche, and to their credit they used this analysis on both the Left and the Right. If you claimed “everyone should do justice to the poor” in front of Nietzsche, he would question whether you said that because you really loved justice and the poor or because you wanted to start a revolution that would give you control and power.

Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish, because it absorbs oxygen from water rather than air, is only free if it is restricted and limited to water. If we put it out on the grass, its freedom to move and even live is not enhanced, but destroyed. The fish dies if we do not honor the reality of its nature.

Societies that have rid themselves of all religion have been just as oppressive as those steeped in it. We can only conclude that there is some violent impulse so deeply rooted in the human heart that it expresses itself regardless of what the beliefs of a particular society might be—whether socialist or capitalist, whether religious or irreligious, whether individualistic or hierarchical. Ultimately, then, the fact of violence and warfare in a society is no necessary refutation of the prevailing beliefs of that society.

Hell and the Equality of People

Dawkins argues that if you believe in evolution as a biological mechanism you must also believe in philosophical naturalism. But why? The same year that Dawkins’s The God Delusion was published, Francis Collins published The Language of God. Collins is an eminent research scientist and head of the Human Genome Project. He believes in evolutionary science and critiques the Intelligent Design movement that denies the transmutation of species. However, Collins believes that the fine-tuning, beauty, and order of nature nonetheless point to a divine Creator, and describes his conversion from atheism to Christianity.

Doesn’t Evolution Disprove the Bible?

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.

When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods.

Goethe refers to this as selige sehnsucht—blessed longing. We not only feel the reality but also the absence of what we long for.

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

In the movie Rocky, the title character’s girlfriend asks him why it is so important for him to “go the distance” in the boxing match. “Then I’ll know I’m not a bum,” he replies. In the movie Chariots of Fire one of the main characters explains why he works so hard at running the hundred-yard dash for the Olympics. He says that when each race begins, “I have ten lonely seconds to justify my existence.” Both of these men looked to athletic achievement as the defining force that gave meaning to their lives.

The Hebrew word for this perfect, harmonious interdependence among all parts of creation is called shalom. We translate it as “peace,” but the English word is basically negative, referring to the absence of trouble or hostility. The Hebrew word means much more than that. It means absolute wholeness—full, harmonious, joyful, flourishing life.

It is critical for anyone reading this book to recognize this fundamental difference between the gospel and religion. Christianity’s basic message differs at root with the assumptions of traditional religion. The founders of every other major religion essentially came as teachers, not as saviors.

The Forgiveness of God

The Second Reason: Real Love Is a Personal Exchange

Think, however, of emotionally wounded people. There is no way to listen and love people like that and stay completely emotionally intact yourself. It may be that they may feel stronger and more affirmed as you talk, but that won’t happen without you being quite emotionally drained yourself.

In The Cross of Christ, John Stott writes that substitution is at the heart of the Christian message: The essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for us. We…put ourselves where only God deserves to be; God…puts himself where we deserve to be.8

The gospel, however, is not just a moving fictional story about someone else. It is a true story about us. We

Jonathan Edwards, in reflecting on the interior life of the triune God, concluded that God is infinitely happy. Within God is a community of persons pouring glorifying, joyful love into one another. Think about this pattern in our own experience. Imagine there is someone you admire more than anyone else in the world. You would do anything for him or her. Now imagine you discover that this person feels exactly the same about you, and you enter into either a lifetime friendship or a romantic relationship and marriage. Sound like heaven? Yes, because it comes from heaven—that

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