People like me are like flies in the ointment of evangelical theology. We did all the things they told us to do, we gave our hearts and our lives entirely over to Jesus, yet in the end we still found their belief system lacking. It’s not supposed to happen that way. We must have done something wrong. Defenders of the Christian faith like Tim Keller acknowledge that the belief system they’re pushing has gaps in it—places where the external evidence comes… Read more
In the penultimate chapter of his Reason for God, Tim Keller attempts to pull together all the loose threads strewn about this apologetic work, weaving them together into a coherent vision for the world. He offers his belief system as a superior alternative to the one the rest of the world wants you to accept, as if the myriad belief systems around the globe could be boiled down to a single alternative, variously disguised. That’s an unsurprising assumption, I suppose, if… Read more
Maybe I spoke too soon. I previously said that Tim Keller was done trying to build a logical case for Christianity and had moved on to sermonizing, but the second-to-the-last chapter in his apologetics work The Reason for God presents his final shot at arguing for the legitimacy of the Christian faith. In Chapter 13, Keller rehashes the story of the resurrection of Jesus, arguing that it must have really happened, not so much because he has positive proof besides a… Read more
With only three more chapters to go in Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, it appears the pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan has abandoned the central thesis of the book. Perhaps we came to this with unrealistic expectations, but halfway through the book Keller confesses he believes everyone really knows there is a God, then he pivots hard into preaching for the remainder of the book as if his readers are already convinced. I have not tried to prove the… Read more
I remember once believing that my religion was unlike all other religions in the world. Christianity was special, possessing qualities that no other religion had, and for me that spoke to its authenticity. I can’t recall why I thought uniqueness automatically validates a belief system, but it was a core tenet of my faith that the deal you get with Jesus is better than what you could get from anybody else. It’s a deal so good, so intrinsically appealing, that… Read more
Two-thirds of the way through a book entitled The Reason for God, Tim Keller confesses he doesn’t intend to provide you with evidence that God exists. Why not? He says it’s because you already know that God exists…all of you, atheists included. He’s just trying to make you see that you already do. Then as if nothing more needs to be said on the matter, in a chapter entitled “The Problem of Sin” Keller shifts abruptly into preaching sermons for the remainder… Read more
Reformed pastor Tim Keller devotes Chapter 9 of The Reason for God to regurgitating the Argument from Morality, which essentially states that without a belief in a Supreme Being, there can be no basis for moral restraint among human beings. This argument typically takes one of two directions: Argument 1: People who don’t profess faith in a Supreme Being behave less morally than those who do, or Argument 2: Skeptics cannot elucidate satisfactory reasons for being moral without believing in a Supreme Being…. Read more
In my last post, we looked at four (bad) arguments for the existence of God presented by Tim Keller in Chapter 8 of The Reason for God. I call them the Argument from Inexplicability, the Argument from Fabricated Probabilities, the Argument from Wishing, and the Argument from Regularity. As I’ve often pointed out, not only are arguments like these untenably weak, but even if they weren’t they would still fail to establish which God we are discussing. Even if we decided… Read more
When I first picked up Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, I did not expect that out of fourteen chapters he would devote only one of them to offering arguments for the existence of God. I’m not sure what I expected, but after all the hype from my Christian friends and their pleading with me to read it for myself, it wasn’t that. A Very Brief Case Indeed Keller spends the first seven chapters responding to what he calls the most common objections to… Read more
“You can’t ride two horses with one a**, sugarbean.” —Earl Smooter, Sweet Home Alabama Halfway through his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller pauses for an intermission in which he pivots from his previous discussion of “the seven biggest objections…people in our culture have about the Christian faith” to lay the groundwork for part two of his book, presumably the part in which he finally gives us, at long last, his reasons for God. He promises they are coming, but… Read more
