Tag: The Reason for God

Keller, in this section, is answering the charge that Christianity is culturally rigid, or stifling. He does so by suggesting that Christianity is culturally diverse and has spread to many varied cultures on the globe. He says the fact that it has done so is evidence that it is culturally tolerant, at least compared to other religions. He cites rapid increases in the number of Christians in Africa and Asia in the last half century. He also quotes a Christian and African author, Sanneh, who agrees with his notions and says that existing cultures are incorporated into Christianity, at least, in the case of Africa. Keller also references his own congregation, in New York City, heavily in this section, as an example of Christianity molded to a local culture.

I will assume that Keller ignores the vast cultural diversity within Africa and Asia and lumps them together for the sake of brevity, and I will do the same. The fact that Christianity has and is spreading is questionable evidence for it’s cultural flexibility. An alternative explanation would be that Christianity has the greatest combination of proselytization mandate and resources. It seems like this would be a large contributor, at the very least.

That said I think I mostly agree with Keller here. Christianity is pretty varied around the globe, and the things required to be a Christian (belief that Jesus is/was the son of God, died for sins, resurrection, etc.) don’t actually impact daily life terribly often. Religion is important to culture, but people, at least with Christianity, do have some flexibility in the way they express their Christianity.

The main problem in regards to culture, with Christianity, is shared by all religions, which is that they encourage people to act as if they know, with 100% certainty, things that they do not, and cannot, know. This sometimes leads to destructive behavior with regard to culture. Religious fervor can drive people to do terrible things, like genocide and war, which is definitely not good for the cultures involved. More intimate examples are those of “witches” and homosexuals. People considered witches (and this is actually still a problem in Africa) were almost always those outside the mainstream of the majority Christian culture. Their cultural freedom may have been limited anyway, by human nature, and they may have been insulted and shunned, but they probably would not have been burned alive if not for Christianity. The more apparent example, in the U.S., is homosexuality, or gay culture, which is certainly being repressed all over the globe, but most intensely in places with religious traditions against homosexuality, namely Christian and Muslim nations. Minority cultures are not treated well in general, but religions, Christianity included, give people certainty, which can lead to terrible extremes.

As I mentioned in the last post, people are diverse enough, and we have plenty of reasons to distinguish the in group from the out group without the added layer of religion. Religion is an unnecessary level on top of human nature and culture that can cause problems, and, in fact, likely will, for the reasons argued above. The level of cultural tolerance between religious people is actually evidence of how little people really believe in their religions. If people truly believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, then they have a divine obligation to murder adulterers and those who work on the sabbath(s)(Leviticus 20:13 and Exodus 35:2). My point in mentioning this is that Christianity is actually more culturally insensitive than Christians are.

My stance is that religion is rarely the root cause of cultural problems, since religion is so esoteric. It is, however, capable of being an accelerant to any animosity. Religions, Christianity included, do not stomp out cultures, but one culture might be emboldened by the messages of religion, Christianity included, to stomp out another.

This section is again off, what I consider to be, the main topic. To be fair, though, Keller is addressing reasons given against Christianity, and not all of them have to do with the existence of god.

In this section he addresses the complaint that Christianity is too restrictive or selective a community. That they are closed and judgmental. Keller admits that some forms of Christian exclusivity are bigoted and unjust, but says that is not the fault of Christianity as a whole, and that similar fringe behaviors can be found in many larger communities. He also argues that any community must set some limits on membership, or the meaning of the community is lost.

On this we agree. It is clearly necessary to the meaningfulness of a group to have some restrictions on membership. And groups have the right to form, in my opinion anyway, around whatever set of beliefs they want to. I think there are enough important distinctions and points of contention in the population, though, that dividing people up over belief in various mythical minutia is counter productive.

Keller, and others I imagine, would argue that Christianity is a community of people with shared moral beliefs in helping the poor, and loving thy enemy, etc. etc. but in practice, I think, this is not the case. There are many other organizations that are better organized around moral codes, various activist and charity organizations for example, than Christianity is. By this I mean the diversity of opinion of various moral issues within the Christian community will be greater than within those secular organizations with clear moral positions. The practical divisors between Christians and non-Christians are belief, or professed belief, in various stories about Jesus and Mary, which seem a silly thing to form such an fervent community around. This, I think, is the more clearly stated objection to Christianity Keller is hearing, and he hasn’t addressed it, at least not so far.

Still, this is not an argument against the existence of Christianity. I think groups should be able to exist around whatever beliefs they want. It is just an argument against membership in that group.

In this section Keller pits Foucault against C. S. Lewis. He presents Foucault’s case as being that any declaration of truth is actually a power play, and that truth is entirely relative. He quotes C. S. Lewis’s objection to to this, which is that Foucault’s premise is itself a declaration of truth, so it would work against itself. C. S. Lewis also makes the analogy of a window, saying that you see through a window, like Foucault claims you can see through a declaration of truth, but that this is only useful if there is something to see behind the window. If everything is a window, then there is nothing to see.

I think I agree with Keller in this particular case. Not all declarations of truth are power plays and not all statements of fact are equally valid.

I think this boils down to the question, does reality exist? Is there an objective truth, a right answer. I think there is. This is one of the few assumptions required to be a rational materialist. As an assumption, I cannot logically prove it. However, I think science’s track record of correct predictions provides decent evidence.

