Finished reading: Reason for God
As I’ve said before, I began reading “Reason for God”, as a part of NCB winter break book club thing.
Well, I’m finally done with the book (as of last week), and I can make … general comments about the book—which is great because that’s all I have the time for at the moment.
So the book is broken into two parts. In the first part, Rev. Keller breaks down secularist arguments by arguing, (1) moral relativism (which is essentially the basis of secularism) is internally inconsistent: relativism doesn’t provide enough ground for the tenets of relativism itself, (2) doubt applies to everything; both to the Christian faith and non-believing atheism.
In the second part, Keller tries to provide the argument for Christianity—why it might be true (given the arguments given in first part, we concede that it’s not possible to prove a belief beyond all doubt—or perhaps even reasonable doubt), and why one might want it to be true.
To be blunt, I find the first part far more convincing than the second part. As I read Rev. Keller’s argument for Christianity, as a natural skeptic (but you all know that I put my skepticism to rest on certain aspects), I keep finding myself in the Devil’s advocate’s position, arguing counter-points and alternate plausible explanations that does not involve God or Jesus Christ (like a good lawyer or mathematician, I don’t have to believe in arguments that I advance; if I couldn’t do that, I would have to give up pretending to be a sophist). In contrast, I found myself mostly agreeing with Rev. Keller in the first half; it’s far much easier to agree that skeptical points of views he offered in the first half are reasonable than to agree that the options Rev. Keller is left with in the second half are indeed the only choices left for a reasonable person.
But through both the first and the second part, here’s one argument Rev. Keller makes for Christianity (that I’ve also seen Pastor Allan make, I think last week) that I do find compelling. Christian Bible, especially New Testament, is a true account, at least to the best knowledge of authors and as well as it has been transmitted to us (as verified by agreements between a number of papyri and archeological evidences), and here’s the reason why: the accounts in the gospels are so embarrassing (e.g. Peter denying Jesus three times) and so counter-productive (e.g. women, who didn’t count for much at the time, being the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection) that one wouldn’t make up things like that as propaganda. In fact, the only reason one would even tell such a story is because it is true and one feels obliged to tell the truth.
I found the very last chapter a little … too mysterious for me, but other than that, the book provides plenty of food for thought. In the end, there’s no guarantee that it will convince a non-believer—or even a seeker—or that it will not derail a supposed Christian, but one would be better off for having read this book than not.