Tim Keller is the founder and current senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a decent-sized multi-campus church in Manhattan with a membership of a bit less than 2,000. Keller is an author of books on Christian apologetics, and he’s come up on my radar from a number of directions, and behest from friends and pastors has inclined me to give him a look. His apologetics opus is The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, released in 2008. In 2016, he released Making Sense of God which he calls a “prequel” to his aforementioned oeuvre–which I have yet to read.
Sense is ostensibly written for non-believers, but it’s hard to nail a target audience—I think a consequence of the writing process more than any rhetorical or intentional persuasive effort on Keller’s part. The book devotes most of its time exploring various non-religious ways we can find meaning in life, and its overarching thesis is that these will ultimately lead to futility, but Christianity does not suffer from these limitations.
It’s hard to organize thoughts on a book like this, so forgive the stream of consciousness. Nor am I keen on making a point-by-point rebuttal here. What I want to say upfront is that my of most salient impression of Keller is that he is making all of his arguments on good faith. He genuinely seems to have made a real, conscientious effort to explore viewpoints alternative to his own with an effort to genuinely understand them, not merely to refute them. And he also doesn’t half-ass his inquiries. I immensely appreciated that, regardless of any disputations I would put forth on his work. Keller evidences this effort better than any other published apologeticist I have read.
[Begin personal digression] To give you some examples of apologetics I’ve already gone through: I’ve actually written elsewhere on Lee Strobel, who I basically think is a pompous douche. A gifted rhetorician, but I would summarize his approach as bad faith. William Lane Craig, while way less douchy, still seems remarkably incapable of understanding the variety of opposing viewpoints despite having a damn philosophy PhD (inb4 I mean “because of”, not “despite”). C.S. Lewis, despite being an immensely influential writer in Christian apologetics, which I would attribute to his conciseness in particular, really never does much to explore opposition in anything that I’ve seen of his. I suppose I can also mention Hovind, Ham, and Hagee as res ipse loquitur? Dinesh D’Souza was also a frustrating read—and that’s not even touching on his fairly atrocious non-apologetics opining. And on the antiquities side Eusebius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas are erudite reads, but not exactly arguing with someone like me in mind—I actually really want to read Pascal in detail; his writing seems way more honest and insightful than the summaries of his grossly misunderstood “wager” that seems to be his theological legacy.
[End personal digression]
In Sense, Keller sets out to explore how we can make sense of the world if we were to not believe in God. He presents these arguments that any of the ancient philosophers would see as the sensible way to discuss philosophy: that is, abstract ideas are all well and good, but how shall we live our daily lives? Philosophy oughtn’t be something just to talk about at the bar or around the campfire, but something eminently practical that helps us get about day to day. In the West, our philosophy of daily life was basically monopolized by Christianity. And that’s just a descriptive fact, not a value-judgment. But what then shall we do when we no longer embrace Christianity? Something has to fill the void. The break in the monopoly of Christianity is a recent thing, picking up momentum since the Enlightenment of the late 18th century (not that there aren’t earlier precedents). In that time, philosophers both professional and lay have been looking to fill the void.
Keller attempts to describe some of the major perspectives that have arisen and gained popularity in that time. These are not a cohesive, monolithic set of views, and Keller readily explains this to the best of his ability—which I appreciated. Keller faces the problem we all do when talking about these perspectives and philosophies: what do we call them? Keller settles on “secularism” and variations of the word. He explains at the outset the trouble with this, particularly that the term secularism itself has multiple uses, and often does not imply any of the myriad of philosophical positions he discusses and also that the many secular post-Enlightenment views that have made their way into the popular culture and zeitgeist are not a monolith. Nonetheless, it is a gigantic pain in the ass to have the kind of conversation he’s aiming for without a word to describe these beliefs as a group. And we really don’t have a good one that he’s missed or anything. Personally, I would (and have in my own argumentation) opt for the term “secular-humanism”, but I also didn’t have to type it like a thousand times in a book either. So I take no objection to Keller picking the word particularly because he bothered making an effort to define what he meant by it.
The big danger with discussing a variety of ideas as an Other to Christianity, etc. is that it becomes super easy (and tempting) to equivocate. I can’t tell you how many times in my years of discussing apologetics I have seen some variety of the argument “this is a secular philosophical viewpoint; atheists have secular philosophical viewpoints; ergo all atheists have this particular philosophical viewpoint”. It’s goddamn maddening. And again, Keller appears to make a good faith effort to avoid this line of reasoning. I will say I found myself in a couple points thinking, “okay dude, you’re equivocating here”, and every time I would think that, by the next page he would issue some kind of point re “but, it’s important we don’t start equivocating on this”. It was frustrating, but forgivable.
Keller spends most of his book going through different approaches secular thinkers have used to answer the essential question of “how do we find meaning in life” in the event that we take the non-existence of God as a given. He references paragons of literature and even some popular culture touchstones, and quotes at length. Stylistically, this was my biggest frustration with his book, although it certainly doesn’t undermine any of his arguments. The extensive quoting, certainly a by-product of Keller’s erudition and love of reading, got tedious pretty quickly. The texts quoted served to give a sample of the quoted author’s perspective in that author’s own words. Which is totally fair. But Keller himself is also a perfectly fine summarizer, and the quoting was unnecessary (I blame English teachers for popularizing this practice). But, perhaps the verbosity is helpful for readers who haven’t been so immersed in literature. The literature, etc. that Keller uses as his paragon examples would delight the hearts of any lit professor—even cynical contrarians like Camile Paglia or the late Christopher Hitchens! Given the scope of his task, I think the selection was pretty sensible.
