Faith and Proof Q&A

Thank you for listening to this Q&A session of Questioning Christianity. We hope you'll continue exploring Christianity by requesting your free copy of Tim Keller's book Making Sense of God. Free copies will be shipped while supplies last. copy go to gospelandlife.com slash free again that's gospelandlife.com slash free well Tim I like the way that you ended things with that a statement that it's not about the quality of our faith, or the quality of one's faith, but the object of one's faith.

As someone very confident in the object of your faith as a Christian, someone is asking, Tim, do you ever have doubts about the validity of Christianity? Yeah, but here's the good thing is my doubts, they migrate. What I mean to say is it's not the same doubt year after year after year. It's like this. If you are going to hire somebody, you have three candidates, you use your reason to get to the place where you...

decide which of the three candidates is probably the best. You've read the references, you've interviewed. Are you 100% totally sure, without any doubt, that that person is going to be perfect for the job? And the answer is, no, you can't be. However, if it is the right person, in about three years or two years, you will know that that was really the right person. The job's never been done better.

if the person was even better than you thought, blah, blah, blah. So you use your reason to get to a place of maybe you say probability, but then it takes experience to get you to certainty. And so... What happens is when you first, I'm trying to get that across to you here, when you first, you might say, bite on Christianity, if you do bite on Christianity, no, you don't have to have this incredible internal psychological certainty. That was the purpose of my little talk there at the end.

It takes time for you to grow in your certainty about the things you can experience. And you know what you can experience? You can experience the presence of God. You can experience His forgiveness. You can experience His grace. You can experience the reality of Jesus. You can experience the reality of the Holy Spirit. So the things that you can actually not just infer from...

rationally, but you can also then commit and experience. Those things, no, I don't have any doubts about. But when you say, are there parts of the Christian faith? Yes, of course, because the Bible is a pretty long book. And there's lots and lots of teaching in it. And sometimes I say, is that true? I mean, there's two ways to doubt something. One is, maybe I don't understand it right. Maybe I don't get it. Maybe I'm not getting this right. The other possibility is...

you say, I don't like this. In fact, I wish it wasn't true. It doesn't feel credible to me. So the Christian faith, there's enough stuff in the Bible that there's going to be always things that you might wrestle with that are very difficult. Some of which you don't know, is it me? Is it, what is it? But I would say, you're talking about the core things. If you're asking me personally, the core things, the reality of Christ.

the reality of the resurrection, those things. No, there's not much doubt left, but it's because it's like, it's the way you wouldn't have that much doubt in the person if you hired the person, the person was, you were working with that person. Day in and day out and you just you just knew about their character. It's like that That makes sense To me Someone sent this in, and I'm going to have to abbreviate it just a little bit, but it resonates with me personally.

So if the Christian God really exists and is omnipotent, why would he set the world up in such a way that makes faith very difficult and then subsequently condemn skeptics and believers of other religions? Why doesn't he help us out, given the gravity of this matter, given that he supposedly loves us? Yeah. Well, now, first of all, I do think...

You could ask a bigger question than that, of course, which is, why doesn't God just end history right now, put everything right, get rid of all suffering, reveal himself to everybody? I don't know. And in some ways, that question is... That's a sub-question of that bigger question. Why doesn't God just set absolutely everything right? And please let me remind you of what Charles Taylor, I used this illustration tonight, what Charles Taylor said.

is modern people have a tendency to say, because I can't see how God could do that and still be just, or because I can't think of a good reason why God would let that happen, therefore there can't be any. He said ancient people would say, if you have a God big enough to be mad at...

because he's all-powerful and all-wise. If you have a God big enough to be mad at that he doesn't fix things, then you've got a God big enough to have some reasons why he doesn't fix things that you might not know. You can't have it both ways. If he's great enough for you to be mad at, he's great enough to know something you don't. And so I don't have a good answer to that question because from my limited human vantage point, some of that sounds unfair.

Nevertheless, I can kind of get there. I can kind of say, I'll just tell you two or three things. Salvation is through Jesus Christ, we Christians believe, because it's by grace. Other religions say if you're a good person, then you can go to heaven. And a lot of people tell me, well, why can't all good people go to heaven? Why is it only Christians?

