No Good Reasons from Keller

A few weeks ago, someone asked me to read The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. There is not a single compelling argument in the book. Worse, Keller inexplicably fails to reach the foundational question until the first sentence of his eighth chapter, more than halfway through:

How can we believe in Christianity if we don’t even know whether God exists?

His answer is not persuasive: The universe had a discrete beginning, therefore it is contingent on something that came before, which might be God. (Except nobody really knows if the universe had a discrete beginning, and some people argue that it didn’t, so that argument goes nowhere.)  The universe is fine-tuned for human life. (But if it wasn’t, nobody would be here to notice, and nobody has figured out a way to calculate the probability that it should have come out this way.) Science relies on assuming the regularity of nature, which is a correct assumption, because God caused the regularity. (Which is a non sequitur. Saying that God caused the regularity is only another explanatory hypothesis; replacing an alleged assumption of science with a theological proposition neither damages the work of science nor supports the hypothesis of God. And what do you mean by “God” anyway?) Beauty and love demonstrate our experience of unfulfilled desires, which means the object of that desire must exist. (No, it just means we have the ability to rationalize our inner drives into categorized goals.) The hypothesis that natural selection could cause organisms to have false beliefs about the world that cause them to have more descendants than organisms with true beliefs means that evolution by natural selection is not guaranteed to result in organisms that can know the truth about the world, so proponents of evolution by natural selection are just as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. (What a magnificent, stupendous failure to understand the scientific method! The hypothesis about false beliefs relates to untested beliefs, while scientific investigation is specifically designed to ferret out those false beliefs. Evolution by natural selection is continually tested and re-examined, which means it is not a “belief,” but a theory—one with enough verification to be called a fact, just like gravity.)

And then Keller whips out what he thinks is the best argument of them all: If you sense any kind of moral obligation—surprise!—you already believe in God. Because, you know, unless God exists, nobody would believe there should be any standards for behavior and it would just be chaos in the streets.

After a mere three paragraphs occupying a little more than a single page of his book, Keller declares that he has demolished all naturalistic attempts to explain morality, finishing up with this pat conclusion: “Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.” (And he completely misses the difference between cultural relativism, which is an anthropological method whereby investigators of other cultures try not to judge them by the standards of their own culture, and moral relativism, which he appears to think is the view that nobody has any authority to tell anybody else what to do—also known as anarchism.)

Look. People rely on each other for the basic necessities of life. I would not be sitting here in a climate-controlled suburban house, typing out a blog post on a laptop computer connected to the internet, with a stomach full of food that was prepared by strangers, looking out my window at a calm street scene devoid of chaos or mayhem if it were false that people rely on each other for the basic necessities of life. It’s not a matter of altruism: almost all of the people who made this moment in my life possible don’t care about me—they don’t even know who I am, and they weren’t thinking of me when they, say, built my house, prepared my food, or worked to maintain the energy infrastructure that powers everything artificial around me. They were working for themselves. We have a complex economy. We need each other. So it makes perfect sense that a social species like ours would evolve to have a feeling that reputation matters and someone is watching, that we would have a strong sense of reciprocity of norms, that we would expect others to conform to basic rules of conduct that maintain the stability of the community, and that we would judge them harshly when they deviate. (Or, more accurately, relying on each other as a social species conferred a lot more benefits on us than we would have had if we were just a bunch of self-sufficient anarchists with only the work of our own two hands to keep us going. The moral sense would be a necessary component of our social nature.)

Almost everybody everywhere feels some kind of moral obligation. We even have names for the people who don’t: we call them psychopaths and sociopaths. But a universal sense or moral obligation does not mean that every human community will develop the same conventions for how to maintain itself. That’s cultural relativism. That there appear to be certain “universals” in human culture is not evidence of God: more reasonably, they are evidence of certain baseline rules that no human society would function well (or for long) without. So it would make sense that we don’t see societies that lack those rules—they would dissolve or destroy themselves.

For some reason, Keller only addresses the existence of God in chapters 8 and 9 of his book. But if those chapters don’t convince you that God exists, or might possibly exist, then none of the other chapters have anything worthwhile to say. Most of them are based on alleged historical evidence (all of it within the Christian tradition, of course), none of which is reliable or convincing unless you have no idea what reliable or convincing evidence is supposed to look like. (For example, he claims in chapter 7 that since the four canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—were “written at the very most forty to sixty years after Jesus’s death,” “the Biblical accounts of Jesus’s life were circulating within the lifetimes of hundreds who had been present at the events of his ministry.” Really? When average life expectancy was almost certainly less than “forty to sixty years,” in a society far less mobile or connected as ours, where people did not have the ability to verify the facts of stories they were told?)

At any rate, The Reason for God by Timothy Keller will go on my shelf next to the similarly dismal The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel (and the more sophisticated, but equally unconvincing Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI). These books are tiresome. I don’t know why I keep telling people I will read them. None of them ever say anything interesting.