Tim Keller book wins Christianity Today award
Sam Hodges, without comment, tells us on The Dallas Morning News Religion blog that Tim Keller's book "The Reason for God" has won Christianity Today's award for best apologetics/evangelism book of 2008.
The title sounded promising. Reason and God together. Could Tim Keller make a logically compelling case for the existence of God? The judges' blurb seemed to say yes:
"The best apologetics book of the new millennium. This powerful study by the charismatic pastor of New York's Redeemer Presbyterian Church synthesizes most of the strongest arguments for Christian faith, boldly answers the 'New Atheists,' and posits Christianity as the world's only hope for peace."The book is divided into two sections. The first considers and rebuts the most common objections to belief in God. The second offers seven reasons for belief in the Christian God.
Sadly, the book does not live up to its promise. The rebuttals to atheists' arguments amount to little more than pointing out that atheists can never prove that God does *not* exist. God can do anything and his ways are mysterious, so suffering, injustice, miracles, etc., no matter how inconsistent with our notion of a good and loving God, or how inconsistent with our scientific knowledge, are all still possible, even if humans can't make any sense of God's doings.
No argument from me on this front. Atheists can't prove God does not exist. Likewise, no one will ever disprove the existence of Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot, orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars, too small to be seen by even our most powerful telescopes. But don't take that as an argument for belief in its existence, either.
The second section offers reasons for belief in God. Keller eventually admits that "there cannot be irrefutable proof for the existence of God." Keller calls his reasons "clues" whose accumulated weight can be formidable. For example, he says everything we know in this world has a cause outside itself. So, he reasons that the universe itself must have a cause outside itself -- God.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that what we now know of quantum physics, the classical notion of cause and effect, what everyone considers common sense, is simply wrong. Things do happen without cause, strange as that might seem. Also, if the universe (which is everything, including time and space themselves) had a cause outside itself, then that cause is also part of what we call the universe, by definition. As logical as Keller thinks he is by saying the universe must have a cause, he is just as illogical by saying that there's something that isn't part of everything.
Keller's other "clues" are equally fallacious. Perhaps Keller's biggest fallacy is his inconsistency in reasoning. His implicit claim is that the accumulated weight of his clues for God makes a convincing reason to believe in God. But he does not accumulate the weight of all the clues against (remember? suffering, injustice, miracles, etc.). On Keller's balance scale, the clues against God get discarded one by one because individually they don't pass his proof test, leaving an empty balance pan on one side, whereas the clues for God get piled up on the other side until their weight tips the scale in favor of God.
At the end of his book, Keller talks about the plausibility of Christianity and calls on readers to make a faith commitment, an "all-or-nothing choice" of allegiance to Jesus. Keller doesn't say it, but that leap of faith is needed because reason alone won't get you there. And that's what makes this book ultimately disappointing. It fails to live up to its title, "The Reason for God."
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