One of the answers is, well, if only good people go to heaven, that leaves us bad people out. And I'm one of them. And I'm not exaggerating. And I'm being falsely modest. Jesus Christ says, if you believe in me, no matter who you are, you go to heaven. And so every single approach to salvation, pretty much, leaves somebody out.

Even those of you, by the way, I've had a lot of people who have said to me, oh, I believe everybody goes to heaven. I say, so Hitler, oh, well, you know. Basically, everybody wants somebody not to go to heaven and somebody to go to heaven. Because everybody has a sense of justice, and so does God. God's got to have the most finely tuned sense of justice of all. So as soon as you start talking about who goes to heaven and who's not, it's not fair. They don't get a chance. Look, at some point...

there's a cutoff. If there's an afterlife, and everybody understands, and there's justice, that means some people are in, some people are out, but we leave that up to God. Anyway, I'm just letting… The bigger question is, does He… Do we allow God to have some ability to be wise beyond what we can fathom? And I think the answer has to be yes, or else you're really not allowing...

for the very existence of God, which, of course, we already said tonight is a matter of faith. Okay. A lot of questions are coming in about the validity or reliability, I should say, the reliability of the Bible, since the Bible...

The Bible is where the Christian belief stems. So basically, to pare down a lot of the questions, can you prove the validity of the Bible? Yeah. Now, you're making me go... This is a series. And in fact, I suppose one of the things I wrestled with the most tonight was not going very far. In other words, tonight all I try to do is I say...

Please do not believe that you will never become a Christian unless somebody can prove that there is a God and prove that Christianity is true and prove that the Bible is true. I mean, my point here tonight was to say nobody can prove wherever you're standing, you're standing in a set of beliefs that you can't prove either. Now...

Therefore, if I can't utterly prove these things, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be considering what the Christian beliefs are, and you should be comparing them to your beliefs. In this case, with the Bible, though, if you're willing to come back, and eventually we get there, here's what I would tell you how I understand that. If you believe that the Gospels...

are historically reliable, and that they basically give you a picture of Jesus Christ and what he did. Now, how do you establish that? That takes historical work that I... just can't do right here, but I would say you can do that. You can ask historians, does the Bible have...

the earmarks of an eyewitness account? Does the Bible have the earmarks of a reliable history? I'm not asking you whether it's infallible or inerrant. I'm just saying, do you have evidence for that? I would say yes, and I could make that case. then once you have the Gospels as just a historically reliable account of the life of Jesus, then you've just got to figure out what you think about Jesus. At that point, you're not talking about the Bible anymore. You're talking about Jesus.

Let's just assume that Jesus did say most of what the Bible says he said. Let's just assume that Jesus did most of what the Bible says he did. There's plenty of evidence that he did. then you figure out who he was. And if you decide, nah, I don't know who he is, or he was just a nice teacher, then you don't have to worry about the rest of the Bible. But if you decide, wow, I don't know how to explain him.

I don't know how to explain his character, his claims. I don't know how to explain the accounts of the resurrection. If you decide, I think I do believe in Jesus, then the rest of the Bible comes along with that because Jesus trusted the Bible. He quoted every 10 things he says. He quotes the Bible. He bases his life on the Bible. So if you're going to ask me, how would you prove the reliability of the Bible? I would say I wouldn't. I would...

show you the historical reliability of the Gospels. I'd show you Jesus, and if you decide... you want to go with him, that you trust that and you believe in that, he's compelling to you, then that brings you back around to what's his view of the Bible. And that would be the order in which I'd go. Getting multiple questions about evolution.

I'm going to go with evolution. Okay. Doesn't the fact that love exists, that we can experience love, isn't our capacity for love itself because we have evolved under the theory of evolution? The secular understanding of love, is it just a chemical reaction in your brain that helped your ancestors survive? You don't believe that. You don't believe that's all love is. You believe it's more than that.

and yet that means you're taking a leap of faith in which you're, in a sense, contradicting your secular view of the world. Tom Stoppard, you know the famous playwright, he did... Rosencrantz and Gilder Stern are dead, and he wrote... Shakespeare in Love, won an Oscar for that. He's a great playwright. He just recently had a play here called The Hard Problem. It was playing at Lincoln Center and just closed at Christmas. I didn't get a chance to go see it, but I have read it.

