Đức Tin và Bằng Chứng: Bạn Có Thể Tin Vào Những Điều Không Thể Chứng Minh Không?
Doctor Timothy Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania. In 1989, he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons.
He's the author of multiple books, but is best known for his New York Times bestseller.
The reason for God and making sense of God and and making sense of God, from which this series.
Is based a fun trivia fact about Tim tonight is that he's actually a very musical person and he has largely memorized the musical music man from Broadway.
Please join me in welcoming Doctor Timothy Keller.
I memorized some of the music man a long time ago.
So who told her that?
High questioning Christianity.
Why are we here?
We're here.
One reason we're here because we live in a polarized society.
We're polarized about so many things.
Including religion.
And it would be great, wouldn't it?
If we just could find a place where we could.
Talk with each other about religion without yelling at each other.
Now that would be a, I think a contribution.
Now there's a lot of ways to do that.
There are more than one way.
The way we're going to do in during this series is just this.
Seeking to be as respectful as possible to all points of view.
I still am going to each week try to present a thesis, a part of Christianity for I'm going to recommend it to you to say, I think this is something worth worthy of your consideration.
This is something.
Worthy of you.
I believe and there's going to be presentation.
Then there's going to be plenty of time for questioning my presentation.
You get the text in your questions.
You may some of you already have.
You can do it tonight, so it'll be almost equal time.
I hope if I don't run on too far, I'd like to give you a presentation.
Then you get to question me and then afterwards we get to go upstairs and eat.
Not bad food.
And talk informally and I'm I'll be present for you to just come right up and tell me what you really, really think.
And that's what we're going to do.
So each week, that's what we're going to do.
Thesis question.
Go upstairs and talk.
We've done this a couple years a couple other years before and it's been really, really fruitful, and that's what we're doing it again.
Now this first session to some degree I got to set the table.
I've got to do groundwork, and because you can't talk about.
Whether you can believe in God or not, believe in God.
Whether you can believe in Christianity or not, believe in Christianity.
There's no way to do that unless you first go back far enough and say well, how do you decide what to believe in any situation?
How do you believe in anything?
How does faith and reason?
Relate or the subtitle?
Can you believe in things that you can't prove?
How Can you believe in things that you can't prove?
So we've got to get all the way in the back and ask ourselves.
The question how?
Does faith in reason work and the way I'd like to do that tonight is?
I'd like to pose a problem for you.
I'd like to show you a problem, give you a couple of theories that don't work as solutions, and then I'm going to give you what I do think works as a solution.
And a way forward.
So we're setting the table for all the other talks.
Solutions that don't work?
Uh, a solution.
I think that does, and a way forward.
Now here's the problem, and because you probably have your own list, I'm going to give you a list of very smart people that I know of who looked at the evidence and the arguments and converted to Christianity and a whole lot of people who.
Are just as smart who looked at the same evidence, the same arguments.
And they left Christianity became atheists or agnostics tonight when I use the word secular, I'll probably mean certainly an atheist is secular.
Certainly an agnostic is secular.
A lot of secular people say I really don't know, or then there's the indifferent person who says I don't know if there's a God and I don't care.
It's completely irrelevant to me, so there's.
There's a lot of brilliant people who have looked at the evidence and have converted to.
Christianity from being secular or converted to being secular from being a Christian.
I'll give you.
A couple of my own.
You have your own list.
Elizabeth anscombe.
Who taught philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge in the middle of the 20th century, and was probably the most prominent female philosopher in history and a lot of you are saying I never heard of her.
That's telling, isn't it that?
But there's another lecture right there.
Why have you not heard of her?
She's brilliant, brilliant, greatest female philosopher ever.
She converted to Christianity.
Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, is one of the leading scientists in the whole world.
Is the head of the NIH.
3/8 He was an atheist and converted to Christianity.
TS Eliot probably heard of him very very famous playwright, poet, man of Letters, who was an atheist or an agnostic and then converted to Christianity on the other side.
There's some people you know and some of you don't.
People I know Mark Lilla who teaches Humanities at Columbia University brilliant man.