Keller, better than any other Christian author I’ve read, seems to genuinely give a fair shake to atheistic viewpoints. After getting the tired “Oh, so if there’s no God, and therefore no objective morality, you’re saying Hitler and Stalin didn’t do anything wrong” line thrown in your face dozens of times, it’s nice to read a book where the author treats atheists as sensible enough humans to have a more nuanced perspective than that. I realizes that most people do have a system of morality and an answer to the “what is the purpose of life” question that isn’t completely unreasonable.
What was also impressive is that he seems to give atheistic viewpoints a fairer scrutiny than any of the New Atheists I’m familiar with. Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins have been hugely inspirational to me as an aspiring scientist. Christopher Hitchen’s is far and away my favorite political commentator–irrespective of his views. But their analysis of religion and philosophy is maddeningly facile. The God Delusion and God is Not Great are fine rebuttals to someone like Kent Hovind, but useless beyond anyone with any slightly more advanced grasp of religion—which is, thankfully, a ton of people. I would recommend neither book to anyone but the most sheltered religious youth, and only then as a launchpad for skepticism. Keller’s Sense takes the more facile philosophical arguments new atheism brings to the fore and scrutinizes them fairly (and again, obviously these are not new to the new atheist zeitgeist). And honestly, I would have loved to see Keller narrow his scope to these critiques alone.
And that’s the letdown. Keller does a pretty excellent job going through and presenting reasonable summaries of philosophical viewpoints and adducing how they will ultimately not hold up to sustained scrutiny. And if that was the entirety of Sense, I would be buying copies to give away left and right. The first half of his book or so is effectively a great essay on nihilism. That is, if you dig deep enough and scrutinize your beliefs closely enough, you will find that they are ultimately, in some meaningful way, untenable. But, Keller is a Christian. And his objective is to convince you that everything is ultimately meaningless except Christianity. It’s not an unfair view, obviously, but throughout the book, the spectre of this view looms large in the shadows, and knowing that conclusion was coming was a disappointment. What Keller never manages to do is hold up his faith to the same scrutiny that he does everything else. The meaningfulness of Christianity rests on faith. And that faith is not acquired reasonably. Keller never addresses that conundrum—I suspect he has not hit it head on in his own life.
Keller spends the roughly second half of his book explaining the various ways that Christianity can provide meaning in your life. Essentially, I don’t disagree with his thesis to this end. And had he written the book impartially, again, I’d be handing people copies left and right. Christianity can absolutely do this, and it’s a failure in the argumentative process of new atheism to dismiss this. Keller also does a decent job adducing this thesis. But Keller isn’t impartial here, and his proselytization makes his argumentation frustrating. Keller’s Christianity is the product of a modern, well-educated mind. Effectively, Keller’s Christianity is by definition that which can provide a logically consistent answer to the great problems in life. The idea that the Christianity of the apostle Mark is functionally distinct from Keller’s in many fundamental ways is one he doesn’t consider—to be fair, I have literally never met any Christian who will concede this, which I understand. Most Christian philosophy isn’t anywhere in the Bible (e.g. the Trinity, the argument from design), it’s the product of Christian philosophers who have been honing these answers for nearly 20 cenuries. Keller, like every other man of faith, got the faith first and then uses philosophy to fit the faith to his perspectives. The faith can inform the perspectives, but it’s to a limited extent. Because in no universe will anyone sit down with no preconceptions, sift through the big questions, and come to the conclusion that a Jewish carpenter from 2000 years ago would be the answer to everything. Zach Weinersmith put it succinctly in this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-03-11
And to be fair, this faith-precedes-explanations mode of seeing the world is how basically everyone works, faith or no faith. Our morality and political opinions are formed by a number of different, mostly unconsciously acquired means, and we defend/rationalize them with philosophy, rarely ever the other way around. The number of people who get to that honest to God realization that almost no belief structure of theirs was acquired by contemplation and logic and none of them hold up to sustained philosophical scrutiny is, in my experience, genuinely under 1% of the population. For the most part, most people just don’t give a shit. And Keller has inspired me to be more vocal about this realization. In my life, I know dozens of self-described atheists and agnostics. Aside from myself, I only know (personally) one self-described nihilist. None of the others care that there isn’t a God on a day-to-day basis. Any flights of existential terror, if any, don’t make it to Facebook or the bar. The ultimate meaninglessness of life just doesn’t come up—at least not for long if it does.
Keller closes Sense with a rather quick summary of the classical arguments for God’s existence, offering nothing terribly convincing—although I’ve obviously heard them all many times before. I get the impression that he goes to a greater length of this in The Reason for God. It seems more pro-forma than anything.
My summative assessment: Keller would be an excellent nihilist if he stopped letting his Christianity get in the way.