AN INVITATION TO THE SKEPTICAL ATHEIST AND CONFIDENT MATERIALIST

Tim Keller has written another great book, MAKING SENSE OF GOD: An Invitation to the Skeptical.  His work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has brought him in touch with a cross-section of yuppie Manhattanites. He points out that science and reason alone cannot serve as a guide for human society.

“Strict secularism holds that people are only physical entities without souls, that when loved ones die they simply cease to exist, that sensations of love and beauty are just neurological-chemical events, that there is no right or wrong outside of what we in our minds determine and choose. Those positions are at the very least deeply counterintuitive for nearly all people, and large swaths of humanity will continue to simply reject them as impossible to believe.”

He describes the shortcomings of the secular mindset and maintains that it requires a great deal of faith, yes faith, to be believed. It is neither rational nor logical.

On the other hand Christianity is not withering away. It is growing in disciples throughout the world. “Last Sunday there were more Christians attending church in China than there were in all of ‘Christian’ Europe.”

He makes a case for loving God and discovering your true self in Christ as a means of amplifying and deepening enjoyment of the world.

The chapter on The Problem of Morals is worth the price of the book. In it he eviscerates the secular arguments for morality. If morals are personally relative and socially constructed to justify our choices then there is no standard by which we can be judged or we can judge others. We cannot even have a conversation with someone who disagrees. There is no self-evident set of moral values. We claim to set our own values but at the same time want to impose our values on others.

“This schizophrenia is a major source of the increasing polarization we see in our culture….Secularism continues to lack even a rudimentary explanation of why moral obligation exists is there is no God…. Our culture is split and fractured by warring factions with fundamentally different visions of justice and social good.”

He concludes that an absolute morality of good and evil implies an absolute Person behind all things. This is the Moral Argument for God.

His final section is on Christianity Makes Sense.

This is a good book for anyone, believer or unbeliever. It shows how hollow the claims of atheism are and how shallow its arguments. After demolishing them he demonstrates the value of Christianity to those who are willing to become disciples of Christ.