I've been in a couple of forums with him.
He's written some great books recently.
Mark Lilla had a very strong religious background.
And yet he.
Grew up and after becoming an adult he looked at it and said no and became a secular man.
Richard Dawkins very famous guy who was raised an Anglican and somewhere in his late teens, said this is ridiculous and he became an atheist and Bertrand Russell Virgin Russell was a very famous 20th century British philosopher who was an atheist and near the end of his life somebody asked him.
He said Mr Russell, doctor Russell.
What happens if you die and?
You find out you're wrong.
And you stand before God, in his judgment.
See what are you going to do?
And Bertrand Russell didn't miss a beat.
He said.
I'm going to say don't blame me, God, there wasn't enough evidence.
In fact, he said I, I'll say to him, there was not enough evidence.
God not enough evidence, so you know you should not blame me for anything.
But here's The funny thing about this.
TS Eliot Francis Collins, who by the way is a scientist.
Elizabeth Anscombe, who's a brilliant, brilliant analytic philosopher.
They thought there was enough evidence they thought there was plenty of evidence.
So here you have equally brilliant people looking at the same stuff.
One group saying no way, no way.
No evidence at all.
It's no proof, no no evidence, no reasonable even got another group.
Saying yes, there is plenty of it.
How do you?
Account for that.
Don't raise your hands.
Let me suggest 2 theories of how to explain that that I don't think work.
The first one I'm going to be really quick about with this theory because even though I know people who believe this and I've met people who believe this, they run almost.
It's very unlikely any of you.
In this room would be in this in this.
This category, but there are some people who say that the reason why the the this group of people believe and this group of people don't believe is because the secular people are simply closing their eyes to the evidence.
In other words, the people who believe in God are rational.
And the people who refuse to look at the evidence and become atheists and secular people.
They're being irrational and biased.
This approach says this.
This group says look the proofs for God, the cosmological, teleological, ontological, moral.
The proofs of God.
They're really strong, and we're going to get to those sometime in the in the series.
And the evidence for the.
Resurrection of Jesus Christ is very, very strong.
And therefore any rational person who is objective and open minded will simply say why this there's every reason to believe in God.
And if you don't, it's because you have some bias and you're just closing your eyes to the facts.
Now, maybe I may be the reason I'm being so quick on this.
I'm not going to.
Spend much time on it.
I don't think that works for a couple of reasons.
I'm not going to take much time on it.
'cause I again, I don't think any of those people live in New York City.
And here's here's.
Here's a couple reasons why, by the way, there is such a thing as bias.
Secular people can and do have their biases against belief.
The Book of Romans actually talks about them, and I'm going to get to that a little later.
But having said that, spending decades and decades with people
Who wrestled with whether to believe in Christianity or not and wrestled with the arguments and wrestled with the the evidence and all that?
I've spent decades with people, and here's one of the things I know.
There is no even the strongest, but his way even the strongest logical arguments for God and for Christianity always.
They're never completely airtight.
They're never completely airtight.
Maybe there may be one argument that's kind of airtight, but all it does is take you to be to believe in Aristotle's unmoved mover. It doesn't take you to the God of the Bible.
The reality is that there are there are very good arguments.
I'm going to give them to you if you're willing to be here tonight and come back later.
But when when it comes to saying every rational person has to accept the evidence for religion and Christianity, because frankly all the arguments are completely airtight, that's not true.
There's always wiggle.
There's always room for doubt always and the the reality is that so many people I've seen who just cannot believe are people of real intellectual integrity.
So it's really not fair to say, oh, they're just being biased besides that.
I'm a Christian, which means I believe that God wants faith.
And however you define faith, it's more than just reason.
In other words, it to say, well, you know anyone who's open to the evidence would be compelled.
Every rational person over the evidence is compelled would be compelled to believe.
Well, that's all I know is that.
That doesn't make that doesn't leave room for faith.
God has set things up.
This is the Christian view so that you do does it you.
You can't exercise faith, which means whatever that is is somewhat beyond reason.
Reason is not enough to make you a Christian or a believer.
