Faith and Proof

Thanks for listening to this special podcast series, questioning Christianity. This short series is meant to address common questions people have about the claims of the Christian faith. In each podcast, Tim Keller addresses a variety of questions like, can there be moral absolutes? And how can you believe in something you can't prove?

We encourage you to share this podcast with others and discuss the topics addressed with friends. And for more content about exploring Christianity, visit gospelandlife.com slash explore. I'm going to introduce to you our speaker, Dr. Timothy Keller. Dr. Timothy Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania.

In 1989, he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan with his wife Kathy and their three sons. He's the author of multiple books, but is best known for his New York Times bestseller, The Reason for God and Making Sense of God. and Making Sense of God, from which the series is based. A fun trivia fact about Tim tonight is that he's actually a very musical person, and he has largely memorized the musical Music Man from Broadway. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Timothy.

I memorized some of the Music Man a long time ago, so who told her that?

um hi questioning christianity um why are we here we're here one reason we're here because we live in a polarized society We're polarized about so many things, including religion. And it would be great, wouldn't it, if we just could find a place where we could talk with each other about religion without yelling at each other.

Now, that would be, I think, a contribution. Now, there's a lot of ways to do that. There are more than one way. The way we're going to do it during this series is just this. seeking to be as respectful as possible to all points of view, I still am going to, each week, try to present a thesis, a part of...

Christianity for, I'm going to recommend it to you to say, I think this is something worthy of your consideration. This is something worthy of you to believe. And there's going to be a presentation.

then there's going to be plenty of time for questioning my presentation. Now, this first session, to some degree, I've got to set the table. I've got to do groundwork. And because you can't talk about... Whether you can believe in God or not believe in God, whether you can believe in Christianity or not believe in Christianity, there's no way to do that unless you first go back far enough and say, well, how do you decide what to believe in any situation? How do you believe in anything?

How do faith and reason relate? Or the subtitle, can you believe in things that you can't prove? How can you believe in things that you can't prove? So we've got to get all the way in the back and ask ourselves the question, how does faith and reason work? And the way I like to do that tonight is I like to pose a problem for you. I like to show you a problem, give you a couple of theories.

that don't work as solutions. And then I'm going to give you what I do think works as a solution and a way forward. So we're setting the table for all the other talks. Problem, solutions that don't work.

a solution I think that does, and a way forward. Now, here's the problem. And because you probably have your own list, I'm going to give you a list of very smart people that I know of who... looked at the evidence and the arguments, and converted to Christianity, and a whole lot of people who are just as smart, who looked at the same evidence, the same arguments, and they left Christianity.

became atheists or agnostics. Tonight when I use the word secular, I'll probably mean certainly an atheist is secular, certainly an agnostic is secular. A lot of secular people say, I really don't know. Or then there's the indifferent person who says, I don't know if there's a God and I don't care.

It's completely irrelevant to me. So there's a lot of brilliant people who have looked at the evidence and have converted to Christianity from being secular or converted to being secular from being a Christian. I'll give you a couple of my own. You have your own list. Elizabeth Anscombe.

who taught philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge in the middle of the 20th century and was probably the most prominent female philosopher in history. And a lot of you are saying, I never heard of her. That's telling, isn't it? But there's another lecture right there. Why have you not heard of her? She's brilliant, brilliant, greatest female philosopher ever. She converted to Christianity. Francis Collins.

who led the Human Genome Project as one of the leading scientists in the whole world, is the head of the NIH. He was an atheist and converted to Christianity. T.S. Eliot, you've probably heard of him. Very, very famous playwright, poet, man of letters, who was an atheist or an agnostic and then converted to Christianity. On the other side, there's some people you know and some you don't, people I know, Mark Lilla.

who teaches humanities at Columbia University. Brilliant man. I've been in a couple of forums with him. He's written some great books recently. Mark Lilla had a very strong religious background, and yet he grew up, and after becoming an adult, he looked at it and said no and became a secular man.

