The Reasons for Faith
Pathfinders, November 2013
Introduction: We’re looking at “The Reason for God” (2008) by Timothy Keller (1950- ). Keller laid
out common objections to Christianity in Part 1 of his book, which he titled “The Leap of Doubt”
(denying God is a faith assertion in itself, he argues). Now, we look at Part 2, “The Reasons for Faith.”
EIGHT: “The Clues of God.”
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“How can we believe in Christianity if we don’t even know whether God exists? Though there
cannot be irrefutable proof for the existence of God, many people have found strong clues for his
reality – divine fingerprints – in many places.”
(1) The Mysterious Bang. “Those of a more rational mind-set have always been fascinated by the
question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ This question has become even more
interesting to people in the wake of the Big Bang theory. There’s evidence that the universe is
expanding explosively and outwardly from a single point.”
“Everything we know in this world is ‘contingent,’ has a cause outside of itself. Therefore the
universe, which is just a huge pile of such contingent entities, would itself have to be dependent
on some cause outside of itself. Something had to make the Big Bang happen – but what? What
could that be but something outside of nature, a supernatural, noncontingent being that exists
from itself.”
(2) The Cosmic Welcome Mat.
“For organic life to exist, the fundamental regularities and constants of physics – the speed of
light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces – must all
have values that together fall into an extremely narrow range. The probability of this perfect
calibration happening by chance is so tiny as to be statistically negligible.”
Stephen Hawking: “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in
just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
(“This has been called the ‘Fine-Tuning Argument’ or the ‘Anthropic Principle,’ namely that the
universe was prepared for human beings.”)
(3) The Regularity of Nature.
“There is something about nature that is much more striking and inexplicable than its design. All
scientific, inductive reasoning is based on the assumption of the regularity (the ‘laws’) of nature,
that water will boil tomorrow under the identical conditions of today.”
But, “science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature, it can only take it on faith.”
“As a proof for the existence of God, the regularity of nature is escapable. You can always say,
‘We don’t know why things are as they are.’ As a clue for God, it is helpful.”
(4) The Clue of Beauty. “If there is no God,…(and) we are the product of accident natural forces,
then what we call ‘beauty’ is nothing but a neurological hardwired response to particular data.”
“(Composer Leonard) Bernstein and (Art Critic Arthur C.) Danto are testifying to the fact that
even though we as secular people believe that beauty and love are just biochemical responses, in
the presence of great art and beauty we inescapably feel that there is real meaning in life, there is
truth and justice that will never let us down, and love means everything.”
“(John Updike in his book ‘Pigeon Feathers’) seems to be saying that regardless of the beliefs of
our mind about the random meaninglessness of life, before the face of beauty we know better.”
“We want something that nothing in this world can fulfill. Isn’t that at least a clue that this
‘something’ that we want exists? This unfulfillable longing, then, qualifies as a deep, innate
human desire, and that makes it a major clue that God is there.”
The Objection: The Clue-Killer. “In our culture there is a very influential school of thought that
claims to have the answers to all of these so-called clues. This is the school of evolutionary
biology that claims everything about us can be explained as a function of natural selection.”
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The Reasons for Faith
Pathfinders, November 2013
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This is even true of religious feelings as well. Daniel Dennett in “Breaking the Spell,” writes: “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.”
“However, there are many who believe not only that the clue-killer argument has a fatal
contradiction in it, but that it actually points to another clue for God.” And that is:
“If we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust
them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties
only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything all?”
“It seems that evolutionary theorists have to do one of two things. They could backtrack and
admit that we can trust what our minds tell us about things, including God. If we find arguments
or clues to God’s existence that seem compelling to us, well, maybe he’s really there. Or else
they could go forward and admit that we can’t trust our minds about anything. What is not fair
is…applying the scalpel of their skepticism to what our minds tell us about God but not to what
our minds are telling us about evolutionary science itself.”
The Clue-Killer is Really a Clue.
“If there is no God, we should not trust our cognitive faculties at all. Oh, but we do, and that’s the
final clue. If we believe God exists, then our view of the universe gives us a basis for believing
that cognitive faculties work, since God could make us able to form true beliefs and knowledge.
If we believe in God, then the Big Bang is not mysterious, nor the fine-tuning of the universe, nor
the regularities of nature. All the things that we see make perfect sense. Also, if God exists our
intuitions about the meaningfulness of beauty and love are to be expected.”
NINE: “The Knowledge of God.”
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“The secular, young adults I have known have a very finely honed sense of right and wrong.
There are many things happening in the world that evoke their moral outrage. There is a problem
with their moral outlook, however.”
Keller calls that problem “Free-Floating Morality.” In other words: “People still have strong
moral convictions, but unlike people in other times and places, they don’t have any viable basis
for why they find some things to be evil and other things good. It’s almost like their moral
intuitions are free-floating in midair – far off the ground.”