And his whole point is that very thing. He says, if you're a secular person and you believe that you feel the reason... The evolutionary biologist says the reason love feels significant to you is it helps somebody, it helps your ancestors survive. And it's a way for you to pass on your genes. And that's the reason it feels that significant. Not that it is that significant. It's just chemistry.

In the play, Tom Stopper does a really good job of saying, every person who says that's all it is then turns around and doesn't live the way that's all it is. Always treats love as more significant than that, which shows you're doing a leap of faith. It also shows, I think, that there is an incongruency between what you believe about the universe and what you actually know deep in your heart.

That'd be one of my arguments against being a secular person and why you would say Christianity can account for why you feel love is that significant. If you're a Christian, then, you know, we were created by a triune God.

Christianity believes the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit have been loving each other for all eternity, and therefore love is the very heart of the universe, and that we were created out of love, and that's the reason why we feel love is so significant. So I would... I would just ask you to consider whether your idea that it's just a chemical reaction to help your ancestors survive and therefore is not obligatory on you at all.

You realize that? If that just helped my answers to survive, it might be practical for me, but it's not obligatory. Love is not obligatory in the secular viewpoint. Yet you feel it is. Why? Nietzsche would say because you're a hungover Christian and you don't know it. I would say because deep in your heart you know what the Bible tells you about the nature of things.

Tim, you made a claim that both secularism and the Christian faith are based on faith. But yet you said we can also... rationally interrogate our beliefs. Someone's saying that you mentioned the Christian side of beliefs is providing a list of things such as satisfaction, a way to deal with suffering, etc. that other belief sets may not provide. But isn't this even a more emotionally biased way to look at a set of beliefs? Yeah. Here, look at it this way. If I start to...

If I show you, for example, that Christianity... I get it. And by the way, I agree with the gist of this question. If I show you that Christianity gives you a better way of understanding love... A better way, a better basis for doing justice. A better foundation for a solid identity where you really, really do have a sense of self and worth.

You say, well, that doesn't prove Christianity is true. It just proves Christianity, all it proves is it would be great if it was true. And that's my first goal. See, why would you say... Do you remember what I said about background beliefs? I'll give you a couple of examples, maybe. Well, it's not exactly answering this question, so I better wait. I told you that we're not rational totally. We always have background beliefs.

And the background beliefs very often color the way in which we, or it affects the way in which we are looking at arguments. Sometimes two people... look at the same argument. One says it's compelling, one says it's not, and it's because the background beliefs are different. So, for example, if your background belief is that Christianity basically is bad for you,

It's bad for you. I've seen it be bad for people. It does this. It does that. It does this. It does that. Okay, so you come in here, and I make an argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Are you going to find that compelling or not? Probably not. Even though I think it would be wonderfully compelling because I'm making it and I think it's wonderful. But you may not. Why? Because your background belief is that, you know what, Christianity is really bad for you. But what if...

When you compare how Christianity gives you meaning, identity, a way of dealing with suffering, and you say, actually, I never thought about that. I had no idea. You know what? Christianity isn't so bad. I don't know if it's true, but it's actually pretty good. It's really pretty good. Wow. It would actually be great if it was true. Then and only then, I believe, once that background belief is taken away, the background belief that it's really bad for you.

Unless I get rid of that, I don't think you're going to be objective. You still may say, I see all of your arguments for why it's true and it's not compelling. Okay, this is what we're here for. We're here to talk and to question and to be respectful of each other. But I would say, unless I get rid of that background belief, which is really prevalent in places like New York City, I don't think you're going to be able to give a fair hearing to the more rational arguments.

So that's actually a great question because it's fair to say if that's what you're going to do for a while, that doesn't actually prove Christianity is true. No, but it puts you in a position where I think I'm... I'm peeling away some background beliefs that might create a bias.

First of all, thank you so much for all the questions. Tim, I think people really want to talk to you. People are sending really large paragraphs, and these are great, but a little hard to read as quickly as I'd like to. So if you would mind paring them down just to... a bit. Also, I know it's kind of echoey, and I want Tim to be able to understand what I'm saying. But thank you, and this is another reason to join us on the fifth floor afterward to talk more.

