Category: The Reason for No God

This is a short section in which Keller explains why belief in Hell does not make Christians more likely to be bigoted or judgmental. The concern is that if someone believes some people are going to heaven while others are destined for hell that the believer will think those bound for hell are less worthy of respect or civil rights, and should be treated differently. Keller’s defense is that Christians don’t know who is going to go to heaven or hell, and so they cannot (or at least should not) treat anyone as if their final resting place is known.

About half of this section is spent relating and defending against the accusation that belief that some people are going to hell is “narrow” thinking. This whole issue is irrelevant, so I will ignore it, except to say that Keller’s right that thinking someone will go to hell is not itself “narrow”. In my opinion, it is the certainty of ones belief’s over another’s despite any evidence that is “narrow”.

The more central issue of Christian’s denying civil rights to those who will go to hell should not be a problem. I agree w/ Keller that the rules of heaven and hell as laid out by himself, and my interpretation of the bible, do not allow for any human to predetermine the direction of another human’s afterlife. At least in normal circumstances. (I am unclear about specialized hypothetical situations, like in the case of killing someone immediately after they sin, or receive absolution.) And even if a Christian did know for certain that a person was going to go to hell, the Christian tradition does not allow them to treat such a person poorly.

That’s all how things should be. I doubt very much they work that way very often. I cannot claim, however, that belief in heaven and hell causes bigoted behavior. It seems just as likely that one would take already existing bigoted ideas and cast the villains as going to hell. Religious people treat peoples not of their religion differently than their in-group, but this can be explained simply as group dynamics, and doesn’t necessitate a dual afterlife belief system.

Really, if you think about it, someone who believes in heaven should be much nicer to someone they believe is going to hell. They’ll have all eternity to hang out with the others going to heaven, they should get to know the other half (or 99.9%) while they still can. And any joy you bring such a soul will be some of the only joy it ever knows amongst and endless sea of sorrows, whereas any good you do to someone going to heaven will be inconsequential compared to the gifts of heaven.

Sarcastic Side Note: Maybe we could cut health care costs by only treating those who are going to go to hell. We’d be doing the ones going to heaven a favor by letting them die.

In this section Keller explains his reasoning for why the existence of hell is not contrary to the notion that God loves us. He starts by defining hell as the state of being apart from God, and not so much a lake of fire as is commonly depicted. He says that souls get there by continuing on their selfish trajectory after death. He points to paranoia, envy, anxiety, and other ails of the living and suggests that they are caused by selfish behavior, and that this mentality would continue after death into an eternity, eventually consuming the soul entirely, creating hell. He says that people in hell do not even want to be rescued, that they are too absorbed in self deception or denial or blaming others. He says that ultimately everyone either says, “Thy will be done,” to God, or he says it to them, and that their will inevitably leads to hell.

There are dozens of problems with this argument, and I’m sure I’ll miss some, but I’m going to plow ahead anyway.

Okay, assuming you believe his notion that the soul exists, and that the soul has a trajectory that it continues on after death, this is not meaningfully different from the notion of god tossing souls into a pit of fire. The nature of infinity means any non-infinite number is essentially 0 in comparison, so even if ones trajectory is very slightly towards hell and it will take you say, 100 billion years to reach it, that’s an instant compared to eternity. Since you can’t change directions after death, the extreme of ones trajectory at death is essentially your state for eternity, as with the classic conception of heaven and hell.

Keller tries to take some of the agency from God in his description of hell. He describes it as people choosing it and God just allowing it. Whether God actively sentences people to hell is irrelevant, though, from a justice standpoint. First, God made those people that are rejecting him, knowing they would do so, so he sentenced them in his act of creation. If you don’t believe that and somehow get around God’s omniscience to suggest that we have the ability to surprise God, then he still has the ability to remake us, or the universe so that none or fewer people go to hell. For example, he could actually do what Keller suggests, and appear and ask everyone if they’d like to do his will. I bet a lot fewer people would end up in hell if he did that.

Keller also implicitly states that anyone not devoted to God is a selfish person, but I take umbrage with that statement. Keller, in previous sections on morality, stated that Christianity doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, and that people can be better than Christians without being Christian. These statements seems to conflict with the idea that your final destination is determined by simply general moral attitude. What role do the things the church says are important (accepting Jesus as the one true god, asking for forgiveness, etc.) play in affecting your trajectory upon death?