Richard Dawkins, very famous guy, who was raised an Anglican and somewhere in his late teens said, this is ridiculous, and he became an atheist. And Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell was a very famous 20th century British philosopher who was an atheist. And near the end of his life, somebody asked him, he said, Mr. Russell, Dr. Russell, what happens if you die and you find out you're wrong and you stand before God in his judgment seat? What are you going to do?

And Bertrand Russell didn't miss a beat. He said, I'm going to say, don't blame me, God. There wasn't enough evidence. In fact, he said, I'll say to him, there was not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence. So, you know. You should not blame me for anything. But here's the funny thing about this. T.S. Eliot, Francis Collins, who, by the way, is a scientist, Elizabeth Anscombe, who's a brilliant, brilliant analytic philosopher.

They thought there was enough evidence. They thought there was plenty of evidence. So here you have equally brilliant people looking at the same stuff. One group saying, no way, no way. No evidence at all. No proof, no evidence. No reason to believe in God. Another group saying, yes, there is plenty of it. How do you account for that, class? Don't raise your hands. Let me suggest two theories.

of how to explain that, that I don't think work. The first one I'm going to be really quick about with this theory because even though I know people who believe this, and I've met people who believe this, they're almost... It's very unlikely any of you in this room would be in this category. But there are some people who say...

that the reason why this group of people believe and this group of people don't believe is because the secular people are simply closing their eyes to the evidence. In other words, The people who believe in God are rational. And the people who refuse to look at the evidence and become atheists and secular people, they're being irrational and biased. This approach says this. This group says, look.

The proofs for God, the cosmological, teleological, ontological, moral, the proofs of God, they're really strong. And we're going to get to those sometime in the series later. And the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is very, very strong. And therefore, any rational person who is objective and open-minded...

We'll simply say, there's every reason to believe in God. And if you don't, it's because you have some bias and you're just closing your eyes to the facts. Now, maybe the reason I'm being so... quick on this. I'm not going to spend much time on it. I don't think that works for a couple of reasons. I'm not going to take much time on it because, again, I don't think any of those people live in New York City. Hardly.

And here's a couple reasons why. By the way, there is such a thing as bias. Secular people can and do have their biases against belief. The Book of Romans actually talks about them, and I'm going to get to that a little later. But having said that, spending decades and decades with people who wrestled with...

whether to believe in Christianity or not, and wrestled with the arguments and wrestled with the evidence and all that. I've spent decades with people, and here's one of the things I know. There is no, even the strongest, put it this way, Even the strongest logical arguments for God and for Christianity, always, they're never completely airtight. They're never completely airtight.

There may be one argument that's kind of airtight, but all it does is take you to believe in Aristotle's unmoved mover. It doesn't take you to the God of the Bible. The reality is that there are good arguments. I'm going to give them to you if you're willing to. be here tonight and to come back later. But when it comes to saying every rational person has to accept the evidence for religion and Christianity because

Frankly, all the arguments are completely airtight. That's not true. There's always wiggle room. There's always room for doubt. Always. And the reality is that so many people I've seen who just cannot believe are people of real intellectual integrity. So it's really not fair to say, oh, they're just being biased. Besides that, I'm a Christian, which means I believe that God wants...

Faith. And however you define faith, it's more than just reason. In other words, to say, well, anyone who's open to the evidence would be compelled, every rational person over the evidence would be compelled to believe. Well, all I know is that that doesn't leave room for faith. God has set things up, this is the Christian view, so that you can exercise faith, which means...

Whatever that is, it's somewhat beyond reason. Reason is not enough to make you a Christian or a believer. It never has been. And so it's really wrong to simply say, well, religious people, they... They're being rational and the secular people are being irrational. And that's the reason why Richard Dawkins and those people and Bertrand Russell, they just close their eyes to the truth. No, these are people of intellectual integrity.

And we have to realize there's a limit to just how even the strongest logical arguments for God. But theory two.

