Making Sense of God Quotes

“Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. . . . Science does not [and cannot] teach brotherly love.”19 Secular, scientific reason is a great good, but if taken as the sole basis for human life, it will be discovered that there are too many things we need that it is missing.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Just as a sailboat is not free to sail unless it confines itself in significant ways, so you will never know the freedom of love unless you limit your choices in significant ways. There is no greater feeling of liberation than to feel and be loved well. The affirmation that comes from love liberates you from fears and self-doubts. It frees you from having to face the world alone, with only your own ingenuity and resources. Your friend or mate will be crucial to helping you achieve many of your goals in life. In all these ways love is liberating—perhaps the most liberating thing. But the minute you get into a love relationship, and the deeper and the more intimate and the more wonderful it gets, the more you also have to give up your independence.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the [Other] from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”23 We say to ourselves, “I would never do what they did. I am nothing like them.” To forgive and embrace, rather than to exclude or subjugate, requires a self-image that does not strengthen itself through drawing such contrasts.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonise: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the very same time. You’re equipped . . . for farce or even tragedy more than you are for happy endings.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before; Since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more. . . . To see the law by Christ fulfilled, and hear his pardoning voice Changes a slave into a child, and duty into choice.35”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“A salvation earned by good works and moral effort would favor the more able, competent, accomplished, and privileged. But salvation by sheer grace favors the failed, the outsiders, the weak, because it goes only to those who know salvation must be by sheer grace.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“there has to be somebody whom you adore who adores you. Someone whom you cannot but praise who praises and loves you—that is the foundation of identity. The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.3 However, if we put this power in the hands of a fallible, changeable person, it can be devastating. And if this person’s regard is based on your fallible and changeable life efforts, your self-regard will be just as fleeting and fragile. Nor can this person be someone you can lose, because then you will have lost your very self. Obviously, no human love can meet these standards. Only love of the immutable can bring tranquillity. Only the unconditional love of God will do.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as . . . not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual thing to worship. . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. . . . Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. . . . Worship power— you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Physician, professor, and author Atul Gawande tells of a doctor working at a nursing home who persuaded its administrator to bring in dogs, cats, parakeets, a colony of rabbits, and even a group of laying hens to be cared for by the residents. The results were significant. “The residents began to wake up and come to life. People who we had believed weren’t able to speak started speaking. … People who had been completely withdrawn and nonambulatory started coming to nurses’ station and saying, ‘I’ll take the dog for a walk.’ All the parakeets were adopted and named by the residents.”5 The use and need for psychotropic drugs for agitation dropped significantly, to 38 percent of the previous level. And “deaths fell 15 percent.” Why? The architect of these changes concluded, “I believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.”6 Gawande goes on to ask “why simply existing—why being merely housed and fed and safe and alive—seems empty and meaningless to us. What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? The answer … is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

“One needn’t remain religious to admit potential harm in the lack of self-awareness in certain secular construals of the world, and to be able to see religious belief, with a kind humility and respect, as a construal that can be equally as plausible as our own. And one that is to be studied carefully … for its crucial insights about human be-ing.” Sessions”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

“While we may be able to demonstrably prove to any rational person that substance X will boil at temperature Y at elevation Z, we cannot so prove what we believe about justice and human rights, or that people are all equal in dignity and worth, or what we think is good and evil human behavior. If we used the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject belief in God, no one would be able to justify much of anything. The”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“He argues that science cannot provide the means by which to judge whether its technological inventions are good or bad for human beings. To do that, we must know what a good human person is, and science cannot adjudicate morality or define such a thing.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Many point to the rising percentage of younger adult “nones” in the United States as evidence for the inevitable shrinkage of religion. However, Kaufmann shows that almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones. Secularization, he writes, “mainly erodes . . . the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established.”67 Therefore, the very “liberal, moderate” forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.68”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Actually, it is quite natural to human beings to move toward belief in God. As humanities scholar Mark Lilla has written: “To most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.”61 Strict secularism holds that people are only physical entities without souls, that when loved ones die they simply cease to exist, that sensations of love and beauty are just neurological-chemical events, that there is no right or wrong outside of what we in our minds determine and choose. Those positions are at the very least deeply counterintuitive for nearly all people, and large swaths of humanity will continue to simply reject them as impossible to believe.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Lo recordé porque hace poco aconsejé a un hombre cuyos padres siempre le respondían de la misma manera. Este hombre me relató lo siguiente: «Ellos nunca dijeron: “estaremos orgullosos de ti si haces esto o aquello”. Cuando les pedí su orientación, siempre dijeron: “solo queremos que hagas lo que de verdad quieras hacer, sea lo que sea, siempre estará bien con nosotros”». El hombre se quejaba que esto lo había hecho sentir no amado y a la deriva. Dudaba que ellos estuvieran igualmente felices con cualquiera de sus elecciones en la vida, pero no consiguió que le revelaran la clase de vida por la cual lo habrían admirado. Sabía que ellos tenían buenas intenciones y que pensaban que estaban siendo modernos y abiertos.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Una fe lógica: Usando la razón para creer en Dios

