Midweek Meditation: "Making Sense of God 2" (Tim Keller)

TITLE: Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical
AUTHOR: Tim Keller
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Viking Books, 2016, (330 pages).

Continuing the excerpts from Keller's very wise take on secularism and religion,

Question 2: "Isn't Religion Based on Faith and Secularism on Evidence?"
Keller puts his finger on this common misconception and argues that it is not an absolute truth that secularism is a search for truth and empirical evidence. In fact, secularism has a profound level of dependence on faith that is often not highlighted. He argues that Christianity is both faith and reason. It is highly arrogant of secularists to insist that only their way of thinking is rational.

"Twentieth century thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein have argued that all reasoning is based on prior faith commitments to which one did not reason. . . .

For example, American philosopher C. Stephen Evans writes, 'Science by its very nature is not fit to investigate whether there is more to reality than the natural world.' Because science's baseline methodology is to always assume a natural cause for every phenomenon, there is no experiment that could prove or disprove that there is something beyond this material world. For example, there would be no way to empirically prove that a miracle has occurred since a scientist would have to assume, no matter what, that no natural cause had been discovered yet. If there actually had truly been a supernatural miracle, modern science could not possibly discern it." (Keller, 34-35)

"The Christian believer is using reason and faith to get to her beliefs just as her secular neighbor is using reason and faith to get to hers. They are both looking at the same realities in nature and human life, and both are seeking a way to make the best sense of them through a process that is rational, personal, intuitive, and social. Reason does not and cannot operate alone. Contemporary secularity, then, is not the absence of faith, but is instead based on a whole set of beliefs, including a number of highly contestable assumptions about the nature of proof and rationality itself." (41)

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