In March of this year, Tim Keller visited Google’s headquarters to discuss his book, “The Reason for God“. After hearing this I went out last night and bought the book to get the full context of his work. This is no light and fluffy attempt to appear intellectual – this is a fair dinkum equal footing engagement of those that contest against belief in God. A very well reasoned discussion. Watch/Listen to the video as an introduction – but read the book for the full context of the conversation.
Some of my notes on the stand out points (to me!) of the talk are as follows:
The purpose of the talk was to discuss why reasons for God are important.
- It was once alleged as society became more technical that belief in God would diminish as being an immature element of development. In actuality, society has become more polarised as more technology has arisen. Africa, Korea & China all increased % of Christians as their access to technology increased.
- Both believers and unbelievers need to try and understand why people become Christians. The new breed of Atheists (Dawkins et. al.) say religion is bad and respect for religion is bad. Their advice is essentially that one section of society may say to another you cannot believe a certain way because it is wrong/irrational/etc.
- As a Christian you should deal with your doubts or else you cannot present a confident faith to others.
There are 3 Reasons why people either believe or don’t believe
- Intellectual Reasons, rational arguments
- Personal Reasons, tragedy, disappointments
some say because of this tradegy in my life I need God
others say because of this I refuse to believe in a God that would allow it to come to pass.
success might also be a driver to say you need or don’t need God
- Social/Culture Influence
“sociology of knowledge” = the people you find most plausible are the people you come to need or want to be liked by. If you move towards skepticism it’s because of friends or significant people that also promoted skepticism.
All three reasons contribute to our view of belief in God for both believers and non-believers. No-one formulates a belief on just one of three. e.g. the argument of “You’re only a Christian because you’re a Pastor”. I’m talking from a rational reasoned argument saying your culture influenced you – if you lived in Madagascar you wouldn’t be a Christian. However, the reverse is also true – if you lived in Madagascar you wouldn’t be a skeptical philosophical pluralist! So while culture/society may have an influence it is not an exclusive influence.
Tim posits that reasoning that ends with or progresses towards believing in God has three progressive key steps or rungs.
Rung 1 – It requires just as much faith for disbelief as belief.
all arguments fall over at some point. at some point, everyone accepts that you take a risk (ie step of faith) to believe or not believe in God.
Rung 2 – It requires more of a leap for disbelief than belief.
2 particular illustrations were used that are simpler to understand with belief in God than disbelief.
existence of universal fine tuning
existence of human rights – contradicts evolutionary theory
Rung 3 – You realise that whereas you can reason to a point of probability, it takes personal commitment to get to certainty.
In other words… you’ll never never know if you never never go.
Filed under: Apologetics, General | Tagged: agnostic, atheism, belief, god, reason, Tim Keller
“if you lived in Madagascar you wouldn’t be a Christian”
Nearly half of the Malagasy are Christians, which attests to the value you place on evidence.
Aside from that, explain how a believer can consider it reasonable to call Jesus (the Way, the Truth, and the Life) ‘good’, when he makes it perfectly clear that 55% of Malagasy are to be tortured for all eternity, for the modest transgression of not believing any of your nonsense?
no-one will be tortured for not believing me – I am not the one who determines anyone’s destination for eternity.
Why though, would a loving God force someone to spend eternity with him in heaven if they reject him and want nothing to do with him? That sounds far more capricious than a God who offers life through Christ to those that believe.
What you call a “modest transgression” is a decision to reject God and his heaven so surely a greater transgression would be to forcefully push someone into heaven who made a decision they wanted nothing to do with God.
“Rung 1 – It requires just as much faith for disbelief as belief.”
Nonsense. Disbelief is the absence of belief. It is the default position. It doesn’t take any faith whatsoever to say that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist. Nor does it take any faith to say there is no historical evidence that Jesus existed either, or that prayer never works.
“everyone accepts that you take a risk (ie step of faith) to believe or not believe in God”
Again, utter rubbish. Atheism is not even a belief, let alone faith.
“existence of universal fine tuning”
Do you guys never think of a new argument? Fine tuning is just teleology in drag, and it’s been utterly discredited. The universe is hardly fine-tuned for life.
“existence of human rights – contradicts evolutionary theory”
Rubbish. That we have the capacity for reason and compassion is not in dispute, and from there, human rights, contraception, the welfare state and many other human inventions that diverge from out evolutionary heritage are easy to understand. The evolution of these capacities is still not fully understood, but there are many excellent and highly plausible hypotheses. A single plausible naturalistic hypothesis is always enough to debunk infantile ‘god of the gaps’ arguments like this one.
“You realise that whereas you can reason to a point of probability, it takes personal commitment to get to certainty”
I realise no such thing. Absolute certainty is a red herring. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of epistemology can see that absolute certainty on the question of the existence of gods is unattainable for both theists and atheists. However, the arguments for existence are so incredibly poor and the evidence utterly non-existent. On this basis we can conclude that gods are as real as leprechauns, faeries and Thetans, and for all practical purposes we can be sure they don’t exist.
“I realise no such thing. Absolute certainty is a red herring. … for all practical purposes we can be sure they don’t exist.”
So you’re certain that Christians can’t be certain, but you can be?
“Compassion” is not compatible with a theory that purports survival of the fittest/strongest. Evolution says might is right and the weak will die out – so having compassion on the poor and under privileged contradicts this world-view.