The second theory, which is dominant in a place like New York City, and that's how we're going to spend some time on it. The second theory says this, that secular people are secular because of reason, but religious people are religious because of faith. Secular people have reason, but religious people have faith, and they have an emotional need to believe. Secular people are just being unbiased. They're just simply looking at things with a clear...

the eye of reason. But anyone who becomes a believer has some emotional need. We're not saying that T.S. Eliot and Francis Collins and... and Elizabeth Anscombe aren't smart people, but they must have had some need, because if you just look at things objectively, you'll be secular. So that idea is, this theory is, secular people have reason, but religious people have faith.

And I'm here to tell you that's not true. Charles Taylor, in his landmark book, A Secular Age, calls that a subtraction theory. Now, what do I mean by the subtraction theory? I'll bring this up just so I know. Charles Taylor says that most secular people tell a subtraction story. What they mean is they say, I used to believe in God, but then I just took away

belief in God and the supernatural. I subtracted it out, and now I just see things the way they are, with a clear eye of reason. I found this... You might say a testimony on the internet, a guy who had been a Christian and he lost his faith. And his name is, doesn't matter, I mean, his name is S.A. Joyce. But here's what he said. He was looking at the evidence.

And he said, the question entered my mind, what is a God for whom there is no real evidence? Non-existent, came the obvious answer. And at that point, the blinders of dogma and the yoke of dread were finally taken off. For the first time, the universe now shone in a wholesome new light, the comforting glow of reality no longer distorted. I was free. Now, Charles Taylor calls that a subtraction story, which is to say...

I was a believer, and I just took out God and the supernatural, and I just used my reason. I got rid of faith and emotion. And I just am looking at it objectively. And when I see that, now I can finally see things clearly. And in fact, what they would say is, finally, I'm... able to see life as it is. Now, how do they explain, say, Francis Collins and Elizabeth Anscombe and T.S.L.? What they say is, well, look, the reality is there's lots of reasons why you might want God to be there.

Like you want to believe that when you die, it's not the end. You want to believe that when you die, you could be with your loved ones. There's all kinds of reasons, emotional reasons, that you don't really want to see life as it is. But if you are just willing to get rid of emotion and get rid of dogma and get rid of all those things and just look at the world through the clear eye of reason, without any faith or belief, just objectively, then you'll become a secular person.

Interestingly, Charles Taylor's massive book, A Secular Age, and Charles Taylor was a Canadian philosopher, French Canadian philosopher. He devotes the entire book almost to showing that that's not true. And here's what his thesis is. And here's my thesis tonight. And this is the thesis I want you to push back on. And I happen to know it's a thesis that's very unpopular in New York. Okay.

The thesis is this. If you're a secular person, secularism is not the absence of belief. It's a new set of beliefs, which are just as unprovable as other religious beliefs. Let me say it again. If you're a secular person, secularism is not the absence of belief. It's not just rational objectivity. It's not the absence of beliefs. It's the presence.

of a whole new set of beliefs, which also are not provable either. And therefore, secular people and Christian people equally have to justify their beliefs. But one does not have the higher moral ground. Secular people can not say, well, we're rational, and if you religious people can prove God, then we'll believe it. We're rational, and if you give us the evidence, then we'll believe it. No, no, you're on the same playing field because it's two sets of beliefs.

neither of which are provable, both of which need to be justified. Does that make sense? I know it's very unpopular, so let me follow along with what Charles Taylor says to make his case. Ready?

Charles Taylor says the subtraction story doesn't work. The idea that secular people don't have faith, but they're just being reasonable and objective. The first reason it doesn't work is because you can't disprove the existence of God. And because you can't disprove the existence of God, that means if you're living as if there is no God, you're doing it on faith. You have faith that there is no God. You're betting your life that there is no God. And therefore...

