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>> SON: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for coming out to Authors at Google. My name is
Eugene Son. And before we begin, I’d like to extend a special thank you to everyone
who made this possible. A lot of work goes into setting this up so I really appreciate
that. It is my pleasure to bring to Google Dr. Tim Keller. For those of you who don’t
know his background, he was raised in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania; educated at Bucknell
University, attended Gordon-Conwell and Westminster Theological Seminary. In 1989, Dr. Keller
founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church located in Manhattan. Today, he’s got a congregation
of over 5,000 people. He has also helped start over a hundred other churches worldwide. Last
night, Dr. Keller was at UC Berkeley promoting his new book, The Reason for God: Belief in
an Age of Skepticism. And he addresses a wide audience whether they’d be agnostics, atheists,
believers in mind, and he tackles some really difficult issues such as: Why is there suffering
in this world? How can a loving god send people to hell? How can there be one right religion
while all the others are wrong?” So with that being said, I think we’re going to
have a great conversation. We’re going to be having a Q and A session afterwards. Please
use the mike to my left and we’ll be taking questions from there. And without further
ado, I’d like to introduce Dr. Tim Keller. >> KELLER: Thank you. I’m going to stay
here. Thank you. Though I have not--thank you, Eugene. I don’t have any idea why any
of you would know anything about my background. Eugene said, if--for those of you who don’t
know my background, I think that had to be all of you. I mean, why would anybody know
it? Even my children don’t really know it. So I want to talk to you about the reason--the
reasoning behind belief in God, or the reasoning the leads to belief in God. I am not--I can’t
possibly cover it in say 25, 30 minutes. My conscience is clear because there is the book.
In other words, what I say to you here is going to be sketchy. If anything I say really
engages you, I won’t be--I won’t feel guilty because I can always say, read the
rest of it in the book. I certainly can’t really give good answers to this question
in a talk, but I think I--I think I addressed it a lot better in the book were I had a little
bit more time. But the question is: What is the reasoning that leads to belief in God?
And I'd like to deal with that in the three headings: Why the reasons for God are important,
how the reasons for God work, and what the reasons for God are. Okay? First, why the
reasons for God are important; why should you even be here? In fact I don’t know why
you’re here, but I’ll tell you why you ought to be here, okay? If you have a kind
of sound, firm skepticism, and you really don’t believe in God, you really need to
know this, what I’m about to tell you, and here’s the reason why: When I was your age--I’m
looking out there--when I was your age, which is a long time ago, everybody knew that the
more technologically advanced the society got, the less religious they'd get. That’s
what everybody thought they knew. And the more economically developed, the more educated
people got, the more religion was going to sort of thin out and the idea of a god and
truth and miracles was going to sort of die out. Not--hardly anybody believes that anymore
because, really, that’s not what's happening. Instead, robust, orthodox faith in God has
gotten stronger in the world. It has gotten stronger in America. Secular thought has also
increased, so we have a more polarized society now. But, you know, last week, the Pew Foundation
took out, sent out its latest survey of the religious life of people in America and now
evangelical Pentecostals is largest single category, bigger than mainline Protestants,
bigger than Catholics. That would never--I can’t imagine that 30 years ago. Meanwhile,
in the rest of the world, to keep some things in mind, Africa had gone from 9% to 55% Christian
in the last hundred years. Korea went from about 1% to 40% Christian in the hundred years
while Korea was getting more technologically advanced. The same thing has basically happened
for China. There are more Christians in China now than there are on America, and this has
been happening even as science has advanced. So the old idea that somehow orthodox religion
is sort of going to go away, no. It isn’t. It’s going to be here, which means the only
way we’re going to get along is we got to be able to get sympathetically into one other's
shoes. So if you don’t believe in God, you need to--you need to try to understand why
anybody does or we're not going to be able to work in a pluralistic society. You know,
the new atheist books, Mr. Dawkins, Mr. Hitchens and company, when they say religion is bad
in those books, that’s not a new thesis. A lot of people have been saying that for
a long time. What is kind of new about the books is they don’t just say religion is
bad, they say respect for religion is bad. And if you counsel one section of your population
to belittle and disdain and do nothing, you know, shows no respect for the beliefs of
this group of people, beliefs that give them great joy and meaning in life. If you counsel
one group of people to despise and do nothing to try to understand this group of people,
that is a recipe for social disaster if anybody actually takes the advice. Now, if you are
a believer in God, you need to know the reasons for God, and here’s the reasons why. Doubt.
