Reading Time: 5 minutes Two-thirds of the way through a book entitled The Reason for God, Tim Keller confesses he doesn’t intend to provide you with evidence that God exists. Why not? He says it’s because you already know that God exists…all of you, atheists included. He’s just trying to make you see that you already do. Then as if […]
Neil Carter
Neil Carter is a high school teacher, a father of four, and a skeptic living in the Bible Belt. A former church elder with a seminary education, Neil now writes mostly about the struggles of former evangelicals living in the midst of a highly religious subculture. Follow him @godlessindixie
Posted inPhilosophy
Tim Keller and the argument from morality
Reading Time: 10 minutes Reformed pastor Tim Keller devotes Chapter 9 of The Reason for God to regurgitating the Argument from Morality, which essentially states that without a belief in a Supreme Being, there can be no basis for moral restraint among human beings. This argument typically takes one of two directions: Argument 1: People who don’t profess faith in a […]
Posted inScience
The argument from misunderstanding evolution
Reading Time: 7 minutes In my last post, we looked at four (bad) arguments for the existence of God presented by Tim Keller in Chapter 8 of The Reason for God. I call them the Argument from Inexplicability, the Argument from Fabricated Probabilities, the Argument from Wishing, and the Argument from Regularity. As I’ve often pointed out, not only are […]
Posted inReligion
Four (bad) reasons for God
Reading Time: 8 minutes When I first picked up Tim Keller‘s The Reason for God, I did not expect that out of fourteen chapters he would devote only one of them to offering arguments for the existence of God. I’m not sure what I expected, but after all the hype from my Christian friends and their pleading with me to read […]
Posted inReligion
Changing gods midstream
Reading Time: 7 minutes “You can’t ride two horses with one a**, sugarbean.” —Earl Smooter, Sweet Home Alabama Halfway through his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller pauses for an intermission in which he pivots from his previous discussion of “the seven biggest objections…people in our culture have about the Christian faith” to lay the groundwork for part two […]
Posted inReligion
For the Bible tells me? No.
Reading Time: 8 minutes I don’t have any concrete numbers on this, but I believe most Christians who are into apologetics as a serious hobby are inerrantists. By that I mean they belong to one of those subsets of the Christian faith who believe the Bible is right—not just about some things—but about everything. Tim Keller falls into that […]
Posted inReligion
What’s wrong with asking for a miracle?
Reading Time: 6 minutes When people ask me why I left my faith, I always find myself spending the first part of the conversation discounting assumptions they bring about why this keeps happening to people they know. They usually reach for one of several non-rational causes: Somebody hurt you once You went to the wrong church You just want […]
Posted inScience
Believing in evolution, but not too much
Reading Time: 10 minutes Moving on to Chapter 6 in his The Reason for God, Tim Keller takes on Richard Dawkins, who argues in The God Delusion that scientific literacy and religious belief are inversely related. The more a person understands modern science, Dawkins suggests, the less inclined he will be to accept the supernatural claims of any religion. To back this up, […]
Posted inReligion
The evolution of Hell in The Reason for God
Reading Time: 9 minutes Growing up in an evangelical church I was taught that no matter what it is you want or need, God himself is the answer. You need comfort or security? God is where you get it. You want guidance or companionship? God is there for you. You need discipline? Affection? Wisdom? God, God, God. It reminds […]
Posted inPolitics
Whitewashing Christian history in The Reason for God
Reading Time: 15 minutes To hear Tim Keller talk, you’d think the Christian church was responsible for every progressive social step forward that Western civilization has taken. In order to support this idea, Keller turns in chapter four of The Reason for God to address the developments of the Abolition movement and of the Civil Rights movement in the United […]