“The humanistic beliefs, then, of most secular people should be recognized as exactly that—beliefs. They cannot be deduced logically or empirically from the natural, material world alone. If there is no transcendent reality beyond this life, then there is no value or meaning for anything.64 To hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak, but then to insist that nonetheless every person has a human dignity to be honored—is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary. Even Nietzsche, however, cannot escape his own scalpel. He blasted secular liberals for being inconsistent and cowardly. He believed that calls for social bonding and benevolence for the poor and weak meant “herd-like uniformity, the ruin of the noble spirit, and the ascendency of the masses.”65 He wanted to turn from the “banal creed” of modern liberalism to the tragic, warrior culture (the “Ubermensch” or “Superman”) of ancient times. He believed the new “Man of the Future” would have the courage to look into the bleakness of a universe without God and take no religious consolation. He would have the “noble spirit” to be “superbly self-fashioning” and not beholden to anyone else’s imposed moral standards.66 All of these declarations by Nietzsche compose, of course, a profoundly moral narrative. Why is the “noble spirit” noble? Why is it good to be courageous, and who says so? Why is it bad to be inconsistent? Where did such moral values come from, and what right does Nietzsche have, by his own philosophy, to label one way of living noble or good and other ways bad?67 In short, he can’t stop doing what he tells everyone else to stop doing. Thus, Eagleton observes, Nietzsche’s “Man of the Future” has not abolished God at all. “Like the Almighty, he rests upon nothing but himself.” We see that there is no truly irreligious human being. Nietzsche is calling people to worship themselves, to grant the same faith and authority to themselves that they once put in God. Even Nietzsche believes. “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.”68 We have seen that the secular humanism Nietzsche despised lacks a good grounding for its moral values.69 However, the even greater dangers of Nietzsche’s antihumanism are a matter of historical record. Peter Watson details how Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.70”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws the lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“people come to faith in God through a mix of rational, personal, and relational reasons.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Secularism in the twentieth century has not proven it can give moral guidance to technology or the state. Many intuit faintly or strongly that we human beings and our loves and aspirations cannot be reduced to matter, chemistry, and genes.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“People believe in God not merely because they feel some emotional need, but because it makes sense of what they see and experience. Indeed, we have seen that many thoughtful people are drawn toward belief somewhat unwillingly. They embrace religion because they think it is more fully true to the facts of human existence than secularism is.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“People believe in God not merely because they feel some emotional need, but because it makes sense of what they see and experience.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“why was it that Jesus was able to get the Jewish people around him to believe he was God? How could he have overcome the unthinkability of that? Why did he succeed as the only person who ever claimed deity and also founded a major—indeed, the largest—movement and religious faith? The first answer is that his life must have been exquisitely beautiful. The greatness we get a glimpse of in the Gospels must have smitten those around him. It is extraordinarily difficult to claim to be perfect and divine and then to get the people who actually live with you to believe it. But Jesus did”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Western secularists insist that their view of human rights is simply obvious to any rational person, but non-Western cultures respond that they are “far from self-evident.”9 This leaves human-rights activists quite vulnerable to charges of imperialism. If human rights and equality exist “just because we say so,” then activists are not able to persuade, only to coerce. They can force cultures to adopt Western, individualistic ideas of rights and equality by using money, political power, or even military force. But, the charge goes, all this is just the latest stage in the West’s inveterate bent to domination and colonialism. Western nations are now doing what they’ve always done, but disingenuously now, under the banner of “human rights.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“To state that there is no God or that there is a God, then, necessarily entails faith. And so the declaration that science is the only arbiter of truth is not itself a scientific finding. It is a belief.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Theologian Philip Ryken quotes from a contemporary novel about a young single woman. She writes a New Year’s resolution: “Develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.” However, she sees a problem. “My sense of self comes not from other people but from . . . myself? That can’t be right.”24”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Christianity’s unsurpassed offers—a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“are not identical. A society could have a secular state even if there were very few secular people in the country. Another distinction is very common. Individuals could profess to not be secular people, to have religious faith. Yet, at the practical level, the existence of God may have no noticeable impact on their life decisions and conduct. This is because in a secular age even religious people tend to choose lovers and spouses, careers and friendships, and financial options with no higher goal than their own present-time personal happiness. Sacrificing personal peace and affluence for transcendent causes becomes”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“We are trapped in a world of death, a world for which we were not designed.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“We are not happy because we are frustrated. . . . We are frustrated because we are, first of all, unhappy combinations of conflicting desires. Civilization can, at best, reach a balance of discontents.”18”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World