Monday, May 11, 2009
I was reading Timothy Keller's The Reason for God. It was a pretty good book although I am already acquainted with some of the things he talked about. But the chapter on the Clues of God changed my perspective on generally the proving of God altogether. Subconciously I always felt that although not everything about God can be proven, but the evidence I have on my hands were soild proof to certain foundations of Christianity. But I appreciated Keller's insight upon this. Paraphased, what he was trying to drive at was that the there was a way to disprove everything that Christians claim to prove if we are looking at a airtight proof. Take for example, the argument about how everything in the universe were precisely calculated to sustain life meant that there must god. A skeptic could easily argue that well you can't prove or disprove Christianity with that piece of evidence. It could be an intelligent creator, it could be chance. Even if there was an intelligent creator it might not be the God of the bible either. So in a sense, the evidence kind of does nothing. And if you really run through many of the arguments for Christianity, it kind of appears that way too.
The question is, then how?
Keller proposes something called critical rationality in which he recongises that the dilemna as mentioned above exists. But one cannot deny that all these evidence gives one a CLUE that God exists. And following on that train of thought, he wrote that, at the end of the day things makes more sense when you put on the lenses of Christianity in light of the evidence than everything else (he went on to talk about how evolutionary naturalism and all fails in light of seeing everything as a concrete whole).
What I really liked about this section of the book is that, Keller admits that there is NO airtight proof of God per say. Which makes sense right, isn't it? If God is the ultimate playwright of our lives, then how are we going to find it? It's something like, using CS Lewis' example, how can Hamlet try to find Shakespeare in his attic? But what we do have on our hands are thus clues to the existence of this God. And the combination of these clues would be a very formidable force.
May I add something at the same time? I think the issue at hand is that, we are all flawed human beings. If that is so, then our thinking must be flawed isn't it? Therefore, although God gave us the gift of reason, if our fundemental nature is flawed, doesn;t it mean that there is also a possiblity that some of our rationalisations about things are wrong as well?
This, alongside the fact that evidence/arguements can be easily disputed, serves as a warning to myself as well that we must always listen to people who we try to talk to them about Christianity and beware of falling into the self righteous trap as well by sounding like a intellectual idiot by forcefully tweaking science and knowledge into Christianity when it really does not fit. We have got to listen and give others the credit of their arguments before we tear them down, in love.
Innocence
8:36 PM