In order to allow for anyone to be saved in the trajectory model of heaven and hell, it would be necessary to only consider a very small segment of time when determining the trajectory, or to have some sort of reset mechanism. Without such, a lifetime of sin could not be overcome without a similarly long time of sainthood. With either escape case, though, does it work both ways? If I live a life of good attitude, but then think something negative before getting splattered will I continue in that mindset until I wind up in hell? Or could I accidentally reset all my good thoughts, and wind up going to hell?

All of this, obviously, is purely speculation. There is no evidence of a soul or an afterlife. If you want to use reason, it’s in the title of the book, in such a situation you should apply Occam’s razor and determine that neither exist, since that is the simplest explanation.

In conclusion, another totally unconvincing and uncompelling section from Keller. How many in a row is that?

In this section Keller gives his explanation for how God can be a God of love and of wrath. He starts by pointing out that it is not uncommon for people to become angry, not in spite of, but because of love. Love means caring a great deal for someone, so if anything bad is happening to them we can get angry.

Keller makes a second point, with the help of Miroslav Volf, that a god who did not mete out justice would not be worthy of worship. They go on to argue that belief that God will right all wrongs is the only way they can prevent themselves from taking action against injustice and continuing the circle of violence.

Finally, Keller quotes Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel prize winning poet, to suggest that belief that there is no heaven or hell, that no justice will be dispensed after death, encourages peoples baser instincts to lie, and murder and other bad things.

Keller’s second and third points are not really related to the core issue here, so I’ll start with the first. Saying that we get mad from love is not at all convincing to me. God is perfect, and loves perfectly. If you perfectly love something you must delight in all of it’s aspects. Blemishes become beauty marks, annoyances become cute quirks. So it must be for God for all of us, to a perfect degree.

Or maybe my notion is wrong, and God still sees flaws in us. How can he be mad at anyone but himself? He made us. He made everything. It’s like us drawing a circle, and telling it to be a square, and then getting all angry when it’s still a circle.

And finally, assuming you still think it makes sense that God get’s wrathful, then why does he do the things he does when he does? He’s God, he could enact justice with laser precision and with cutting poignant poetry. Instead he drowns the whole world? or kills all the first borns in a city? Those are the anthropomorphic projections of scared humans, not the actions of loving deity.

Keller’s other two points don’t really argue against the motion, but instead try to suggest that it’s a good thing people believe in a God of justice, regardless of it’s truth. This is a strange tactic to take if you think it’s true, in my opinion. Let’s look at the arguments anyway.

They both basically boil down to the notion that people are worse if they don’t think God is up their watching, making sure everything’s fair in the end. They are childish ideas dressed up with fancy language and spoken by highly decorated individuals, but childish ideas still.

Two things, first, we just got done with the chapter on morality where Keller argued several times that Christianity won’t necessarily make you a better person, and yet here he is arguing the opposite. Christianity doesn’t make you better when you point out that Christians aren’t actually better, but it does in all other arguments, apparently. Again, I’d like to point out that there’s never been any evidence that Christians, or any other religious group, behave any better than atheists.

Second, God’s justice, at least as described in the bible, is anything but. He has created us as sinners, commanded us not to sin, and then deals out ultimate punishment, where’s the justice in that? A man can rape and murder small children all his life, so long as he asks forgiveness and be let into heaven, but those children, if they die unbaptized, will go to hell? Perhaps you don’t believe in such extremes, but regardless, the heaven and hell system of justice cannot be perfect unless humanity is composed of only angels and demons, which it objectively is not.

Keller’s case here is frustratingly flimsy. There’s not enough here to even really rip into. As usual, god is unnecessary. In Keller’s own writing he explains why people forgive and choose not to seek “justice” or revenge, because it leads to a never ending cycle of violence. Nothing more is needed to explain these actions of rational compassion, but Keller, and his fellows, tack on God because they already believe in him. If you belief that god is the source of all good things, then it makes logical sense that belief in him would make people better. Fortunately, you don’t need to do all the extra work of believing in god, you can just use logic and empathy to be a decent human.

We’re on to Chapter 5. I’m glad to be moving on to the new topic of… hell… oh… kay. Well, good. Hell it is then.