If you're a secular person, you are living by faith. See, I've talked to many secular people who say this. I don't believe in the abominable snowman unless you can give me evidence for it. So why should I believe in God unless you give me evidence for it? Now, when you say that, you're making a category mistake. It's a category mistake because God, no religion. I'm not talking about just Christianity here. No religion.

actually believes that God is an object inside the universe like the abominable snowman. Here's a better way to understand what religion is saying. All the religions of the world say this material world...

cannot exist on its own. Matter could not just happen. Matter cannot just keep itself maintained. That there must be something, some immaterial... being some supernatural reality that generated matter and that upholds matter okay secular people say no no no matter generated itself it just it caused itself and it can support itself.

So the religions of the world say matter cannot generate or maintain itself. And secular people say, well, yes, it can. There's nothing but matter. There is no transcendent reality. Now, how are you going to prove one of those views? What experiment, what scientific test could you use to even test the secular thesis that matter generated itself?

and doesn't need any undergirding reality behind it. How do you test for that? You can't. When a secular person says, well, we don't know where matter came from, it just came. Okay, how do you test for that? You can't test for that. Thank you for listening to Questioning Christianity. If you're exploring the claims of Christianity, we would like to send you a free book, Making Sense of God by New York Times bestselling author Tim Keller.

Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it's easy to wonder, why would anyone believe in Christianity? As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. In this book, Dr. Keller demonstrates how Christianity provides modern people with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs.

To request your free copy, go to gospelinlife.com slash free. Free copies will be shipped while supplies last. Again, that's gospelinlife.com slash free. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of his talk. Blaise Pascal's famous wager, maybe you've heard of it. He basically says, you cannot prove that there is a God, but you cannot prove that there is no God. It's impossible to prove something like that.

And therefore whoever you are, you're basing your life and betting your life on an act of faith that either there is or there isn't a God. So secular people actually have a view of the material world and reality that can't be proven.

And therefore, it's based on faith. That's the first thing Charles Taylor says. Here's the second thing he says. Now, the second reason the subtraction story doesn't work is because there are as many emotional reasons to disbelieve in God as there is to believe in God. And therefore, that's a wash.

I'm a believer, and I've got plenty of emotional reasons I might want to believe in God, and it might cloud my rational faculties. But if you are here tonight and you're not a believer, there is plenty of emotional reasons. that you might have to not believe in God. And that can also cloud your rational faculties. Thomas Nagel, for many years taught philosophy at NYU, very famous.

a philosophy professor down there, he wrote a book some years ago. He's an atheist, and here's what he said. He said, I want atheism to be true. And I am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally, I hope that I'm right. It's that I hope there is no God.

I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem that I have is not rare. Isn't that interesting he called that a cosmic authority problem? My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life.

This is a ridiculous situation. It is just as irrational to be influenced in one's belief by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist. You may have heard of Aldous Huxley, who was a famous atheist, British. uh writer and he wrote this he said the philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with the problem of pure metaphysics

He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he should not live the way he wants to live. I must admit for myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. I objected to the morality because it interfered with my sexual freedom. And Tom Nagle adds a footnote.

He says, I'm curious whether there's anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there's a God or not. Anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn't particularly want either one of those answers to be correct. See, what I'm trying to say is simply this.

There's lots of emotional reasons why you might not want to believe in God. Because as Aldous Huxley said and Tom Nagel said, that means I can't live any way I want. But there's also plenty of emotional reasons why I do want. You might want to believe in God. And therefore, just realize wherever you are, whoever you are, you do have some biases.

You do have some needs that might cloud your rational faculties. It's not going to be easy, therefore, to think about this in a good way, in a clear-minded way. But you mustn't say all the emotional needs are on that side.