It never has been, and so it's really wrong to simply say, well, religious people.
They they're being rational, and the secular people are being irrational.
And that's the reason why Richard Dawkins and those people and Bertrand Russell.
They just close their eyes to the truth.
Now these are people of intellectual integrity and we we we have to realize there's a limit to just how even the strongest logical arguments for God, but theory too.
The second theory, which is dominant in a place like New York City, and that's how we're going to spend some time on it.
The second theory says this that secular people are secular because of reason, but religious people are religious because of faith.
Secular people have reason, but religious people have faith and they have an emotional need.
To believe.
Secular people are just being unbiased.
They're just simply looking at things with a clear eye of of of reason.
But anyone who becomes a believer has some emotional need.
We're not saying that TS Eliot and Francis Collins and and Elizabeth Anscombe marked smart people, but they must have had some need because.
If you just look at things objectively.
You'll be secular, so that idea is this theory is secular people.
Have reason but religious people have faith and I'm here to tell you that's not true.
Charles Taylor, in his landmark book, a secular age, calls that a subtraction theory.
Now what do I mean by the subtraction theory?
Excuse me, I'll bring this up just so I know.
Charles Taylor says that most secular people tell a subtraction story.
What they mean is they say, I used to believe in God, but then I just took away belief in God in the Super now.
I subtracted it out and now I just see things the way they are with a clear eye of reason I I found this.
You might say testimony on the Internet.
A guy who had been a Christian and he lost his faith and his name is doesn't matter.
I mean he's a name.
His name is ASA Joyce.
But here's what he said.
He was looking at the evidence and he said the question entered my mind.
What is a God for whom there is no real ever?
Since non-existent came the obvious answer, and at that point the blinders of dogma and the yoke of dread were finally taken off for the first time, the universe now shown in a wholesome new light, the comforting glow of reality no longer distorted.
I was free now, Charles Taylor.
Calls that a subtraction story, which is to say I was a believer and I just took out God and the supernatural and I just used my reason.
I got rid of faith and.
Motion and I just I'm looking at it objectively and when I see that now I can finally see things clearly and.
In fact, what they would say is finally I'm.
Able to see life as it is now.
How do they explain, say, Francis Collins and Elizabeth Hanson?
Anscombe and Antaeus like what they say.
Is well, look.
The reality is, there's lots of reasons why you might want God to be there, like you want to believe that when you die it's not the end you want to believe that when you die you could be with your loved ones.
There's all kinds of reasons, emotional reasons that you don't really want to see life as it is.
But if you are just willing.
To get rid of emotion and get rid of dogma and get rid of all these things and just look at the world through the clear.
I've reason without any faith or belief, just objectively.
Then you'll become a secular person.
For the Charles Taylor's massive book, a secular age, and Charles Taylor was a Canadian philosopher, French Canadian philosopher.
He devotes the entire book almost just showing that that's not true, and here's what his thesis is.
And here's my thesis tonight, and this is the thesis I want you to push.
Back on and I happen to know it's a thesis that's very unpopular in New York.
OK thesis is this.
If you're a secular person, secularism is not the absence of belief, it's a new set of beliefs which are just as unproveable.
As other religious beliefs let me say it again, if you're a secular person.
Secularism is not the absence of belief.
It's not just rational objectivity.
It's not the absence of beliefs, it's the presence of a whole new set of beliefs which also are not provable either, and therefore secular people.
And and Christian people equally have to justify their beliefs.
But one does not have the higher moral ground.
Secular people cannot say well we're rational.
And if you religious people can prove God.
Then we'll believe it.
We're rational, and if you give us the evidence, then we'll believe it.
Now I know you're on the same playing field because it's two sets of beliefs, neither of which are provable, both of which need to be justified.
Does that make sense?
I know that it's.
I know it's very unpopular, so let me follow along with what Charles Taylor says to make his case ready.
Charles Taylor says the subtraction story doesn't work.
The idea that secular people are don't have faith, but they're just being reasonable and objective.
The first reason it doesn't work is because you can't disprove the existence of God.