The next question, Tim, following up on what you're saying is you mentioned background beliefs. Is there any reliable way to discover what my background beliefs are? Okay. Just dialogue and talking. I would say that probably not on the Internet. I think face-to-face discussions. I mean, some of you know that the very way in which we structure this event and how you can come to it is trying to get friends, basically, to come together.

And we actually do think that most everybody I know who has made any kind of progress in faith matters.

usually happens in the context of relationships. So let me give you an example, though, of three background beliefs. These are probably not the kind of background beliefs you're thinking about, but some years ago there was a man who came to the Redeemer Church. and had given up Christianity. And when he came, he listened to the preaching. Back then, I was the preacher, the main preacher.

One day we had a long talk, and then we had a series of talks, and he realized that the preaching had stripped away some of his background beliefs. And here's three things that... He had grown up in the Christian church, and he realized he had picked up three beliefs that had, when he moved to New York, it completely, all those three beliefs basically...

made Christianity seem implausible. Here's why. The first belief he grew up with was, and he said, is that if you meet an atheist or an agnostic, a person who's not a Christian, that person will be really creepy. because secular people, atheist people, are really bad people.

So you see, he was raised in a very conservative environment. So the first belief he had was that secular people would be really creepy. The second thing is, if you ever have sex outside marriage, you're going to feel so bad and guilty and shameful. And the third belief he'd been taught or given was that if you're living a good Christian life, God wouldn't really let anything bad happen to you. Not really bad.

maybe a little bad, teach you a lesson, you know, you break your leg, and you miss the appointment, but then you get in the hospital, you meet a great nurse, and you marry her, and you live happily ever after. So the three background beliefs were non-Christian people are creepy. If you ever have sex outside of marriage, you'll feel horrible. And God will never let anything bad happen to you. He got to New York and all those background beliefs.

played havoc in his life. Because first of all, he met all kinds of non-Christians who were better people than the people he grew up with. Secondly, he did have sex outside of marriage, and it felt really good. And then number three, some really bad things happened to him that he said, I didn't think God would ever let something like that happen to a good Christian. And as a result, Christianity seemed like completely stupid. It just didn't make any sense to him.

And when he came here, he said the preaching showed him that those three beliefs are not part of Christianity at all. He had grown up. It was implicit in his Christian community he grew up in. those three beliefs. People talked about that. They taught that. They said that. When he got here, he realized that none, in fact, I think, by the way, I'll just let you know, since I was the preacher, that the Bible actually teaches directly against all three of those things.

It doesn't say, oh, if you have sex out of separate marriage, you'll necessarily feel bad. It doesn't say that bad things can't happen to really, really good people. Look at the book of Job. It doesn't say any of those things. And he said when those things got pulled away, he had to go back and look at Christianity again. Because when he got here and those three beliefs let him down.

It made all of Christianity look stupid. Once he realized that that wasn't part of Christianity and they weren't right, Christianity started looking good again. Now, I'm not telling... Well, by the way, if there's anybody... If the shoe fits, wear it right now. If there's any of those...

You'd be surprised how often people who come up from very conservative backgrounds bring these kinds of beliefs with them, thinking it's part of Christianity when it's not. And then what it does is it eats your faith out. To find out what those might be takes time. To find out what those things might be, reading, discussing with people. But of course, by the way, I want you to know that you can be a Christian and have your life very distorted.

by background beliefs that are not really Christian teachings at all. And so I would just say it happens in community and it happens in relationships, and those are so much more important than anything else.

Really love this question. I'm not a Christian, but I have no issue with believing in God. My whole life, I have felt that I have a strong faith in God. Why is this not sufficient? Why must I believe in Jesus to be a believer? Well, it depends on who Jesus is. When you say, why is it necessary?

If God sent Jesus to earth, think about this. In some ways, I love the question too, but it's actually the easiest question I was asked tonight. That's why I really love this question. Point is, if you believe in God, great. then you need to find out whether God sent Jesus, his son, to earth. If he did, then it is necessary to believe in him. If he's the son of God, it's necessary. If he's not the son of God, it's not.

