“The Reason for God” Highlights, Notes & Quotes
Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God summary: notes, quotes, & highlights
Intro
Faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it.
All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs.
Every doubt is based on a leap of faith.
There can’t be just one true religion
Claiming that your way of thinking about religion is the correct way is just as narrow-minded as claiming that there’s only one true religion.
Christians believe that human beings are made in the image of God. That leads us to expect that nonbelievers will be better than any of their mistaken beliefs would make them. The doctrine of sinful nature leads us to expect that believers will be worse than their beliefs would make them.
Christianity is an “exclusive” belief system that is really open to others.
How could a good God allow suffering?
My argument against God was that the universe seemed cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten that idea of “just” and “unjust”?
The evolutionary mechanism of natural selection DEPENDS on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak. Those things are perfectly natural.
If you are SURE that this natural world is unjust and filled with evil, you are assuming the reality of some extra-natural (or supernatural) standard by which to make your judgment.
Jesus had to pay for our sins so that someday he could end evil and suffering without ending us.
God takes our misery and sufferings so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.
Christianity is a straightjacket
We should criticize Christians when they are condemning and ungracious to believers, but we shouldn’t criticize churches when they maintain standards for membership in accord with their beliefs.
Freedom isn’t the absence of restrictions—it’s finding the right restrictions, the liberating ones.
A love relationship limits your personal options. Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love. We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve a mutual, unselfish loss of independence.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to keep it intact, you must give it to no one.
The church is responsible for so much injustice
The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
When violence and warfare occur in a society, that doesn’t disprove that society’s beliefs.
It’s profoundly humbling to know that we are saved by grace regardless of what we do. So maybe Christian fanatics aren’t that way because they’re too committed to the gospel, but because they aren’t committed to it enough. They’re fanatically zealous and courageous when they should be fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving, and understanding.
Jesus’s sermon on the mount doesn’t criticize irreligious people, but rather religious ones.
It was the church, not the world, who crucified Christ.
How can a loving God send people to hell?
Why does God require blood to pacify his wrath? Why can’t he just forgive?
Instead of trying to shape our desires to fit with reality, we seek to control and shape reality to fit with our desires. The ancients would look at an anxious person and prescribe inner change. Modern society instead prescribes making outer changes.
Modern society gives us the responsibility of determining right and wrong.
If Christianity is the transcultural truth of God, then we would expect it contradict and offend every human culture at some point, because human cultures are ever-changing and imperfect.
If you love a person and you see someone ruining them—even they themselves—you get angry.
The final form of hate is indifference
Hell is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.
It is not a question of God “sending us” to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
Hell is the greatest monument to human freedom. As Romans 1:24 says, God “gave them up to their desires.” All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair than that?
Christians aren’t narrow for believing that wrong thinking and behavior have eternal effect.
Science has disproved Christianity
Science can only test natural causes. It can’t decide if any other potential causes outside of nature could possibly exist.
God’s existence can’t be proven or disproven.
It’s false logic to argue that if one part of scripture can’t be taken literally then none of it can.
Miracles don’t simply lead to cognitive belief, but to worship, awe, and wonder.
Miracles challenge our minds while promising our hearts that the world we want is coming.
You can’t take the Bible literally
Luke 1:1–4 claims that the author got his accounts from eyewitnesses who were still alive. If the gospels are fictionalized, then all those eyewitnesses and their children and grandchildren would have had to have been dead. The gospels were written too early for that to be a possibility.
Why would the originators of Christianity write that women were the first witnesses of the resurrection when their status in society was so low that it wouldn’t have been allowed in court?
If you reject Christianity because some of the Bible’s teaching offend you, then you are assuming that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you.
The real God will say things that outrage you and make you struggle (just like in real friendships and marriages).
Intermission
If you claim that nothing should be believed until it’s proven true, then how can you prove that statement is true?
You can always find reasons not to believe something.
We have a sense that the world is not the way it ought to be. We have a sense that we are very flawed yet very great. We have a longing for love and beauty that nothing in this world can fulfill. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose.
Clues of God
All scientific reasoning is based on the assumption that nature’s laws will be the same tomorrow as they are today. This requires an act of faith.
Human beings might just be material who believe that truth, justice, good, and evil, are just illusions, but when we’re in the presence of great art or natural beauty, our hearts tell us otherwise.
We have a longing for love, joy, beauty that no amount of food, sex, or success can satisfy.
Evolutionary theorists agree that our capacity to believe in a god is hardwired into our physiology because it was associated with traits that helped our ancestors adapt to their environment.
Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it’s not because he’s really there, it’s only because that belief helped our ancestors survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science?
It isn’t fair for evolutionary scientists to be skeptical of what our minds tell us about God while not being skeptical of what our minds tell us about evolutionary science.