Believers should never say, oh, secular people, they just don't want to believe in God because they want to live any way they want. And secular people must not say, oh, religious people, they want to believe in God so that they can know they can go to heaven when they die. Well, the answer is yeah. They're both true. And therefore, it's a wash. In other words, this argument does not...

cut either way. But it certainly does not mean that secular people can just say, oh, there's absolutely no reason why, you know, I'm being totally objective. You hear what Tom Nagel said at the end? He said, I doubt very much there's anybody who comes. to the question about God in an objective, unbiased way. I don't believe anybody does. But here's the main reason why Charles Taylor says,

secular people have got to admit that their secularism is really a new belief set, a new set of beliefs, not the absence of belief, is because they have beliefs about rationality and morality. Secular people have beliefs about rationality and morality that are unprovable, and yet they're the very basis of their lives. What do I mean by that? Well, what does he mean by that? I'm still following Taylor. So Taylor says, for example...

Whenever somebody says, I'm just being rational, if you could prove Christianity to me or if you could prove God to me, then I believe. And Charles Taylor, who's smarter than you and me and anybody in this room, and who's a philosopher, says, would you please define proof?

He says, you know there's at least four, you can look this up even online, go to Wikipedia. If you put in the word rationality, you'll see there's at least four or five different working definitions of rationality, each one thinking the other ones aren't rational. And outside of math, when you talk about proof, there's proof in mathematics. That's one thing. But proof in law, proof in philosophy, proof in science.

Nobody agrees on exactly what proof means. And here's the weird thing. You cannot advocate for a particular view of proof without using. that view of proof, which is the thing you're supposed to be establishing, which means reason is always based on antecedent faith. Let me go on a little further. Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, and Michael Polanyi, who was a scientist, both wrote about what they called tacit beliefs. They said, anyone who ever thinks they're being objective never is.

Anyone who ever thinks they're being completely rational never is, because we have background beliefs that are, they call it, well, Michael Pollan, you call them tacit beliefs. They're background beliefs, which are... virtually unconscious, but which actually affect whether we consider certain arguments convincing or not. So let me give you a perfect example of this.

Charles Taylor, in his book, asks an interesting question. He says, why is it that before 1500? 1500 A.D., the year 1500. Before 1500, people suffered. They've probably suffered worse than we suffer today. But nobody said that that meant there couldn't be a God. Nobody. But since the year 1500, increasingly people say, because of evil and suffering, there can't be a God.

So, you know, it's called the argument from evil, and the argument, technically it's called the atheological argument from evil, which is because of the evil and suffering of the world, God can't exist. Because if he was good and all-powerful, he would stop it. That's the argument. And we're not going to talk about that tonight. We're going to talk about it later if you're willing to come back.

Charles Teller says, why is it that in the past that argument was totally unconvincing to people, and why is it today it's very convincing to many people? And the answer is, he says, background beliefs. that you're barely aware of he said ancient people background belief was that if there is a god of course i wouldn't understand him

If there is a God, of course my reason, my human reason would be incapable of plumbing the depths of him. But modern people are very, very confident that human reason can figure out the universe. Very confident. And therefore modern people say, if I can't think of a good reason why God would allow this evil and suffering, there can't be any good reason. Got that? Ancient people would never have thought about that.

So why is it that modern people find that argument very compelling? Ancient people didn't find it compelling at all. It's the background beliefs that we're not even sure of. We don't even see them. It's the background beliefs. And so Michael Polanyi and Martin Heidegger say, nobody comes to the evidence. This is, by the way, one of the reasons why Collins over here and Dawkins over here, both great scientists, would look at the same evidence and say, yes.

God exists, and one says, no, God doesn't exist, because neither of them are completely objective. There's background beliefs about human nature. about the nature of human reason, about all kinds of things Heidegger and Polanyi say that are actually affecting the way in which you read. I'll give you a couple more of those in a minute. But so you see the main point, first point, Charles Taylor says, if you say, I'm being rational.