Which means you just need to check it out. That's what we're here for, is to look at the evidence and look at the text and that sort of thing. That's all. That's the objective answer, which is... if I believe in God, why do I have to believe in Jesus? The answer is, if God sent Jesus and he really is the son of God, then of course you need to, it's necessary. Subjectively, I'll just say this, though I'm sure I'll get back to it in the future.

I can't just love God in the abstract. If you just tell me, love God, I can say, how do I do that? If I believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who emptied himself of his glory, that he was living this incredible life and he came down, became a human being, was rejected, was tortured, died on the cross for our sins. In other words, it takes a lot to believe that, but if you do believe that and you believe that he did that for you...

then it evokes a love, a sense of being loved and a love. And therefore, I have to say, subjectively, God in the abstract doesn't do a thing for me. God, being willing to involve himself in the suffering in this world, does. So subjectively, that's why I think it's important to believe in Jesus. Objectively, I think you just have to check out whether God actually sent him to earth as his son.

So based on that, since it's really all about Jesus, and you mentioned his life, his death, his resurrection, we actually got this question earlier before this evening, and it relates to this, so I'd love to ask it. I like how this person words it. This person says... Are you 95%, 99%, 99.99% or fully 100% convinced that Jesus was truly resurrected in a supernatural fashion as described in the Bible? And if 100%, why do you not allow for the risk that...

a risk that you made a mistake in your analysis? Well, no, that's great. That's a great question. You know, you do have to say... For example, can I prove that my wife is not a Russian spy in incredibly deep cover? Where are you? It's possible. I wondered. Occasionally. I didn't even see her there. Yeah, there she is. That's right. Yeah. Now, she is Croatian. So that's Eastern Europe.

The reality is, in any philosophy class, they're going to tell you, no, you can't be 100% sure that she's not a Russian spy in deep cover. You can't. But... Psychologically, emotionally, am I 100% sure she's not? Sure I am. Sure I am. Right? Okay. So, rationally, can I be 100% sure? No.

Emotionally, in every other way, at least the kind of certainty you need for life, can I be? Yeah, of course I can be. Same with Jesus. Sorry. When it comes to the resurrection, can you be 100% rationally sure? No. Of course not, because first of all, you can't be 100% absolutely sure of anything. Didn't you ever see The Matrix? How do you know that you're not in a vat somewhere with these things coming out of your back?

I mean, that's Ludwig Wittgenstein. Every philosopher worth his salt or her salt is going to show you that you can't be rationally sure of anything completely. And I want you to know I had thyroid cancer. 17 years ago. And during that time, the only time in the last 50 years that I actually was laid up without doing anything for about four weeks. And I read a big book on the resurrection by N.T. Wright.

called The Resurrection of the Son of God. It's the evidence of the resurrection, 900 pages or so. Best book on the resurrection done by a historian in the last 100 years. And I realized as I read it, my rational certainty was going up. It was so convincing and so compelling, and I saw evidence I'd never seen before, and probably my rational certainty was advancing by reading that book. But can it go to 100%? Of course it can't be.

For all intents and purposes, I can be every bit as sure that Jesus was raised from the dead as I can be that my wife is not a Russian spy in deep cover. Thank you so much, Tim. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have left for questions. Thank you so much to everyone who sent them in.

And before we end, Tim, can you give us a teaser about next week? It's about the subject of meaning. First week, the second week is going to be meaning in particular. how do you get a meaning that suffering can't take away? A meaning in life that suffering can't take away. If your meaning in life is your job, I can tell you right now, suffering can take that away. But how do you get one that enables you to face anything?

And that will be, we're beginning that series that I mentioned before in which we're comparing the way, for example, we will look at how Buddhism, Hinduism, secularism. Christianity, the various ways people give you handles for dealing with suffering. And we're going to compare them, and that'll be next week.

Thanks for listening to the Questioning Christianity podcast. And remember, you can find more content to help you explore the claims of Christianity by visiting gospelandlife.com slash explore. That's gospelandlife.com slash explore. The Questioning Christianity talks in this series were recorded in 2019 in New York City, where Dr. Keller spoke with a local live gathering made up of attendees who did not identify as Christian and their Christian friends who invited them.