Faith in doubts

The Rev. Timothy Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, provides a treatise on faith and doubt in his book “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism,” published in February.

In the first half of the book, Mr. Keller analyzes and dismantles doubts proffered about the Christian faith. In the second half, he offers reasoned arguments for faith and uses literature, philosophy and pop culture to explain how believing in a Christian God is a sound and rational practice. He also gives believers tools to defend their faith.

Mr. Keller is ordained by the Presbyterian Church in America. He served as a pastor in Hopewell, Va., from 1975 to 1984.

Question: Why did you want to write this book? What message do you hope to get across?

Answer: I wrote the book because a number of people asked me to write it. It’s the kind of thing we preach and teach at Redeemer, and it represents the material that has been presented orally for many years. The main message of the book is you can listen to all the strongest intellectual objections and you can think through them and still come out with a strong, robust faith in classic Christian teaching.

Q: Why has the discourse between believers and nonbelievers become divided?

A: There’s a series of reasons people have come to doubt Christianity, and the first half of the book is about that. There are doubts about the Bible. There are doubts arising from the teaching of evolution and Darwinism. There are doubts arising from Christian people having acted in an unjust way. What’s going away is a moderate faith … people believing mildly and not wanting to talk about it.

The conflict is getting hotter because both sides — secularism and strong religious beliefs — are getting stronger as the middle ground is collapsing.

Q: Why is there a growing skepticism toward traditional religion?

A: One part of it is the fault of traditional religion, where there’s self-righteousness, bigotry, inconsistency and hypocrisy. It’s also partly the result of the selfish individualism of Americans. They don’t like organized religion. They don’t like to be part of communities.

Q: Why is it important for believers to examine their doubts?

A: Believers need to do that for two reasons. If you deny your doubts and if you don’t take them seriously, they’ll bite you back later on. Doubts can push you into understanding your faith much, much better. Doubts can lead you to think out why you believe what you believe. And you need to question your doubts, so you can help other people with theirs. You need to deal with your doubts not only for your sake but for that of your neighbors and friends.

Q: How should nonbelievers also “look at doubt in a radically new way”?

A: Unbelievers, or people who don’t believe, don’t see that there is faith in their doubts. They see their doubts as hard-nosed skepticism, but what nonbelievers don’t see is that their doubts are filled with faith. There are faith assumptions in their doubts.

Q: Can you explain how building our lives on anything other than God causes those things to become enslaving addictions?

A: That’s a big part of the book. That’s what Soren Kierkegaard says. He basically says, if you build your life on human approval — in other words, on getting people to like you — you’re absolutely enslaved. If you build your self-image on your power, when you lose an election or your job you will be devastated, because you’re enslaved to power because you need to have it.

But if you build your self-image on God’s love, you can handle it when people don’t like you, when you lose power, when you lose control. To build your life on anything finite means these things can enslave you.

Q: You say in the “Intermission” chapter that we sense that the world is not the way it ought to be. What would bring the world to its rightful place?

A: The Christian answer is the second coming of Christ. We would never put too much trust into one program. We would never say any particular thing would save us. We’re not utopian; we don’t overtrust in human plans.

Q: In the first half of your book, you dismantle several common objections to Christianity. Can you address one of these, “You can’t take the Bible literally,” and explain what you mean by this?

A: People who say this mean they think there’s lots in the Bible you can’t literally trust. You’ve got to take some of it symbolically and write some of it off as legendary and primitive. That is the objection. I argue that you can trust everything in the Bible.

Q: Can you summarize your thesis in the second half of the book of the reasons for belief in God?

A: The second half of the book shows that belief in God makes more sense of our life than belief that there is no God. It makes more sense of love, moral obligation, human rights and of our experiences, our flaws and our problems. The second half also lays out what Christianity really teaches.

Q: After reading your book, is there still room for a nonbeliever to doubt?

A: Sure there is. In the “Intermission,” I try to say that I don’t believe in what’s called “strong rationalism,” the idea that there’s an argument that you can come up with that all rational people have to believe in. What I try to say is, rationally you can’t prove God; you can only reason to where God’s existence is probable. You can only get to certainty, not with reason, but with your whole life commitment.

Q: Why are you certain God exists?

A: The reasons are in the book, and the book gives me a lot of reasons to believe Christianity is true. After I thought it through, I found it to be a combination of both my mind and heart leading me to believe it was true, and my commitment brought me to certainty. You can reason yourself to probability, but it takes personal commitment to get to a place of certainty.