You're defining reason. You're defining proof. You've got all kinds of background beliefs. And the fact is that all reason, whenever you're rational, whenever you're using your reason, your reason is always... grounded on antecedent faith, beliefs about the nature of proof, about the nature of reality, and background beliefs that you're barely aware of. And so one reason why secular people actually are...

based on faith is because they have faith in a particular view of rationality. But secondly, and this is maybe the one I'm going to, probably the one that will hit home the most. Charles Taylor says, secular people still have morals. Secular people in particular have two moral values. He says it's equal human rights and universal benevolence. Now when Taylor talks about equal human rights, you know what I'm talking about. The idea that every human being is equal.

in value and dignity, and has rights. That's one moral belief that secular people have. And the second moral belief is universal benevolence. That is, I shouldn't just take care of the poor people in my neighborhood or my family or my race or my community. I really should be concerned about poor.

the poor and the needy everywhere, every place. I should be talking, I should be caring about all of them. So the belief in the moral obligation of honoring equal human rights and the moral obligation... of universal benevolence. He says now, Charles Taylor says, okay, those are moral beliefs. Secular people have them. Prove it. Give me a scientific proof that all human beings are equal.

Give me a scientific proof that everybody's got equal rights. Do it. And the answer is you can't. Because those moral values, all moral values, if you've got them, are always matters of faith.

There's no scientific way to prove them. But, and here's where I'm going to push it a little bit. For a Christian to believe in human rights, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Taylor, And John Gray, who is a philosopher who's still writing right now, and he just recently wrote a book called Seven Types of Atheism, according to Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Taylor and John Gray, who is an atheist, by the way.

What they all say is that the idea of human rights and the idea of universal benevolence makes sense. It's a logical inference if you believe there's a God who created the universe. who made all human beings in his image, and who commands you to love as he loves. So if you have a God of love who creates everyone and puts his image on everyone, then to believe in universal...

benevolence, and equal human rights for all is actually not a matter of faith. You might have faith to believe in that God, but once you believe in that God, it's a logical inference. Human rights and universal benevolence. But... Here's what Nietzsche says. Nietzsche says, what if there is no God, which is what he believes? And what if the universe is impersonal? And what if we're not here for any purpose? And what if the only way you got here was through...

Evolution, which is the strong eating the weak, which is the way of nature. It is absolutely natural for the strong to devour the weak. That's how we got here. That's called evolution. And Friedrich Nietzsche says, if you still want to believe in equal human rights, and you should take care of the poor and the needy, which of course is the exact opposite of the way you got here, which is evolution. Totally opposite.

If you still want to believe in that, that's fine, but it's an amazing leap of faith. And by the way, Nietzsche says it's not fine. Because Nietzsche says, if you believe in equal human rights, and you believe in universal benevolence, and you say, I don't believe in God, you're still believing in Christianity, whether you like to believe it or not. Because he says,

He says, those values made sense in a universe in which you had a personal God of love who made everyone. They don't make sense in our universe at all. If you want to believe in them, okay, but it's a massive leap of faith. A bigger leap than Christians are making. So, for example, John Gray says this about Nietzsche. He says, with few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals.

Awkwardly, Nietzsche points out that all liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and he rejected those values for that very reason. What Nietzsche recognizes is that you can be rid of God only if you also do away with all innate moral meaning. Civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to all those values.

that came from the belief in divinity and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. So, you see what's going on? So, for example, a guy named Andrew Koppelman. He's a professor of law and political science at Northwestern University. And he's a secular man, an agnostic he calls himself. He reviewed Charles Taylor's book. the secular age. And he really felt the power of this whole point, the subtraction story. And he really felt the power of the argument that said,

If you're a secular person and you believe in human rights and you believe in universal benevolence, that sort of thing, you really don't have any basis on it. It's a complete leap of faith into the dark. And this is what he says. He says, I'm not prepared to argue. as other secular people do, that there is no transcendent basis for my commitment to human rights, and that my commitment to human rights is a purely contingent historical formation. And therefore, I have to admit...

There's a permanent gap in my belief system. He goes on and he tries to say what he means by secular people who say that human rights is a purely historical information. What they mean is... That they say, yeah, today we think slavery was wrong because now it's the majority opinion. But in the past it wasn't wrong. And in the future it might not be wrong again. Because there are no moral absolutes, there can't be. What could be...

