Keller at Penn

March 12, 2008

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the opportunity to hear Tim Keller twice yesterday, first at Westminster Seminary in the morning, then at the University of Pennsylvania in the evening. The morning session was essentially an interview with Keller led by three faculty members from Westminster. The interview centered around the subject of apologetics. It was a bit tough to take notes, so I will focus my attention on Keller’s address last night at Penn.

The lecture was in support of Keller’s book, The Reason for God. Beforehand I wondered how in the world Keller would pack 270 pages of his book into a one-hour lecture, but I thought he did a wonderful job of unpacking the material, though it obviously was not as detailed as the book. He talked really fast, but here’s my best effort at a Tim Challies-like not-so-live blog on the address (thanks to Gino for some additional notes that I missed).

For many years it was predicted that secularism would rise up to the majority and make religious belief non-existent, but that is not what has happened. We do not live in a secular society. We live in a polarized society with a rise in both the secular and religious populations. Therefore, the most important thing needed to keep such a society from destroying itself is for the secularist to know what makes people believe, and the religious need to know/understand what makes people doubt. Only by this kind of willingness to understand one another can we keep our society in any kind of harmony.

The address will be structured around three main points: 1. How the Reasons for God Work. 2. What are the Reasons for God? 3. Where do the Reasons for God take us?

1. How the Reasons for God Work

In other words, everyone who believes or disbelieves in God does so because of three factors:

A. Intellectual reasons – ie. Compelling rational, logical arguments for or against the existence of God.

B. Personal experience interpreted – Perhaps a person was abused as a child and that experience has made them doubt the existence that God could exist.

C. Social – The people you need or admire most have beliefs that seem more plausible to you than people who you don’t need or admire. (see Peter Berger’s book: A Social Construction of Reality)

Belief or disbelief should never be reduced to one of these three. All three of these factors play a part in a person’s belief or unbelief. It is harmful to reduce the belief/unbelief of another person to just one of these factors (ie. ‘You only believe because you were socially conditioned to believe in God, but I have used my intellect and logic to arrive at the truth that there is no God.’) When this happens, it stifles meaningful interaction between those who differ in their beliefs.

2. What are the reasons for God?

This was the main portion of the lecture. When moving from unbelief to belief, Keller describes a ladder with three rungs. Your goal is to move people who disbelieve first onto the first rung, and then up from there.

A person is ‘standing on the first rung’ when they come to the point that they realize that it takes just as much faith to disbelieve in God as to believe. All arguments which seek to infallibly prove the non-existence of God inevitably fall flat. They cannot disprove God, and therefore there is a risk involved in disbelieving. It is a matter of faith. There are four big reasons why people do not believe:

A. Evil/suffering – If God is good and all-powerful, then the prevalence of pointless evil and suffering in the world shows that such a God does not exist.

Philosophically this argument does not work. How do you know the suffering is pointless? Just because you cannot imagine a good reason for the suffering, that does not mean that there cannot be a good reason for it. If God is big enough for you to be angry with Him for allowing suffering and evil, then He is big enough to have reasons for the suffering that you cannot understand. There is nothing in this argument that infallibly proves that God does not exist.

B. If God existed, then those who claim to follow Him wouldn’t be so evil. Christianity has produced crusades, Islam has produced global terrorism, etc.

But this argument also fails to prove the non-existence of God. The fruit of violence is grown in the soil of all worldviews. Even atheistic beliefs have produced great evil, and can lead to such dehumanization that evil is justified.

C. You cannot know that there is a God. You can’t be absolutely sure of it. Therefore you cannot say that any one religion is true.

However, this assumes that you know all truth that there is to be known. The example is given of the blind men and the elephant. Several blind men all encounter an elephant and grab onto different parts of it. They all have different thoughts on what the elephant is like, because they only have a part of it, but are blind to the rest. So it is with religions.

But Alvin Plantinga refutes this by stating that you would need to have a higher knowledge of the existence of the elephant to be able to disprove that each blind man’s view is incorrect. This would be an assumption that contradicts the claim being made. One cannot say, ‘You only see a part of the truth about God,’ unless you believe you can actually see the whole truth, which you just said no one can know.

D. I don’t have to disprove God; the burden is on you to prove it, and if you can’t, then God does not exist.

If God is transcendent and outside His creation, then it would make sense that you cannot find Him simply by looking in the creation, because He exists outside of it. Finding God is like Hamlet trying to find Shakespeare. The only way Hamlet could find Shakespeare is if he wrote himself into the play.

Besides that, this argument falls flat because your whole life is based on things you cannot empirically prove, such as moral convictions or even simple things like where you live or whether you are really a butterfly and not a person.

The sum of the matter is this: If you can’t disprove God and you live that way, you are taking a big risk. When you recognize that it takes as much faith to disbelieve as to believe, you are on rung number 1.

A person is on the second rung when they realize that it is a bigger leap of faith to disbelieve than it is to believe. For instance, the fine-tuning of the universe does not infallibly prove God’s existence, but it is a lot more plausible to believe that God created a world in which life could exist than to believe that the big bang caused hundreds of trillions of universes, and by random chance one happened to evolve that could sustain life. If a card-dealer drew himself 4 aces for 20 hands in a row, he could tell you that with the trillions of universes that exist, it is possible that this is the one universe in which he deals himself aces every time. But it’s a lot more plausible to believe that he is cheating!

Or another example is the universal longing and pleasure found in love. If there is no God, then the feeling of love is simply within us because of natural selection, and it is a complete illusion. If it is nothing more than a chemical reaction that has sustained humans, why is our longing for love so intense? Isn’t it more plausible to believe that a God of love made us in His image?

Or if there is no God, then why are human rights so important to societies? Do they just happen to be there (a huge leap of faith), or are they the result of the fact that a God of justice and goodness made the universe with certain absolute rights and wrongs?