At issue for this section is the complaint that it doesn’t seem fair for God to send people to hell. Some people resolve this issue by geting rid of God and hell, others just to get rid of hell. Keller has another solution. His solution is to ignore the problem. He says that it is just a cultural objection, that in other cultures a judgmental god is not an issue but perhaps the message of turning the other cheek is. He backs up this position by mentioning that if there were a metaphysical truth it would be inconsistent in some ways with all human cultures, since our cultures are imperfect. He rightly points out that Christianity fits this description.

I’m gonna go in reverse order today. It’s true that in this particular way Christianity melds with the reality we all observe, parts of it are offensive to every culture. Unfortunately, this is true of all religions, and pretty much any other sufficiently complex body of ideas, so as a guide to picking the Truth, it is not helpful. Also, since there are many observed systems with this property, it must also be true that it is possible to create one without divine inspiration. Since such is the case, perhaps all systems that offend all cultures in some way are purely mundane. The fact that Keller even bothers to put such weak evidence into his book is a testament to how little evidence there is for his claims.

Keller’s argument that the belief that Hell is inconsistent with a loving God is cultural is a misdirect. All notions of right and wrong are culturally influenced. He’s right that it’s important to look at ones objections to things and check to see how they are derived, upon which we base these objections, what assumptions are being made. But our individual beliefs are all we have, culturally influenced or not. If you are going to ignore them you lose all basis for making moral decisions for yourself.

Keller, at least so far, as not defended the existence of hell in any way. He just said ignore your objections, because your objections are culturally based. This is equivalent to saying, “Nuh uh. God says it’s ok.” The only way this makes sense is if you can convince yourself that there is a Truth out there, and that the Christians have it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. All you have to do is surrender your independence over to a higher power, which may in fact just be a bunch of old guys reading an even older book.

Side Note:

I take Keller at his word that there are cultures out there that have little problem with the idea of Hell, at first, but I wonder what these cultures think of hell after some reflection. Explain to someone that god exists, he is all powerful, all knowing, and loves you completely. Then explain that if you don’t accept him, he will torture you forever. In what culture does perfect love manifest in torture, or revenge?

In this section Keller tries to make the case that he began in section on Fanaticism, that the solution to the problems within Christianity is more Christianity. That is, more of true Christianity, in Keller’s mind. He starts with several examples of Jesus and other biblical figures being critical of religious people. He sites the sermon on the mount, and several other passages. He claims this is evidence that Christianity has a self governing ethos and capability.

Keller goes on to reference C. Sommerville who claims that even secular criticisms of the wrongs of Christianity are based in Christianity. This is because, they argue, the moral underpinnings of the criticisms are themselves Christian. To demonstrate this they use the thought experiment comparing a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon’s concept of honor to the moral code of a Christian. The pre-Christian’s culture is “shame-based” whereas the Christian culture is “based on charity”. An example given to show the difference is that a pre-Christian would not mug an old lady because then he would be despicable, and nobody would respect him, and he would not respect himself. The Christian would not mug and old lady because he can imagine the impact such an action would have on the victims and cares for the well being of those people.

In conclusion, Keller discusses the situation of historical Christianity, when most of the worst oppressing was happening. He talks of the difficulty in converting the culture from a power based one to a Christian one of charity. He implies that a hybrid semi-Christian culture existed and that the non-Christian parts of the culture were the parts responsible for the oppression. His remedy to the problems with Christianity, is more Christianity.

So, lets start at the beginning. The notion that there are many anti-religious passages in the bible are hardly surprising, given that Jesus, or (in actuality) the Bible’s authors, were creating a new religion. One common reason to do so is because one disagrees with the current popular choices. A new religion would certainly want to distinguish itself from the perceived problems with more prevalent faiths of the day. So many of the passages referenced by Keller, I suspect, are more speaking of the other religions, than their own.

However, even if this those statements were mostly aimed at other religions, one would still want to try to apply the same standards to oneself, in order to not be hypocritical. The ability to criticize religious people is not evidence of the ability to self govern. In fact, Keller himself admits that Christianity has had many problems in the past, and today, but instead of taking this as evidence of a lack of ability to police itself, he blames what he considers un-Christian aspects of the church.

