The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

In the wake of World War II the English writer Dorothy Sayers saw many British intellectual elites in despair about the direction of human society. In her 1947 book Creed or Chaos? she proposed that their hopelessness was largely due to their loss of belief in the Christian doctrine of “original” sin, that is, humanity’s inherent pride and self-centeredness. “The people who are most discouraged,” she wrote, “are those who cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment.” To them, the genocide in totalitarian states and the greed and selfishness of capitalist society “are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe.” Christians, however, are accustomed to the idea that “there is a deep interior dislocation in the very center of human personality.” She concluded: The Christian dogma of the double nature in man—which asserts that man is disintegrated and necessarily imperfect in himself and all his works, yet closely related by a real unity of substance with an eternal perfection within and beyond him—makes the present parlous state of human society seem less hopeless and less irrational.13