Even so, “people will definitely go on holding to their beliefs in human dignity even when
conscience belief in God is gone. Why is this the case? I have a radical thesis. I think people in
our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know.”
The Concept of Moral Obligation. “It is common to hear people say, ‘No one should impose their
moral views on others, because everyone has the right to find truth inside him or herself.’ This
belief leaves the speaker open to a series of very uncomfortable questions. Aren’t there people in
the world who are doing things you believe are wrong – things that they should stop doing no
matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior? If you do (and
everyone does!), doesn’t that mean you do believe that there is some kind of moral standard that
people should abide by regardless of their individual convictions? This raises a question. Why is
it impossible (in practice) for anyone to be a consistent moral relativist even when they claim that
they are? The answer is that we all have a pervasive, powerful, and unavoidable belief not only in
moral values but also in moral obligation.”
“Though we have been taught that all moral values are relative to individuals and cultures, we
can’t live like that. In actual practice we inevitably treat some principals as absolute standards by
which we judge the behavior of those who don’t share our values. What gives us the right to do
that, if all moral beliefs are relative? Nothing gives us the right. Yet we can’t stop it.”
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The Reasons for Faith
Pathfinders, November 2013
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The Evolutionary Theory of Moral Obligation.
“A common answer today comes from…sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. This view
holds that altruistic people, those who act unselfishly and cooperatively, survived in greater
numbers than those who were selfish and cruel.”
One problem with this is: “For evolutionary purposes, however, the opposite response – hostility
to all people outside one’s group – should be just as widely considered moral and right behavior.”
And, altruism can bring reciprocal benefits, one to another. But what of instances where altruism
is practiced anonymously? Besides, “natural selection does not work on whole populations.”
“Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact
that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.”
The Problem of Moral Obligation.
We cannot be “consistent moral relativists.” The same is true of “cultural relativism.” One may
say in theory “This behavior is O.K. for its cultural setting.” But you will still go on to declare
wrong what you believe to be wrong (for instance, subjugation of women).
The Difficult Issue of Human Rights. “It is wrong to violate the equal dignity of other human
beings. But why should we believe that? On what does this dignity depend?”
Keller surveys the writings of Alan Dershowitz and Ronald Dworkin, saying “As Dworkin
concludes, if we want to defend individual rights, we must try to discover something beyond
utility that argues for these rights.”
“(Law Professor Michael J.) Perry’s new book, ‘Toward a Theory of Human rights,’ is very
significant. Perry concludes that though it is clear ‘there is religious ground for the morality of
human rights…It is far from clear that there is a non-religious ground, a secular ground, for
human rights.”
The Grand “Sez Who?”
“If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is ‘moral’ and another ‘immoral’
but only ‘I like this.’ If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral
feelings into law?...The fact is, says (Yale Law Professor Arthur) Leff, if there is no God, then all
moral statements are arbitrary, all moral valuations are subjective and internal, and there can be
no external moral standard by which a person’s feelings and values are judged.”
“Without God (Leff) can’t justify moral obligation, and yet he can’t not know it exists.”
The Argument for God from the Violence of Nature. “We inescapably believe it is wrong for
stronger human individuals or groups to kill weaker ones. If violence is totally natural why would
it be wrong for strong humans to trample weak ones? There is no basis for moral obligation
unless we argue that nature is in some part unnatural. We can’t know that nature is broken in
some way unless there is some supernatural standard of normalcy apart from nature by which we
can judge right and wrong. That means there would have to be heaven or God or some kind of
divine order outside of nature in order to make that judgment.”
“There is only one way out of this conundrum. We can pick up the Biblical account of things and
see if it explains our moral sense any better than a secular view. If the world was made by a God
of peace, justice, and love, then that is why we know that violence, oppression, and hate are
wrong. If the world is fall, broken, and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and
disorder we see.”
“If you believe human rights are a reality, then it makes much more sense that God exists than
that he does not.”
The Endless, Pointless Litigation of Existence.
“My goal has been to show you that you already know God is there. To some degree I have been
treating the nonexistence of God as an intellectual problem, but it is much more than that. It not
only makes all moral choices meaningless, but it makes all life meaningless too.”
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The Reasons for Faith
Pathfinders, November 2013
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“If the Cosmic Bench is truly empty, then ‘who sez’ that one choice is better than the others?...
Whether we are loving or cruel in the end would make no difference at all.”
“Once we realize this situation there are two options. One is that we simply refuse to think out
the implications of all this….The other option is to recognize that you do know there is a God.
You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning
in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity – all because you know God exists.”
Next Week: Ten: “The Problem of Sin” and Eleven: “Religion and the Gospel.”
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