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The Lack of Reason for God, Chapter 5
This is part of a series examining the the logic of Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In Chapter 4, we examined injustice in the name of Christianity.
Chapter 5
In which a loving god sends us to Hell.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
pp. 69-70. "In his book Bellah notes that 80 percent of Americans agree with the statement 'an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.' He concludes that the most fundamental belief in American culture is that moral truth is relative to individual consciousness."
There is no basis for that conclusion. To what other beliefs is that one even being compared? Also, a poll can show widespread agreement with any sentiment, if it is phrased in a generally agreeable way. The "80 percent" figure doesn't mean anything.
pp. 70-72. Keller spouts vague and unsubstantiated generalizations about "ancient times" and "modernity". In roundabout fashion, he compares science to Sauron through their "dreams of power". There is nothing there even worth reading, let alone addressing.
p. 72. Keller pretends that moral relativism means that our values are no better than anyone else's values, and therefore we shouldn't take offense if god's wrath and vengeance contradict our values. Of course, by this logic, Keller shouldn't take offense if Vikings come by and sack his church.
pp. 72-73. Keller suggests that if Christianity is perfect and your culture is flawed, then the two might naturally disagree on the topic of a wrathful god. This is a rewording of the "you can't understand god" response to the argument from evil, which we covered in chapter 2.
pp. 73-74. Keller asserts that god is wrathful only because he loves us so much. Once again, if anybody ever makes that excuse to you for their actions, get away from them fast, because they are abusive. When someone is upset that their loved ones have harmed themselves, going into a furious rage and casting them into Hell for eternity is not a healthy response. This sort of god needs to be locked up for the benefit of society, until it can get its anger issues under control.
pp. 74-75. Keller states that lack of belief in divine retribution makes people violent, because they will naturally be inclined to commit excessive acts of vengeance themselves. He dismisses a liberal lack of such an inclination as showing "no real concern for justice".
Keller is deliberately glossing over the middle ground* between lack of justice and excessive vengeance, in order to pretend that those of us who do not believe in a vengeful god must choose one of these two extremes for ourselves. (He also ignores the fact that eternal damnation is infinitely more extreme than the examples of human vengeance whose excess he decries.)
* "No one told him jail is a thing," says my book club friend. She also states that Keller's argument makes him scary: "If he stopped believing in god, would he go around punching or killing people?" Finally, she notes that when she refrains from behaving wrathfully, it's because she knows that no good will come of it, not because she thinks, "I don't have to punch this person, because god is going to, some day, in Hell."
pp. 75-76. "Milosz had personally seen, in both Nazism and Communism, that a loss of belief in a God of judgment can lead to brutality".
He has wandered from the topic of justice, and repeated* his baseless (and tasteless) attribution to secularism of state-sponsored crimes against humanity.
* From chapter 1, page 5, and chapter 4, pages 54-56. See the latter for discussion.
pp. 77-78. Keller addresses eternal damnation, and discounts the idea of Hell as a place of torture to which god sends you for such crimes as murder, being born into the wrong religion, and eating figs. He presents Hell as a state that people naturally reach after they've wrecked their lives by being bad, without any intervention from god. (Or, if they're only slightly bad, or even totally good but not god-fearing, it's a state that they will eventually reach, based on their "trajectory". Because souls apparently have inertia.)
Keller's bowdlerized version of Hell has no basis in Biblical or Christian teaching (and in fact contradicts them); he seems to have made it up in order to ignore the moral implications of eternal torment. In any case, he tries to remove god's agency in sending people to Hell by portraying people as sending themselves there. But this doesn't excuse an omnipotent god, who both set those peoples' lives in motion toward Hell, and chose not to rescue* them on the way. A human behaving this way would, at the very least, be guilty of criminal negligence. God's crime, given his perfect foreknowledge and willful refusal to avert catastrophe, is much greater. If he existed (and were omnipotent), he would bear full responsibility for everything that happens, including people going to Hell.
* Some would likely argue that the Bible is that rescue. Keller quotes Luke 16:24-31, in which Abraham tells a man in Hell, who had asked for his brothers to be warned against his fate, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them." God offering the Bible as salvation is like tossing a life preserver too far away for the drowning person to reach it, then taunting them for not being a stronger swimmer. (Or not tossing it at all, in the case of cultures that don't read the Bible.) Of course, since the Bible is unconvincing to non-Christians, the analogy will be most apt if the life preserver is made of lead.
p. 78. "When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing — though a good thing — becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy."
Well, thanks for warning me against building my life around helping people and making the world a better place. Apparently, I'll be better off if I give that up in favor of God.
My book club friend notes that Keller gives no indication of what it would mean to build one's life around god.
pp. 80-81. Keller addresses the concerns of two women who felt that his belief that non-Christians go to Hell made him narrow. "Because Christians think wrongdoing has infinitely more long-term consequences than secular people do, does that mean they are somehow narrower?"
Though I find accusation of "narrowness" so vague as to be uninteresting, I will at least note that Keller may have reversed cause and effect here. "Your belief makes you narrow" probably does not, in this case, mean that the belief is evidence of narrowness, but that the belief is likely to cause narrowness. I leave to the reader the question of whether it does.
pp. 81-83. Keller addresses people who believe in a god of pure love, rather than the loving but wrathful Christian god. He claims that there is no religious, historical, or observational evidence for such a god. I cannot argue with him on that. Their god sounds just as unlikely as his does, though perhaps more worthy of worship.