And because you can't disprove the existence of God, that means if you're living as if there is no God.
You're doing it on faith.
You have faith that there is no God.
You're betting your life that there is no God.
And therefore, if you're a secular person, you are living by faith.
See I've talked to many secular people who say this.
I don't believe in the abominable snowman.
Unless you can give me evidence for it, so why should I believe in God unless you give me evidence for it now?
When you say that you're making a category mistake?
It's a category mistake because God no religion.
I'm not talking about just Christianity here.
No religion actually believes that God is an object inside the universe like the abominable snowman.
Here's a better way to understand what religion saying religions.
All the religions of the world say the material world.
Cannot exist on its own.
Matter could not just happen.
Matter cannot just keep itself.
Maintained that there must be something some immaterial being some supernatural reality that generated matter and that upholds matter, OK.
Secular people say no, no, no matter generated it's.
It just it caused itself and it can support itself.
So religious, the religions of the world say matter cannot generate or maintain itself, and secular people say, well yes, yes it can.
There's nothing but matter.
There is no transcendent reality.
Now how are you going to prove one of those views?
Experiment, what scientific test could you use?
To to even test the secular thesis that matter generated itself and doesn't need any undergirding reality behind it.
How do you test for that?
You can't.
When, when a secular person says, well, we don't know where matter came from, it just came.
OK, how do you tattoo you test for that you can't test for that?
Blaise Pascal's famous wager.
Maybe you've heard of it.
He basically says you cannot prove that there is a God, but you cannot prove that there is no God.
It's impossible to prove something like that, and therefore whoever you are you're basing your life and betting your life on an act of faith that either there is or there isn't.
A God.
So secular people actually have a view of.
The material world.
And reality that can't be proven.
And therefore it's based on faith.
That's the first thing Charles Taylor says.
Here's the second thing he says now.
The second reason the subtraction story doesn't work is because there are as many emotional reasons to disbelieve in God as there is to believe in God.
And therefore that's awash.
I'm a believer, and I got plenty of them.
There's plenty of emotional reasons I might want to believe in God, and it might cloud my rational faculties.
But if you are here tonight and you're not a believer, there is plenty of emotional reasons to that.
You might have to not believe it.
You might have to not believe in God.
And that can also cloud your rational faculties.
Thomas and Eagle taught for many years, taught philosophy at NYU.
You very famous.
A philosophy professor down there.
He wrote a book some years ago.
He's an atheist, and here's what he said.
He said I want atheism to be true.
And I am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well informed people I know are religious believers.
It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally I hope that I'm right.
Wait, it's that I hope there is no God.
I don't want there to be a God.
I don't want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem that I have.
Is not rare initial thing called the cosmic Authority problem.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.
One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life.
This is a ridiculous situation.
It is just as irrational to be influenced in one belief by the hope that God does not exist, as by the hope that God does exist.
You may have heard of Aldous Huxley, who was a famous atheist British writer, and he wrote this.
He said the philosopher who finds no meaning in the world, is not concerned exclusively with the problem of pure metaphysics.
He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he should not live the way he.
Wants to live.
I must admit for myself.
The philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality.
I objected to the morality because it interfered with my sexual freedom.
And Tom Nagel adds a footnote.
He says, I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there's a God or not.
Anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn't particularly want either one of those answers to be correct.
See what I'm trying to say is simply this.
There's lots of emotional reasons why you might not want to.
Believe in God because as Aldous Huxley said, and Tom Nagel said, that means I can't live anywhere I want.
But there's also plenty of emotional reasons why I do want.
You might want to believe in God and therefore just realize wherever you are whoever you are, you do have some biases.
You do have some needs that might cloud your rational faculties.
It's not going to be easy.
They referred to think about this in a in a good way in a in a clear minded way.
But you mustn't.
Say all the emotional needs are on that side.
Believers should never say all secular people, they just don't want to believe in God because they want to live anywhere they want.
And second, people might miss when I say oh, religious people.
They want to believe in God so that they can know they can.
Go to.
Heaven when they die well the.
Answer is.
Yeah, they're both true.