What could be wrong with nature? Nature is strong, eat the weak. What could be wrong with nature? Unless you have a supernatural transcendent basis by which you can judge some things in nature are right and some things in nature are wrong, but there can't be such a thing.

So this guy is saying, well, I don't believe in God, but I still believe what? He says, I actually believe slavery always was wrong and always will be wrong, no matter what the people say. And so this is his final statement. Quote, he says, modern secularism then. is a religious worldview with its own narrative of testing and redemption, and it shares the vulnerabilities of such views. And there's another guy who's not a faculty member. He's just a guy I found on the Internet.

who also reviewed Charles Taylor's book. The reason I was interested in it is a young man, his first name is David, I'll just call him David, who... Grew up in a very, very, very fundamentalist conservative background. Went to a very conservative fundamentalist college and moved to New York City probably 15, 20 years ago, I think now, and lost his faith. and he's now a secular person.

And then he read Charles Taylor's Secular Age, which said, you're not objective. What you've done is you have left aside one set of unprovable beliefs, and you have just adopted another set of unprovable beliefs. And this is what he says. Really, really interesting. he says when i began to lose my faith a lot of my christian friends told me i was just trying to be cool at the time i told them that my loss of faith was strictly the result of

Good, solid, intellectual arguments. All, by the way, capitalized. Good, capital G, solid, capital S, intellectual arguments. In other words, he basically said, it's all a matter, I've just looked at the reasons, I looked at the evidence, it's all rational, I'm just being objective. In other words, he told them a subtraction story. But this is what he said after reading Charles Taylor.

He said, I now must concede that rational arguments, though it played a role in the change, was my coming to secular beliefs was not a new moral... Yeah, pardon me. He says, okay. He says, what actually happened to me was not me coming out of the cave into the daylight, but it was a matter of a new, more or less, equally faith-based story eclipsing the old one. What happened here, he said, was that...

There are as many value judgments in liberal humanism as there are in its parent religion, in other words, Christianity. And many people who come to the point of unbelief are happy to accept them despite objecting to what they consider the similar ungroundedness of Christianity.

It's amusing now how little my values intrinsically had to do with materialism I've been convinced of. Nothing about individual liberty, human rights, or civilizational progress follows from the fact that I now believe God is not me. It does not exist. So what he's saying is, I used to say the reason I became a secular person was because I was just being rational. Actually, I know that my belief in human value, my belief in human rights...

actually does not follow from my belief that God doesn't exist. There was Alexander Solovyov. He was a Russian philosopher. And he says this in a nutshell, trying to say what Nietzsche's saying. He says, man descended from apes by a process of the strong eating the weak. Therefore, let us love one another.

And what he was trying to do is summarize what Nietzsche was saying. He was saying, I'm sorry, the idea of love and of human rights does not follow from the idea that there is no God. And therefore, if you want to believe... in human rights go ahead but realize that's faith it's faith so what's the solution now i'm telling you

that the reason why you get smart people who look at the evidence and come out in different places is because the process of losing your faith or gaining your faith is more complicated than anybody wants to admit. It's not just a matter of looking at arguments and evidence. Number one, you've gotta look at your own background beliefs. You've gotta try to discern your own background beliefs.

And number two, you have to realize wherever you stand at that moment, you're not being objective. You've got your own set of commitments and beliefs. And therefore, the way forward is to compare beliefs. When I've given this talk before, usually people say, wait a minute. So you're saying we're all kind of religious. We all are filled with faith. Yes.

I'm saying that secularism is a set of beliefs that are not provable scientifically and logically, they're not self-evident to everyone, and they have their own contradictions and problems. So some people say, well, that means that we're all sort of stuck. In our little bubbles of faith. I can't prove my beliefs to you. You can't prove your beliefs to me. So we're stuck. No, no, not really. Because you can rationally interrogate your set of beliefs. You can at least do these five things.

you can at least do these five things. Number one, you can ask if your beliefs are consistent with one another or whether your beliefs contradict each other. Number two, you can ask whether your human experience fits your beliefs. Are you actually able to live your faith out? Or do you find that your faith is constantly bumping up against...