Next week: Science versus Christianity.
The whole series.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In Chapter 4, we examined injustice in the name of Christianity.
In which a loving god sends us to Hell.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
pp. 69-70. "In his book Bellah notes that 80 percent of Americans agree with the statement 'an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.' He concludes that the most fundamental belief in American culture is that moral truth is relative to individual consciousness."
There is no basis for that conclusion. To what other beliefs is that one even being compared? Also, a poll can show widespread agreement with any sentiment, if it is phrased in a generally agreeable way. The "80 percent" figure doesn't mean anything.
pp. 70-72. Keller spouts vague and unsubstantiated generalizations about "ancient times" and "modernity". In roundabout fashion, he compares science to Sauron through their "dreams of power". There is nothing there even worth reading, let alone addressing.
p. 72. Keller pretends that moral relativism means that our values are no better than anyone else's values, and therefore we shouldn't take offense if god's wrath and vengeance contradict our values. Of course, by this logic, Keller shouldn't take offense if Vikings come by and sack his church.
pp. 72-73. Keller suggests that if Christianity is perfect and your culture is flawed, then the two might naturally disagree on the topic of a wrathful god. This is a rewording of the "you can't understand god" response to the argument from evil, which we covered in chapter 2.
pp. 73-74. Keller asserts that god is wrathful only because he loves us so much. Once again, if anybody ever makes that excuse to you for their actions, get away from them fast, because they are abusive. When someone is upset that their loved ones have harmed themselves, going into a furious rage and casting them into Hell for eternity is not a healthy response. This sort of god needs to be locked up for the benefit of society, until it can get its anger issues under control.
pp. 74-75. Keller states that lack of belief in divine retribution makes people violent, because they will naturally be inclined to commit excessive acts of vengeance themselves. He dismisses a liberal lack of such an inclination as showing "no real concern for justice".
Keller is deliberately glossing over the middle ground* between lack of justice and excessive vengeance, in order to pretend that those of us who do not believe in a vengeful god must choose one of these two extremes for ourselves. (He also ignores the fact that eternal damnation is infinitely more extreme than the examples of human vengeance whose excess he decries.)
* "No one told him jail is a thing," says my book club friend. She also states that Keller's argument makes him scary: "If he stopped believing in god, would he go around punching or killing people?" Finally, she notes that when she refrains from behaving wrathfully, it's because she knows that no good will come of it, not because she thinks, "I don't have to punch this person, because god is going to, some day, in Hell."
pp. 75-76. "Milosz had personally seen, in both Nazism and Communism, that a loss of belief in a God of judgment can lead to brutality".
He has wandered from the topic of justice, and repeated* his baseless (and tasteless) attribution to secularism of state-sponsored crimes against humanity.
* From chapter 1, page 5, and chapter 4, pages 54-56. See the latter for discussion.
pp. 77-78. Keller addresses eternal damnation, and discounts the idea of Hell as a place of torture to which god sends you for such crimes as murder, being born into the wrong religion, and eating figs. He presents Hell as a state that people naturally reach after they've wrecked their lives by being bad, without any intervention from god. (Or, if they're only slightly bad, or even totally good but not god-fearing, it's a state that they will eventually reach, based on their "trajectory". Because souls apparently have inertia.)
Keller's bowdlerized version of Hell has no basis in Biblical or Christian teaching (and in fact contradicts them); he seems to have made it up in order to ignore the moral implications of eternal torment. In any case, he tries to remove god's agency in sending people to Hell by portraying people as sending themselves there. But this doesn't excuse an omnipotent god, who both set those peoples' lives in motion toward Hell, and chose not to rescue* them on the way. A human behaving this way would, at the very least, be guilty of criminal negligence. God's crime, given his perfect foreknowledge and willful refusal to avert catastrophe, is much greater. If he existed (and were omnipotent), he would bear full responsibility for everything that happens, including people going to Hell.
* Some would likely argue that the Bible is that rescue. Keller quotes Luke 16:24-31, in which Abraham tells a man in Hell, who had asked for his brothers to be warned against his fate, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them." God offering the Bible as salvation is like tossing a life preserver too far away for the drowning person to reach it, then taunting them for not being a stronger swimmer. (Or not tossing it at all, in the case of cultures that don't read the Bible.) Of course, since the Bible is unconvincing to non-Christians, the analogy will be most apt if the life preserver is made of lead.
p. 78. "When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing — though a good thing — becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy."
Well, thanks for warning me against building my life around helping people and making the world a better place. Apparently, I'll be better off if I give that up in favor of God.
My book club friend notes that Keller gives no indication of what it would mean to build one's life around god.
pp. 80-81. Keller addresses the concerns of two women who felt that his belief that non-Christians go to Hell made him narrow. "Because Christians think wrongdoing has infinitely more long-term consequences than secular people do, does that mean they are somehow narrower?"
Though I find accusation of "narrowness" so vague as to be uninteresting, I will at least note that Keller may have reversed cause and effect here. "Your belief makes you narrow" probably does not, in this case, mean that the belief is evidence of narrowness, but that the belief is likely to cause narrowness. I leave to the reader the question of whether it does.
pp. 81-83. Keller addresses people who believe in a god of pure love, rather than the loving but wrathful Christian god. He claims that there is no religious, historical, or observational evidence for such a god. I cannot argue with him on that. Their god sounds just as unlikely as his does, though perhaps more worthy of worship.
Next week: Science versus Christianity.
The whole series.