And therefore it's a wash that in other words, this argument does not cut either way.
But it certainly does not mean that secular people can just say, oh, there's absolutely no reason why, you know, I'm that.
I'm being totally objective.
Is year what Tom Nagel said at the end.
He said, I doubt very much.
There's anybody who comes to the question about God.
In an objective, unbiased way, I don't believe anybody does.
But here's the main reason why Charles Taylor says secular people have got to admit that their secularism is really a new belief set.
A new set of beliefs, not the absence of belief, is because they have beliefs about rationality and morality.
Secular people have beliefs about rationality, morality.
That are unproven.
And yet, they're the very basis of their lives.
What do I mean by that?
Well, what does he mean by that?
I'm still following Taylor, so Taylor says, for example.
Whenever somebody says I'm just being rational.
If you could prove Christianity to me, or you could prove God to me, then I believe and Charles Taylor, who's smarter than you and me and anybody in this room and who's a philosopher says, would you please define?
He says, you know, there's at least four you can look this up even on even on the online.
Go to Wikipedia.
There's if you put in the word rationality, you'll see there's at least four or five different working definitions of rationality, each one thinking the other ones aren't rational.
And outside of math.
When you talk about proof, there's proof in mathematics.
That's one thing, but proof in law.
Proof in philosophy.
Proof in science.
Nobody agrees on exactly what proof means, and here's the weird thing you cannot advocate for a particular view of proof without using that view of proof, which is the thing you're supposed to be establishing.
Which means reason is always based on antecedent faith.
But let me go on a little further.
Martin Heidegger, the philosopher Michael Polanyi who was a scientist, both wrote about what they called tacit beliefs.
They said anyone, whoever thinks they're being objective never is anyone.
Whoever thinks they're being completely rational never is because we have.
Background beliefs.
That are they call it well?
Michael Pollan called them tacit beliefs, their background beliefs, which are virtually unconscious, but which actually affect whether we consider certain arguments convincing or not.
So let me give you a perfect example of this. Charles Taylor in his book asked an interesting question. He says, why is it that before 1500?
1500 AD you know the year 1500 before 1500, people suffered. They've probably suffered worse than we suffer today, but nobody said that that meant there couldn't be a God.
But since the year 1500, increasingly people say because of evil and suffering, there can't be a God. So you know the arc.
It's called the argument from evil, and the argument, or it.
Technically it's called the theological argument from evil, which is because of the evil and suffering of the world.
God can't exist because it was good.
And all powerful.
He would stop it.
That's the argument.
And we're not going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about it later.
If you're willing to come back, but.
Charles Taylor says, why is it that in the past that argument was totally unconvincing to people?
And why is it today?
It's very convincing to many people, and the answer is he says background beliefs that you're barely aware of.
He said ancient people background belief was that if there is a God, of course I wouldn't understand him.
If there is a God, of course.
My reason my human reason would be incapable of plumbing the depths of him.
But modern people are very, very confident that human reason can figure out the universe very confident.
And therefore modern people say if I can't think of a good reason why God would allow this evil and suffering, there can't be any good reason.
Got that ancient people would never have thought about that.
So why is it that modern people find that argument very compelling?
Ancient people didn't find it compelling at all.
It's the background beliefs that we're not even sure of, but we're not even we don't even see them.
It's the background beliefs, and so Michael, Polanyi and Martin Heidegger say nobody comes to the evidence.
This is, by the way, one of the reasons why Collins over here and Dawkins over here both great scientists would look at the same evidence.
One say yes, God exists and one says no God doesn't exist, because neither of them are.
Completely objective, there's background beliefs about human nature, about the nature of human reason about all kinds of things.
Heidegger and Polania say that are actually affecting the way in which you read.
I'll give you a couple more of those in in a minute, but so you see the main point at first point, Charles Taylor says, if you say I'm being rational, you're defining reason.
You're defining proof.
You've got all kinds of background beliefs, and the fact is that all reason whenever you're rational, whenever you're using your reason, your reason is always.