The reality of human experience. Number three. Can you deny something one minute and the very next minute show that you actually had another way to believe it? In other words, another way to put it is... Can you deny something one minute and yet go on to assume it the next minute, which means you end up borrowing from the beliefs of other systems? Alistair McIntyre.

a philosopher who says, how do you deal with people who've got these different systems? One of the ways you can check is if you have one set of beliefs and you find yourself constantly having to borrow ideas from another set of beliefs, and maybe your set of beliefs isn't. It just isn't really working. One more is, are you willing to embrace the conclusions of your beliefs, the logical conclusions of your beliefs? And if not, why not?

You see, the point is that even though we can't prove absolutely everything in our set of beliefs to people who have got other beliefs, we can compare them. What I'm going to do the next several weeks... is I'm going to say, here are a number of things that you have to have in order to live. You need to have a meaning in life. You need to have a way of handling suffering. You need to have a strong identity.

You need to have happiness and satisfaction in life. You can't live without these things. How is your set of beliefs doing? I'm going to compare how your beliefs are doing with what Christianity offers. And arguably, Christianity gives you resources for those things that are unequaled. So instead of the next four or five times we meet together...

Eventually, I'd like to give you evidences and arguments, but that's not how you should start. The reason you've got smart people that come down on both sides of this, smart people who believe and smart people who don't believe, is because the process is complex. And it's a matter of comparing your sets of beliefs. I want you to think about what you believe and compare it to Christian beliefs in how the two sets of beliefs do with accounting for reality.

and helping you face suffering, and giving you an identity, which is how you're supposed to test these things. Last idea. Jesus Christ was once approached by a man. who said, would you come heal my son? And Jesus said, sure, I'd be happy to heal your son if you believe. And what the man said is, crying out in desperation. He says, I believe. Help my unbelief. Wow, there's an honest man. I believe.

I don't really believe. Jesus says, hey, if you believe, I'll heal your sin. I believe. No, I don't believe. I believe. Help my unbelief. And guess what Jesus does? Does he say, I'm sorry, not good enough. You need to go to Tim Keller's Questioning Christianity course. You need to get at least, oh, you know, you just need a lot more certainty. You've got to get rid of these doubts. No, what does he do?

Some of you know. He heals the boy. Now, what does that say? Two things. Number one, coming to faith is a process. It's a process, and Jesus recognizes that. But here's the other thing. The faith the Christians are looking for is not some pure, perfect psychological certainty. Because at least in the Christian understanding of things, it's not the quality of your faith that saves you.

The purity of your faith that saves you. It's the object of your faith that saves you. If you're about to fall off a cliff and you just reach out, scared to death, and grab a branch, and it holds you up, you're saved. Why? What saved you? Was it the quality of your faith? No, you weren't sure when you grabbed the branch. You weren't filled with certainty. You weren't sure. But when you grab that branch, even without a whole lot of perfect faith,

It saved you. Why? It's the object of your faith, not the quality and purity of your faith that saves you. And so the Christian understanding of faith is it is a process. It is messy. It is complicated. It is a process of thinking and intuition.

Yes, you can use your reason, and yes, you can use your intuition. But when it all comes down to it, the Christian understanding is it's a commitment to Jesus that saves you, not the quality of your faith. You don't have to be perfect in all this. It's messy. And Jesus has mercy on those that doubt.

Thanks for listening today to Tim Keller on the Questioning Christianity podcast. We encourage you to subscribe and share this podcast series with others and discuss them with a friend. We hope you'll go on to listen to the Q&A session for this talk in the episode that follows. And remember that you can find more content about exploring Christianity by visiting gospelandlife.com. That's gospelandlife.com.

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.