So I agree with Keller on this one. I have a caveat to mention, though, and that is to distinguish between Truth and truth. Capital ‘T’ Truth gets used in a lot of strange ways, but I understand it to mean the absolute, immutable, 100% true state of things. Basically, the way the universe really is. I believe such a thing exists, but I do not believe it is knowable. We can use the scientific method to approach it, and sometimes we describe the best of our efforts in that regard as lowercase ‘t’ truth, but we cannot fully understand Truth. Anyone who claims to know Truth, especially on extremely complex subjects as human behavior, is not believing in the same sort of thing as me. Keller in this section does not seem to be presenting anything problematic in this regard, but I want to address it now to avoid confusion if the various “truths” are conflated.

I don’t really know what to do with the next several sections. My initial thought was to ignore them, since there are no arguments in them, but I have decided to lump several of them into a group and at least comment on them. Since these sections are not in the same format as the previous ones, my response will also be somewhat different.

A brief summary of the content of these sections (the rest in chapter 2 if you are following along) is that Jesus died on the cross and suffered. According to Keller this means that God must love us, and the reason for suffering is not that God is just being mean, since he came down and suffered with and for us. Keller then goes on to speak of heaven, and how it will be so glorious as to undo all suffering, and that heaven will actually be better because of all the suffering. He gives as a comparison the increased appreciation and pleasure in a treasured object after it is recovered from being thought lost forever.

I know it might seem like it to some readers, but there are actually no arguments for the existence of god in any of these sections. So I have nothing strictly on topic to say. I will try to follow Keller a bit, though, in case anyone is interested.

Keller, in these sections, assumes the existence of God (that’s why there’s no argument) and then makes several other large claims, and provides no evidence. He claims that Jesus existed, was the son of God (and also God), and that he died and was resurrected. He uses these assertions to claim that God loves us, but since the assertions are baseless, so are claims built on them. He also claims that there is a life after death, and that in at least one form it is so perfect as to undo all earthly suffering. All of this can safely be ignored, since they are just assertions without backing.

There is a tenuous connection to our previous arguments about suffering, when Keller asserts that heaven will make all the suffering worth it, which could be interpreted as a reason for suffering. First, this is a terrible argument because it rests on the assumption that heaven exists, which has not been established, to say the least. Second, this is actually a simple reworking of the original argument, that suffering is good for us, since it makes existence after the suffering better. I’ll remind you of my argument against this, which is that God can do anything, which would include making existence exactly as good as he wants regardless of previous suffering, thus rendering the suffering unnecessary.

I don’t feel like I am really qualified or interested enough to argue here about the internal logical inconsistencies of the biblical Jesus myth. All I will say is that, at least to my reading, there are many.

I also feel that I should point out, just in case, that the bible, and all the stories in it, are not evidence of god. The authority of the bible as a reliable source rests on the existence of god, so it is circular to then use the bible as evidence for god.  Put another way, if there is no god, then the bible is just an old book like any other, so why would you believe everything it says?

Keller sets up this argument in the, “if you don’t buy my last argument, that’s okay because of this,” position. It is the notion that the existence of suffering is equally a problem for atheists. A C. S. Lewis favorite, he is quoted in the argument, it asserts that without God any notion of good or evil is personal and therefor can’t be used as a critique of God. The argument asserts that if you are an atheist there cannot be anything good or bad, just things you like or don’t like.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t matter. The atheist does not need to provide reasons to disbelieve in god, the theist needs to provide reasons to believe.

But besides that, another problem is that it is actually somewhat testable, and is almost certainly wrong. We can check to see if people who don’t believe in God are more prone to doing bad things than those who do. Of course, this get’s complicated in a hurry, because nobody agrees on what god says is good, what to do on the Sabbath(s), what can’t I eat etc. etc. And even supposedly the same god has changed his mind over time. Beating your children and wive(s) used to be morally obligated, owning people used to be fine, etc. etc.

But even if you ignore all that, and focus on just the things the various gods seem to agree on things don’t go the theists’ way. There are societies that had laws against stealing, killing, lying, etc. before modern gods were even thought of. The countries today with the highest number of atheists have the lowest rates of those crimes.  There are even studies suggesting “moral” behavior in other social animals, such as apes.

So probably, the assertion is false, but even if it isn’t, that just is evidence there’s not absolute good, not that there is a god.

The one line refutation of this argument goes something like, “You’re saying the fact that I detect suffering proves there is a god? So there is suffering. So he’s not the nice Christian God.” See previous argument.

Personal Thoughts: This argument is very popular and comes up over and over. I have a few notions about why.

Some people seem to think that this argument uses evolution against the atheist, but this is based on a misunderstanding of evolution. These people say that it’s impossible to evolve a sense of cruelty since evolution (or natural selection) is itself cruel, so evolved creatures would be used to it. Basically that’s just not how evolution works at all, and it’s totally possible to evolve so as to be unhappy with the way evolution works, or anything else for that matter.

Some people like this argument because it sorta shifts the question from “does god exist?” to “do absolute truths exist?” Some people just feel like there should be an absolute good, and an absolute evil, and using this argument you can suggest to them that if they believe in those absolutes they have to also believe in god, preferably the arguer’s version. This is not true, though. Just as there are infinite number of supernatural possibilities as the source of this absolute good, there is also the possibility that there is no source, that it is just an intrinsic law of the universe. Belief in an absolute good is certainly not evidence of any specific god or supernatural belief.

Another reason I think this argument is popular is that theists think that atheists are under the same restrictions they are. They forget that atheists don’t actually need there to be an absolute good and evil, so they think the argument is more powerful than it is.

Also, if anyone cares for my personal opinion, I don’t think there is some sort of absolute good. I also am not a complete moral relativist. I think humans, and other social animals, have evolved behaviors that manifest as moral inclinations. Also, I think we can/could use the scientific method to devise systems of behavior (a morality) to achieve agreed upon goals as a society. We could study different populations with different behaviors and determine which presents desired results. Actually, I think we do this already informally, just slowly.