Grounded on antecedent faith beliefs about the nature of proof, about the nature of reality, and background beliefs that you can you're barely aware of.
And so the one reason why secular people actually are based on faith is because they have faith in a particular view of rationality.
But secondly, and this is maybe the one I'm going to, probably the one that'll.
Hit home the most Charles Taylor says second.
If people still have morals.
Secular people in particular have two two moral values.
He says it's equal human rights and universal benevolence.
Now when Taylor talks about equal human rights, you know what I'm talking about.
The idea that every human being is equal in value and dignity and has rights.
That's one moral belief that.
Second, people have in this second model belief is universal benevolence.
That is, I shouldn't just take care of the poor people in my neighborhood or my family or my race or my community.
I really should be concerned about the the poor and the needy everywhere.
Every place I should be talking.
You know I should be caring about all of them so.
The belief in the.
Moral obligation of honoring human equal human rights and the moral obligation.
Of of of Universal benevolence, he says, now, Charles Taylor says, OK, those are moral beliefs.
Second, you'll have them prove it.
Give me a scientific proof that all human beings are equal.
Give me a scientific proof that everybody have got equal rights.
Do it and the answer is you can't.
Because those moral values all moral values.
If you've got them.
Are always matters of faith.
There's no scientific way to prove them.
But and here's what.
Here's where I'm going to push it a little bit.
For a Christian to believe in human rights, according to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Charles Taylor
And, uh, John Gray, who is a uh philosopher who's still writing right now, and he just recently wrote a book called Seven types of Atheism.
According to Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Taylor and John Gray, who is an atheist by the way.
What they all say is that the idea of human rights and the idea of universal benevolence.
It makes sense.
It's a logical inference.
If you believe there's a God.
Who created the universe?
Who made all human beings in his image and who commands you to love as he loves?
So if you have a God of love who creates everyone and and and puts his image on everyone, then the to believe in universal benevolence and equal human rights for all is actually not a matter of faith.
It might be you might have faith to believe in that.
God, but once you believe in that God, it's a logical inference.
Human rights and universal benevolence.
But here's what Nietzsche says.
Nietzsche says, what if there is no God, which is what he believes?
And what if the universe is impersonal?
And what if we're not here for any purpose?
And what if the only way you got here was through evolution, which is the strong eating the week?
Which is the way of nature.
It is absolutely natural.
For the strong to devour the week, that's how we got here.
That's called evolution.
And Friedrich Nietzsche says, if you still want to believe in equal human rights and you should take care of the poor and the needy, which of course is the exact opposite of the way you got here.
Which is evolution?
Totally opposite if you still want to believe in that, that's fine, but it's an amazing leap of faith.
And by the way, Nietzsche says it's not fine because Nietzsche says if you believe in equal human rights and you believe in universal benevolence, and you say I don't believe in God, you're still believing in Christianity.
Whether you like to believe it or not.
Because he says he says those values made sense in a universe.
In which you had a personal God of love who made everyone they don't make sense in our universe at all.
If you want to believe in them, OK, but it's a massive leap of faith.
A bigger leap than Christians are making.
So for example, John Gray says this about Nietzsche.
He says with few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals.
Awkwardly, knee chief points out that all liberal values derived from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and he rejected those values for that very reason.
What Nietzsche recognizes that you can be rid of God only if you'd also do away with all innate moral meaning.
Civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to all those values that came from the belief in divinity and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested.
You see what's going on?
So for example, a guy named Andrew Koppelman.
He is a professor of law and political science at Northwestern University.
And he's a secular man, an agnostic. He saw calls himself. He reviewed Charles Taylor's book, the Secular Age, and he really felt the power of this whole point.
The subtraction story, and he really felt the power of the argument.
That said, if you are a secular person and you believe in human rights and you believe in.
Universal benevolence, that sort of thing.
You really don't have any basis on it, and it's a it's a complete leap of faith into the dark, and this is what he says, he says.
I'm not prepared to argue.
As other secular people do that there is no transcendent basis for my commitment to human rights, and that my commitment to human rights is a purely contingent historical formation.
And therefore I have to admit there's a permanent gap in my belief system.