People have strong moral convictions, but don’t know WHY they find some things to be evil and others good.
For evolutionary purposes, hostility to everyone outside of one’s group should be considered as moral and right behavior.
If humanity is a product of natural selection, altruism should have died out a long time ago.
In “survival of the fittest,” it doesn’t make sense to argue that every individual has dignity.
If God doesn’t exist, then no one else can take his place to declare which laws should be obeyed.
If there is no God, then there is no “moral” and “immoral” but only “I like this.”
Nature is ruled by one central principle: violence by the strong against the weak, yet we believe it’s wrong for stronger individuals to kill weaker ones.
Christianity says that we know right and wrong because we were made by a God of peace, justice, and love. It also explains the existence of violence because the world is fallen and broken.
Believing that God doesn’t exist should logically lead us to conclude that napalming babies is culturally relative. If we know that conclusion to be wrong, then why not assume that God exists?
We live like peace is better than war and truth is better than lies, but if God doesn’t exist, then human existence is just a tiny speck in an ocean of time, and it doesn’t matter if we are loving or cruel.
The problem of sin
All sins are attempts to fill voids
Sin seeks to get an identity apart from God
Our need for worth is so powerful that we “deify” whatever we base our value on, looking to it with worship-like passion and devotion even if we consider ourselves to be irreligious.
We become enslaved by whatever we gives us our sense of meaning.
Building our lives on something other than God not only hurts us if we don’t get our heart’s desires, but also if we do.
If we find our identity and sense of worth in a certain political position, then politics isn’t really about politics—it’s about us.
The more we love and identify with our race, political affiliation, or religion, the harder it becomes to suppress feelings of superiority or even hostility. It’s hard to have an identity that doesn’t lead to exclusion.
Most ancient creation accounts depict a violent war. Evolutionary also science depicts life arising from violence. Genesis says creation was planned and beautiful.
Sin isn’t just doing bad things. It’s putting good things in the place of God. The solution isn’t to change our behavior but to reorient and center our hearts and lives on God.
Jesus is the one lord who died for you and breathed his last breath for you—does that sound oppressive?
Everyone lives for something which becomes “lord of their life.”
Religion and the gospel
All other major faiths have founders who are teachers that show the way to salvation. Only Jesus claims to actually be the way of salvation himself.
Pharisees don’t pray or serve as much as they should which results in more anxiety, insecurity, and irritability than the irreligious.
If you’re living up to your religious standards then you’ll feel superior to others, but if you aren’t living up to those standards you’re loath yourself.
The gospel is that I’m so flawed that Jesus had to die for me yet I am so loved and valued that he did so gladly. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time.
Grace is a threat to the illusion that we are free to live as we choose because if I’m a sinner saved by grace then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.
The true story of the cross
Why would you just have to die? Why couldn’t God just forgive us?
Forgiveness is bearing the cost of the misdeed yourself. It means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it. When Jesus forgave us he absorbed the debt of sin himself.
The God of the Bible is not like the primitive deities who demanded our blood for their wrath to be appeased.
Real love is an exchange. Do you love your kids emotionally you must be willing to be drained emotionally.
We put ourselves where only God deserves to be while God puts himself where we deserve to be.
Christ wins through losing and turns the values of the world upside down.
In this new counterculture, Christians look at money as something to give away. They look at power or something to you strictly for service.
The fact that Jesus had to die for me humbled me out of my pride. The fact that he was glad to die for me assured me out of my fear.
The reality of the resurrection
If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to except all he said. If he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said?
If you believe Jesus did not rise from the dead you need to come up with a historically feasible alternate explanation for the birth of the church.
One Corinthians 15:3–6 says that 500 eyewitnesses saw Christ after his resurrection.
The tomb must’ve been empty. No one in Jerusalem would have believed the preaching for a minute if the tomb was not empty.
Christianity caused a massive worldview shift that usually only happens to smaller groups of people over longer periods of time. Hundreds of Jews started worshiping Jesus overnight even though it would’ve been blasphemous for their religion.
Virtually all of the early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it’s hard to believe they would’ve done it to support a hoax.
It isn’t enough for the skeptic to dismiss the resurrection without answering all these historical questions.
It’s impossible to prove something in history like proving something in a laboratory.
The dance of God
When something is useful you are attracted to it for what it can do for you. When something is beautiful you enjoy it simply for what it is. Just being in his presence is it’s own reward.
If God isn’t three in one, then he couldn’t have loved until he created other beings, since love is between two beings.
Within God there is a community of persons enjoying each other. Marriage is a picture of this.
We were made to join God in that community, not just to have a vague belief in him.
Adam knew he would live if he obeyed God, but he didn’t. Jesus knew he’d be crushed if he obeyed God, and he still did it. Jesus already had a perfect community of joy, glory, and love. He didn’t need us, but he wanted us to join him.