A while ago a friend left The Reason for God by Timothy Keller at my house. I dunno their intentions exactly, but it might have mostly just been the irony of setting it next to The God Delusion on my shelf. I flipped through it a bit a while ago and found it boring and unconvincing, but I have not read even a tenth of it.
I thought I might give a shot at addressing all the various arguments presented in the book. The book is around 270 pages, but the arguments in it make up about 2% of that. Mostly he drones on with examples from his congregation and such, so addressing the arguments will not take me very many pages. I will take them on one at a time whenever I can and post them here. I will not attempt to be complete in my rebuttal, just adaquate. By this I mean I will not elucidate all the ways he is wrong, just one or two that spring to mind and that I can articulate quickly.
Also, it is possible there will be some arguments in the book that I can’t address, at least not directly. In fact, I’d be sorta surprised if there weren’t. This does not mean that I believe there is a god, or that there is one. It is simply the nature of logic. There are sound arguments for all sorts of false things. Normally we would do experiments to create definitive arguments, but in the case of god this is not possible, so we’ll just have to judge for ourselves what the most reasonable conclusions are.
Anyway, in general I’ll try to keep the posts short and sweet. If you feel that more time should be devoted to the argument, then ask a question or make a point, or elaborate for yourself in the comments.
For anyone following along at home I am skipping to page 23 in Chapter 2 where he makes his first argument. Also, throughout this series I will use capital ‘G’ God to refer to the Christian notion of a omnipotent, omniscient, merciful god, and lowercase g to refer to a more general god concept. Since the book is Christian apologetics, I will likely usually be referencing the capital ‘G’ type.
Evil and Suffering Isn’t Evidence Against God
Keller states that the atheist position is that a good god would not allow pointless suffering, and since there is pointless suffering there is either no god, or no good god. Then he correctly points out that just because we can’t think of a point to the suffering, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Then he lists some cases where he thinks suffering has been beneficial.
The problem is that God is God. He can do anything. Meaning, whatever benefit was gained by the suffering, God could bestow without the suffering. Thus, all suffering is pointless. Thus, there is no God.