He goes on and he tries to say what he means by secular people who say that human rights is a purely historical formation.
What they mean is that they say yeah.
Today we think slavery was wrong because now it's the majority opinion.
But in the past it wasn't wrong.
And in the future it might not be wrong again.
Because there are no moral absolutes, there can't be.
What could.
What could be?
What could be?
What could be wrong with nature.
Nature is strong.
Eat the weak.
What could be wrong with nature?
Unless you have a supernatural transcendent basis by which you can judge some things in nature are right and some things are nature wrong.
But there can't be.
Such a thing so this guy is saying, well, I don't believe in God, but I still believe.
What he says.
I actually believe slavery always was wrong and always will be wrong no matter what the people say, and so his is his final statement quote.
He says modern secularism then.
Is a religious worldview with its own narrative of testing and redemption, and it shares the vulnerabilities of such views.
And there's another guy who's not a faculty member. He's just a guy I found on the Internet who also reviewed Charles Taylor's book. The reason I was interested in it. He is a young man.
His name, her first name is David.
I'll just call him David, who grew up in a very, very very fundamentalist conservative background.
Went a very conservative fundamentalist college and moved to New York City.
Probably 1520 years ago, I think now and lost his faith and he's now a secular person.
And then he read Charles Taylor secular age, which said you are not objective what you've done is you've you have left aside one set of unproveable beliefs and you have just adopted another set of unproveable beliefs.
And this is what he says really, really interesting.
He says.
When I began to lose my faith, a lot of my Christian friends told me I was.
Just trying to be cool.
At the time I told them that my loss of faith was strictly the result of good solid intellectual arguments, all by the way, capitalized good capital, G.
Solid capital S intellectual arguments.
In other words, he basically said it's all a matter.
I just looked at the rack.
The reasons I looked at the evidence.
It's all rational I I'm just being objective.
In other words, he told him.
A subtraction story.
But this is what he said after reading after reading Charles Taylor, I now must concede that rational arguments, though it played a role in the change.
Was my coming to secular beliefs was not a new moral yeah?
Pardon me.
He says OK.
He says what actually happened to me was not me coming out of The Cave into the daylight.
But it was a matter of a new, more or less equally faith based story, eclipsing the old one.
What happened here?
He said, was that as many value judgment, there are as many value judgments in liberal humanism as there are in its parent religion.
In other words, Christianity, and many people who come to the point of unbelief, are happy to accept them despite objecting to what they consider.
The similar UN groundedness of Christianity.
It's amusing now how little my values.
Intrinsically had to do with materialism.
I'd been convinced of nothing about individual liberty, human rights, or civilizational progress follows from the fact that I now believe God is not does not exist.
Now, So what he's saying is I used to say the reason I became a secular person was because I was just being rational.
Actually, I know that my belief in human value, my belief in human rights actually does not follow from my belief that God is doesn't exist.
There was a Alexander no sell off.
He was a Russian philosopher.
And and he says this in a nutshell, trying to say what Nietzsche saying.
He says man descended from apes by a process of the strong eating the weak.
Therefore let us love one another.
And what he was what he was trying to do is summarize what Nietzsche was saying.
He was saying.
I'm sorry the idea of love and of human rights does not follow from the idea that there is no God, and therefore if you want to believe.
In human rights, go ahead, but realize that's faith.
It's faith so.
What's the solution now?
I'm telling you.
That the reason why you get smart people who look at the evidence and come out on different different places.
Is because the process of losing your faith or gaining your faith is more complicated than anybody wants to admit.
It's not just a matter of looking at arguments and.
Sentence number one.
You've got to look at your own background beliefs.
You've got to try to discern your own background, beliefs, and number.
Two, you have to realize wherever you stand at that moment, you're not being objective.
You've got your own set of commitments and beliefs and therefore, the way forward is to compare beliefs.
When I've given this talk before, usually people say wait a minute so you're saying we're all kind of religious we we all are, are filled with faith, yes.
I'm saying that secularism is a set of beliefs.
They're not provable scientifically and logically.