If God exists, then all these things (and Keller said he could list 20 more such examples) make perfect sense. But if there is no God, then to believe in them are big leaps in the dark. If your premise (God does not exist) results in conclusions you don’t believe (love isn’t real, human rights aren’t natural, etc.), why not change your premise? So it takes more faith to disbelieve than it does to believe.

But even at this point, you have not arrived at a certain, air-tight defense of the existence of God. The best that reason can give you is a high probability, not certainty. This leads to the third rung of the ladder, and the third and final point of the lecture.

3. Where do the reasons for God take us?

The third rung is when you come to see that it takes personal commitment to arrive at certainty. Weak faith in a strong object is infinitely better than strong faith in a weak object.

If you fell off a cliff and saw a branch on your way down, you could have all the reasons in the world to believe it would hold you if you grabbed. You could have all the faith too, but if you don’t grab on to it (commit) you will fall. Conversely, if you have just a small amount of faith in the branch’s ability to hold you and you reach and grab out for it, you will be saved. The saving work is not based on your intellectual knowledge or your amount of faith, it is based on the strength of the branch.

In the Bible Jesus is called the Branch, because He is the rock solid object of our faith who will not break if we grab hold of Him for our salvation. Going back to the image of Hamlet and Shakespeare, what we find in Jesus is that God has ‘written Himself into the play.’ Every other religion says that God is detached and removed, but only Christianity says that God has written Himself into the story. He loved us so much, that He came in the person of Jesus to reveal Himself to His people. Christianity doesn’t give you a watertight argument, it gives you a watertight person, and that person is Jesus. Commitment to Him is what makes the existence of God certain to those who believe.

I am told that the video of this lecture may be online in the near future. If it is, I will be sure to post it. In summary, this was a wonderful evening, which stimulated my thought and strengthened my desire to be ready to give an account for the hope that is in me (1 Peter 3:15). I know this overview was lengthy, but it was profitable for me to think through it all again in detail.

After the lecture Gino and I had the privilege to speak with Dr. Keller for a couple of minutes, and express our appreciation for his ministry; not only in apologetics, but his emphasis on community and the centrality of the Gospel. As any reader of this blog knows, Keller has had a big impact on me in the last 6-9 months, an impact that I believe will endure for all my days in ministry. He seemed genuinely touched by our expression of thanks, and I left feeling gratitude to God for gifting His Church with men like Tim Keller.

Congratulations to anyone who made it this far in reading this post!

Posted by Larry | Filed Under Random Musings, Seeking Him 

Comments

6 Responses to “Keller at Penn”

  1. Mark Traphagen on March 12th, 2008 8:54 pm

    HI, Larry!

    This is Mark from Westminster Bookstore, organizer of yesterday’s Keller events. Glad they were a blessing to you, and thanks for your great summary of the Penn Museum address.

  2. Darryl's Blog on March 13th, 2008 6:20 am

    The Keller Tour…

    I didn’t make it to Philadelphia as I had hoped this week: my sister-in-law’s baby hasn’t arrived yet. Here’s a report of a Tim Keller event I’d hoped to attend. In case you missed it, Keller also spoke at Google……

  3. Larry on March 13th, 2008 10:55 am

    Darryl — Glad you were blessed by the recap; practically all of the content in Keller’s address can be found in The Reason for God.

    Mark — Thanks to you for coordinating these events! They were a great blessing to many I’m sure, and I appreciate you stopping by by the blog to comment!

    Larry

  4. Michele on March 14th, 2008 9:37 am

    Thanks for the summary Larry. I’m at work right now and I’m going to print it out and show it to a couple of people. I think those short answers are great for the questions they ask me and it’s easier to read a few paragraphs than the whole book for them I’m sure.

  5. disappointed....prefer Van Til on April 7th, 2008 7:40 pm

    Since I was a student of Van Til myself, and was an apologetics TA, while a student, I had to grasp and grapple with the so-called Van Tillian apologetical method. In reading Keller’s book 4 times, I didn’t really find any trace of that. I also find it extremely disap-pointing, that this present generation, is not able to ‘hear’ the fine-tuning, nor be able to tell the difference. Keller’s allusions, in fact, at least one chapter to Lewis, is a far deviation from the Van Tillian methodology, who was a founder of Westminster, and whose edifice, Mr. Keller gave his lecture in. I do believe, Dr. Van Til, would have sharply disagreed with Mr. Keller’s approach, which is objectified in his quotations, in which he carefully LEFT OUT any mention of Van Til. He quoted Lewis extensively, Plantinga, who are NOT in the Van Tillian direction, and therefore, I believe even though he is popular — so is the POPE. Should we follow his methdology? Van Til, disagreed with both Schaeffer — even though he was an effective evangelist. But, from a distinctly Reformed and scholarly perspective, we really cannot lump Keller’s present volume, with Van Til. There are major differences — and the proof of the pudding is he didn’t even mention him. That seems very strange indeed. Van Til used to speak of borrowed capital, and how the non-believer sits on his father’s lap –as a child, denying the father’s existence. Did Keller do the same thing — borrow from Van Til, yet never quoting him? Strange indeed!

  6. Larry on April 8th, 2008 6:49 am

    To the anonymous commenter above:

    Could you help me to understand what you exactly your difficulty with Keller’s book is? At first you said Keller has a methodology that Van Til would have disagreed with. Then at the end you said that he borrowed from Van Til but didn’t quote him. If you could clarify your concerns I would be appreciative.

    And also, why is the value of Keller’s reasoning judged by how much it accords with Van Til’s approach? I would imagine there are other ways that a person can reach out to non-believers without following Van Til?

    Thanks in advance for clarifying your comment, and helping me to better understand your concerns.

    Larry

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