Keller provides examples of Christians reforming the world for the better in the name of Christianity, even against the wishes of other Christians, Martin Luther King junior being his best well known. Nobody argues that a Christian cannot do good. Keller’s examples would prove them wrong if they did. What Keller’s examples fail to show is that Christians act better, or more good more often, than do non-Christians. I’m not convinced he’s shown that.

Keller defines anything bad in the church as un-Christian, and anything good as Christian. By this definition the solution to any problem can be worded, “more Christianity” because it is the same as saying “more good”. It is semantic gymnastics to use the word Christian to mean only part of Christianity, and is ultimately meaningless.

Moving on to this notion that secular criticisms of Christianity come from Christianity. First, why is this in this book? If that’s true, wouldn’t that give them more weight in the eyes of Christians? In no way is an argument made invalid by using the subject of the argument. Again, in many cases, shouldn’t this make the argument more compelling. It’s like using your opponents own words against him in a debate.

Even though it seems it would actually help me not to, I will argue against this notion anyway, cause I’m equal opportunity like that. Take the thought experiment presented. They say the pre-Christian would not harm the weak because it would be “despicable”, but how does this pre-Christian know that? It’s because he can imagine the impact such actions would have on the victims, and he cares about those people… exactly like a Christian. Keller, and Sommerville , simply ascribe a negative motivation on top of the morality when it’s done by the other, and a don’t when it’s done by the Christian.

Keller’s arguments that I summerize in my third paragraph are essentially the same as those in the first. Christianity is made up two parts, the Christian part, and the bad part. When simplified his argument in the section is, “Christianity is not perfect, but it would be better if it had more Christianity”. That sentence makes no sense, except that we know that each use of the word Christianity has distinct meanings. What the sentence really means is either, “Christianity is not perfect, but it would be better if it had more good stuff,” or, “The church and it’s members are not perfect, but it would be better if it had more Christianity.” As you can see, neither is a very impressive assertion, and neither does anything to argue in favor of Christianity, or against the notion that Christianity has done much bad in the world.

Side Note:

There seems to be a constant conflict within Keller, and many Christians, on this subject. He must argue that Christianity is not immoral, but he himself claim that moral acts do not sway the Christian God. He claims the problem with Christian fanatics is a feeling of moral superiority, but at the same time must argue for Christian moral superiority, since his defense is that the problem with fanatics is that they’re not Christian enough. It’s a problem of having cake and eating it, too. Christians, to Keller, are superior to the others, but part of that superiority, indeed, the source, is being more humble than the others. In order to believe in such superiority you must lose it. It is an untenable position.

Keller, here, defends Christianity in the face of fanatics. He tries to explain that what people think of fanatical Christians, people who loudly voice their opinions on a myriad of topics and look down on those they disagree with, are not fanatical Christians at all. He stresses that the essence of the Christian faith is not a moral improvement plan (told you they’d make poor doctors, see Character Flaws) but salvation by grace from God. He says such a notion is profoundly humbling and that the bible teaches to be humble, sensitive, empathetic, etc. He says that those thought of as fanatical Christians are in fact not Christian enough.

This is one of those sections where what Keller says is true, but it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean what he wants you to think it means. He doesn’t disagree that those people commonly thought of as fanatics exist, which is good, because everyone knows they do, he just says they’re not Christian enough. However, this doesn’t remedy the problem that fanatics exist. They are still there, part of religion, and a reason to dislike it.

Keller also implies that it’s not Christianity’s fault that those people are like that. That Christianity is about forgiveness and empathy and those fanatics are just going off on their own. The problem is that the stuff the fanatics say is also in the bible, or whatever religion is in question. The notion that you are the chosen people, and everyone else is going to hell, is in there, and it provides a lush environment for fanaticism. Also, the rest of the church, the non-fanatics, provide cover for the fanatics, willingly or not. They do not separate themselves completely from them and often defend or use the fanatics selectively, when it suits them. The tacit support afforded by being the member of such a large, popular group as a religion emboldens a fanatic. In all these ways religion is still producing the fanatics, even if you believe that the fanatics are missing the point.

Further, if you think about it, Christianity does pretty much tell people to be fanatics. It’s true it also tells them to be humble and nice, but if you really believe that God is going to send someone to Hell, someone the Bible tells you to love, unless you convince them to join the church, it seems completely reasonable to do almost anything to try to convince them.