They're not self evident to everyone, and they have their own contradictions and problems.
So some people say, well, that means that we're all sort of stuck in our little bubbles of faith.
We can't, I can't prove my beliefs to you.
You can't prove your beliefs to me, so we're stuck.
No, no, not really, because you can rationally interrogate your set of beliefs.
You can at least least do these five things.
You can, at least of these five things, number one.
You can ask if your beliefs are consistent with one another.
Or whether your beliefs contradict each other #2 you can ask whether your human experience fits your beliefs.
Are you actually able to live your your faith out or do you find that your faith is constantly bumping up against the reality of human experience? #3?
Can you deny something one minute in the very next minute show that you actually had another way.
Believe it.
In other words, not way to put it is.
Can you deny something one minute and yet go on to assume at the next minute, which means you end up borrowing from the beliefs of other systems?
Alasdair MacIntyre.
A philosopher who says, how do you deal with people who've got these different systems is one of the ways you can check is if you have one set of beliefs and you find yourself constantly having to borrow ideas from another set of beliefs and maybe your set of beliefs isn't just isn't really working.
One more is are you willing to embrace the conclusions of your beliefs?
The logical conclusions of your police and if.
Not, why not?
So you see, the point is that even though we can't prove absolutely everything in our set of beliefs to people who've got other beliefs, we can compare them.
What I'm going to do the next several weeks.
Is I'm gonna say here are a number of things that you have got to a, uh, a number of things that you have to have in order to live.
You need to have a meaning in life.
You need to have a way of handling suffering.
You need to have a strong identity.
You need to have happiness and and and and satisfaction in life.
You can't live without these things.
How is your set of beliefs doing?
I'm going to compare how your beliefs are doing with what Christianity offers, and arguably Christianity gives you resources for those things that are unequalled.
So instead of every the next four or five times we meet together, eventually I'd like to give you evidences and arguments.
But that's not how it should start.
The reason you've got smart people that come down on both sides of this smart people who believe in smart people who don't believe is because the process is complex and it's a matter of comparing your sets of beliefs.
I want you to think about what you believe.
And compare it to Christian beliefs.
In how the two sets of beliefs do with accounting for reality in helping you face suffering and giving you an identity, which is how you're supposed to test these things.
Last idea.
Jesus Christ was once approached by a man.
Who said would you come heal my son?
Jesus said, sure, I'd be happy to heal your son.
If you believe.
And what the man said is.
Crying out in desperation, he says, I believe.
Help my unbelief?
Wow, there's an honest man.
I believe, but I don't really believe it was.
Like you know I.
Just says hey, if you believe I'll heal your son, I believe I know.
I don't believe I believe.
Help my unbelief and guess what Jesus does?
Does he say I'm sorry, not good enough.
You need to go to Tim Keller.
Question Christianity.
You need a.
You need to get at least.
Oh, you know you just need a lot more certainty of you gotta get rid of these doubts.
What does he do?
Some of you know he heals the boy.
Now, as I say, two things number one come into faith as a process.
It's a process, and Jesus recognizes that, but here's the other thing.
The faith that Christians are looking for is not some pure perfect psychological certainty.
Because, at least in the Christian understanding of things, it's not the quality of your faith that saves you the purity of your faith that saves you.
It's the object of your faith that saves you if you're about to fall off a Cliff and you just reach out scared to death and grab a branch, and it holds you up, you're saved, why?
What saved you?
Was it the quality of your faith?
No, you weren't sure when you grabbed the branch.
You weren't filled with certainty.
Will feel.
You weren't sure, but when you grabbed that branch even without a whole lot of perfect faith, it saved you why?
It's the object of your faith, not the quality and purity of your faith that saves you.
And so the Christian understanding of faith is it is a process.
It is messy.
It is complicated.
You it is a process of thinking and intuition.
Yes, you can use your reason and yes you can use your intuition.
But when it all comes down to it, the Christian understanding is it's a commitment to Jesus that saves you, not the quality of your faith.
You don't have to be perfect in all this.
It's messy and Jesus has mercy on those that doubt.