So for the reasons above, Keller’s arguments in this section are wrong, intentionally obfuscating, and also irrelevant.

A note on violence:

This section’s issue, fanaticism, is just a scaled down version of the previous section on violence. Instead of worrying about whole nations being influenced by a few fanatics, he’s concentrating on the fanatics themselves. It seems telling to me that he doesn’t use them same argument as he did in that section, that people will tracendentilize something even without god, here. He doesn’t, I suspect, because it seems obvious on this scale that it is not true. We all know examples of people who are pretty normal, nice, and fun to be around, except when it comes to religion, and it is difficult to think that if it wasn’t for religion the same would be true with those people, but the subject would be politics or philosophy or something else. This seems to strengthen my argument from that section that societies would not necessarily trancendentilize a new idea, if we could somehow abandon god.

In this section Keller defends Christianity as a force for peace. Well, actually, no he doesn’t. He admits that religion causes violence and war by tracendentalizing already present cultural differences, making it possible to conflate disagreements into a “cosmic battle between good and evil.” He doesn’t give in entirely, though. He goes on to say, well, secularism is just as bad as religion. He sites several examples I’m sure we’re all familiar with, the Nazi’s, the Soviet Union, and a few others. He adopts Allister McGrath’s idea that in the absence of god, society will “transcendentalize” something else in order to appear morally and spiritually superior. So, to clarify, secular societies worship something else (like the state, or a race) in place of god, with the same negative effects.

Mostly we agree, since Keller is mostly conceding on this one, at least so far. I would like to point out a few things about his half hearted defense.

First, it’s not necessarily either or. I mean, you can have religious conflict, and other conflicts based on a religious like connection to another concept. Usually the two become muddled, religion is used to justify the other conviction, but the root cause is still separate. I mean to say that just because a society is religious, doesn’t mean they aren’t also racist, for example. So religion isn’t an alternative form of justification for violence, it’s an additional form. Just because it’s not the only problem, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be solved.

Second, the examples of terrible secular societies are the ones that completely abolished religion. It is a special sort of authoritarian government that can do something like abolish religion. The sample is biased. Societies that abolish religion are more likely to commit acts of violence just by their authoritarian nature. Societies with high secularity that are not authoritarian are less violent than similarly free, religious nations, see Scandinavia.

The notion that man will necessarily trancendentalize something is not well demonstrated. It is certainly true that societies can, as demonstrated by history, but it has not been demonstrated that it must be so. In fact, the evidence used to suggest such a notion is certainly biased. Even if the tendency to trancendentalize non-religious ideas is pervasive, that is no excuse to continue to allow religion as a further reason for bloodshed.

This is the first section in Chapter 4, we’re making progress. Here, Keller defends Christianity against the complaint that its practitioners are not especially good. It’s leaders have widely publicized moral failings and the typical congregation suffers from at least as much internal conflict as other volunteer organizations. His first defense is that Christianity never said Christians would be perfect, or even good. He explains how there is no level of moral “goodness” required to be a Christian and that increasing ones moral character is not strictly required, since all good things come from God already, and anything a mortal might try to do to please God would be insufficient, He provides forgiveness and a loving relationship out of grace.

Keller quotes the phrase that church, “is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” He draws on this analogy to suggest that perhaps people with troubled characters would be drawn to the church, like the sick to a hospital. He also suggests that if one of these “sick” people had been Christian for a while and greatly improved since converting she might still not be as morally stable as someone fortunate enough to have been raised in a environment that nurtured moral health, and so to the casual observer, the Christian might appear to be of worse character than the irreligious lucky person.

Unlike some of Keller’s arguments, this section seems pretty internally consistent. I don’t think it paints Christianity very flatteringly, however.

He provides some reasons why Christianity might look bad, it attracting “sick” people, but he doesn’t provide any evidence that it isn’t actually bad. His scenario of the Christian significantly improving but still being inferior to a non-Christian is plausible, but he doesn’t actually provide any reason why it should happen, or evidence that it does. Not only would individual Christians have to improve, which I’m sure some do, he’d have to show that they improve more than they would without Christianity and that the total effect on all Christians is positive, that is, that there aren’t just as many people suffering ill effects because of Christianity, as those getting benefits, which I am far from sure about. His argument depends on faith and wishful thinking.

Even if you give him that argument, though, Christianity still doesn’t seem very attractive. The hospital metaphor breaks down pretty quickly. First, Christianity claims we are all sinners, and therefor all sick and should all be in the hospital all the time. With real hospitals, if you are in the state of being like everyone else, you are considered healthy. Healthy people only go to hospitals to help or visit the sick. The church has never healed anyone, and little wonder, since by their own admission it’s not important. Our moral acts cannot win us the favor of God, in fact, any good thing we do comes from God already, so improving the moral character of people is at best a secondary mission to the Christian church. The primary objective is to keep people in the hospital, not to help them. This is not how real hospitals operate, despite what conspiracy theorists might think, and if they did everyone would agree it would be reprehensible.

At best Keller’s argument paints Christianity as a place to get help if you’re desperate. The doctors are sick themselves and don’t have mandate or special motivation to help you, and even if you get lucky and they do help you, they’ll try to keep you there forever to hang out with people sicker than you. It seems clear that an organization specifically dedicated to helping support those in need would be better suited to the task than the Christian church, and even without one available it is unclear that Christianity would be of benefit.

Keller expands on the previous section in this one. He even somewhat speaks to some of my concerns from my critique of the previous section, although I don’t think them resolved. I’ll explain why after I summarize his position.

In this section Keller takes the position from the last section, that restriction is a good thing so long as you find the correct restrictions, and argues that Christianity is the right set of restrictions. He starts by asserting that love is the right sort of restriction. He explains how love is restricting, even though people don’t think of it that way. Then he clarifies that the kind of love he is speaking of is the good, symmetrical sort, not one sided, where each party sacrifices (is restricted) for the other. Then he finally links this to Christianity by saying that the Christian God is different from all other deities in this respect, because he has changed himself for mankind, becoming a man and suffering and dieing.

In my previous post I complained that Keller just didn’t argue that Christianity was the right sort of restriction at all, and he has done so here. He has done so, however, by making a different unsupported assertion, that love is the right kind of restriction. So, I have all the same problems I had in the last post, just now about his claim about love. He has only pushed back the subject of the argument one step, a common argument technique, but not a logically effective one.

But love is nice, everyone likes love. It is much harder to argue against love as a good thing than Christianity. So lets assume Keller is right, and love is a good restrictive environment, the natural restriction to place on all humans at all times. What about the notion that a person can having a loving relationship with God.

First of all, you have to make a lot of assumptions again. You have to assume that God exists and the Christian interpretation of the biblical story of Jesus is accurate and correct, all of which have no evidence and are logically unsound. But let’s make all those assumptions. Then you are left with the claim that an omnipotent being loves a person the same way that person loves that omnipotent being. Keller says,

When you fall deeply in love, you want to please the beloved. You don’t wait for the person to ask you to do something for her. You eagerly research and learn every little thing that brings her pleasure. Then you get it for her, even if it costs you money or great inconvenience.

Well, good news! God is omniscient and omnipotent and he loves you. That means his research will be very thorough and it won’t even be inconvenient for him to do everything you want without you even asking. *sad trombone* Well, clearly that’s not what is happening.

Maybe, you’re thinking, God loves us like a mother (why is Christianity so patriarchal?) and she knows what’s good for us, better than we know ourselves. Maybe she’s created the best universe she can for us beloved humans, while still allowing us free will. But then why are there people like me, who don’t believe in her? Clearly it would help my chances at making the right decisions to get to heaven if I knew she existed, and if she loves me, she should let me know. And if she loves me, why will she torture me forever? If she loves her good Christian followers, why will she torture their unbelieving friends and family?

Keller says,

For a love relationship to be healthy there must be a mutual loss of independence. It can’t be just one way. Both sides must say to the other, “I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I’ll serve you even though it means a sacrifice for me.”

The whole notion of a loving relationship with a god is very problematic. If God is perfect, then how can God change for you, as you change for him? If he did change, he’d necessarily become not perfect, which is impossible. Also, God exists outside of time, and knows all things, so how could anything you do have any impact on him? The Jesus myth does not get around these problems, even if you believe it.

Love is generally a good thing, even though it is restrictive. It helps people get along, it helps holds human society together, and society is a good thing. But that is love between humans. Co-opting the idea of love to tenuously justify your irrationally held religious beliefs, as Keller has done, is either cynical or desperate, and is not acceptable in either case.

In this section Keller attempts to defend Christianity against the charge that it is restrictive, that it constrains an individuals ability to decide what is moral. Since this is obviously true, he argues that it’s actually a good thing. He sites examples from the physical world, like a pianist who practices for many, many hours to become a virtuoso. His thought being that the restriction of freedom while learning, since the pianist can’t be doing whatever he wants and must instead practice, is good, because it allows him to have freedoms he would not have otherwise when he is a master and can play music he never would be able to otherwise. He then goes on to explain that not all restrictions are good and that one must find the right restrictions. From here he asserts that spiritual freedoms should adhere to restrictions as his physical examples do. As argument he uses purport that people believe that some actions are immoral regardless of the beliefs of the person acting, therefor concluding that those people believe in an objective morality, a restrictive framework which must be adhered too, as with the physical world.

There are too many things wrong with this section for me to cover them all. Here a few that bother me the most, in no particular order.

Keller fails to provide any argument that Christianity is a good thing in all of this. Assuming you believe everything in his statements, he still has never provided anything to make you think that Christianity would be the correct restrictive framework. He has provided no list of benefits to your spiritual well being, no evidence of it’s superiority to Hinduism, or Scientology, or Placebo. He didn’t even bother to write a compelling hypothetical. This indicates to me that his position in this section is a post hoc rationalization, and not a position logically reached from a neutral starting point, or he would not have omitted such an important step.

If I give Keller a charitable interpretation I can read this section as an argument not that Christianity’s restrictions are good, but merely that they are not always bad. Maybe he only means to point out that you can’t just assume from that mere fact of restrictions that something is bad, and this is true. However, if this is what he is arguing he is missing the point. The complaint is not really that there are restrictions, more that there are too many restrictions. He has to make the case that the restrictions put on the Christian mind are more beneficial, or less harmful, than the lack of those restrictions, the ability to sample a variety of moral philosophies and choose ones favorites, and make a personal amalgamation. I guess he thinks he has done this with his argument that there is an objective morality because he has an implied premise that Christianity knows this objective morality perfectly. It must be perfect, otherwise people making up their own versions might be superior.  This is a huge unstated premise, that has zero evidence or logical basis. It is a version of the common circular logic, the Bible says I’m right and I’m right because I’m following the Bible.

Perhaps Keller thinks of Christianity as a helpful tutor. A guide that helps people learn about the Truth of morality. But it is only possible to think this way if one is already a believer, you have to have faith that Christianity is the keeper of the knowledge of objective morality. If you don’t accept that claim, then Christianity is just another belief system, one that discourages free individuals (mostly children) from exploring alternative possibilities out of fear that they will choose the “wrong” answer. It is a reasonable thing to do, given the assumptions of a Christian believer, but they are unnecessary assumptions, not shared by everyone.

Finally, I should point out and argue with Keller’s flimsy evidence supporting the notion that there is such a thing as objective morality, on which his whole argument in this case rests. In the section he tells of a frequent exchange that he feels makes his point. A doubter will say, “People should be able to make up their own minds about what is moral,” and he will respond with a question, “Is there someone out there doing something right now that you think should stop, regardless of what that person believes?” to which the doubter will reply, “Yes.” Keller will then feel they have shown that they believe in a moral truth outside of the belief of the actor, but this has not been shown. The doubter has only admitted to not agreeing with the moral stance of someone else, and nothing about who is right or wrong.

Keller should ask, “Can you objectively show that someone should stop their activity, regardless of their beliefs?” to which the answer would be “No,” if we’re being strict about it. Any objective measure, would rely on a value judgement somewhere. Should that man stop murdering people? Only if you value their right to live as greater than his right to kill. Just because pretty much everyone agrees with those values, doesn’t mean it’s objective, it’s still a value judgement.

I didn’t like this section. I feel like Keller himself doesn’t believe what he’s saying, so he sorta just skipped passed it quickly. The take home message is that he’s right that restrictions alone are not a reason to condemn something, however, he has done nothing to refute the complaint that Christianity is unnecessarily and harmfully restrictive to individual believers. His hand waving arguments are distractions, and poor ones at that.