You’ve got doubts. Don’t tell me you don’t. I know you may come from a church that says,
oh, no, doubt, we don't doubt, we believe. Well, if you don’t deal with your own doubts
and say, okay, in light of this doubt, why do I believe? You know, why do I believe Christianity?
Why do I believe in God, or whatever? If you don’t let your doubts drive you to ask those
questions, your faith will never get strong. Doubts, dealing with doubts honestly is the
best possible way to develop a faith that can last in the face of anything. So you need
to look at the reasoning for God if you’re a believer in God. You need to look at the
reasoning for God if you’re not a believer in God. And, actually, if you--but most of
the people that I know in this country, at least, really are kind of ambivalent. They--your
relationship with belief in God is a really weird one. Sometimes, you do; sometimes, you
don’t. Sometimes, you do more; sometimes, you do less. And you particularly need to
hear this. Second point, how do the reasons for God work? Important. There are three basic
kinds of reasons that all people who believe believe and for which all people who disbelieve
disbelieve. If you disbelieve in God or you believe in God, it’s because of all three
of these kinds of reasons. The first kind are intellectual reasons. In other words,
you read the arguments for the existence of God or you read the objections to God or Christianity,
we'll say--and I’m speaking as a Christian. That’s why whenever I go into a particular
religion, I'm always going to think of Christianity here. And if you think the arguments are compelling,
you believe. If you think the arguments don’t--aren’t compelling, you don’t believe. So there’s
the intellectual; you might call reasoning proper. Secondly, though, you have personal
reasons. Nobody believes in God or disbelieves strictly for intellectual rational reasons.
There’s always personal reasons. And here’s what’s interesting. Some people have horrible
bad experiences, tragedies and difficulties, and disappointments. And some people interpret
that as meaning I really need God in my life, I need something to help me get through this.
And other people have the very same experiences and they interpret this meaning, I don’t
need a god who lets stuff like this happen. Other people get very successful. For example,
they come to work for Google and they’re happy, and, like, the toilet seats are heated.
How would I know that? And--somebody told me; I didn’t believe them. So you’re happy;
things are doing well in life. So some people interpret success in life this way: They say,
this means I don’t really need God. And other people interpret success in life as
saying, you know, I’m happy--I’m successful and I’m still empty. So there’s always
interpreted experience, interpreted personal experiences, a set of reasons why some people
believe in God or not, intellectual reasons why some people believe in God or not; and,
lastly, there’s social reasons. Now, there’s a whole field of--the whole discipline called
the sociology of knowledge. And the sociology of knowledge says that basically you tend
to find plausible, most plausible, the beliefs of people that you want to be--you want them
to like you, or the people that you need and people that you're dependent on, people who
are in the community you’re in or want to be part of--their beliefs tend to be more
plausible than the beliefs of people who are in communities you don’t like or aren’t
interested in and don’t want to be part of. So, to a great degree, you believe what
you believe because of the social support, and I think most of us have to be honest about
this. If you once believed in God and kind of lost your belief, to some degree, that
happened because a lot of the people that you wanted to like you were also being skeptical
and sophisticated and making jokes about it. Or if you move from belief, or pardon me,
non-belief to robust belief in God, very often, it’s because you’ve found a circle of
people that you really like and admire and you can identify with and you’d like to
be liked, and they believed. But what you can’t do is reduce belief or non-belief
to just one of those three, and people always do it. It’s always all three. I'm going
to show you what I mean. Very often, secular, non-believing people, non-believing in god,
will say to me, "Yet, Christian minister, you think you got the truth, you think Christianity
is the truth. If you were born in Madagascar, you wouldn’t even be a Christian." Okay.
So I sat down and I said, "What is this? What is the point of this?" And here’s what he’s
saying: He’s saying, "My understanding of God is based on rationality. I’ve thought
it out. But your belief is socially and culturally constructed, totally. You’re only a Christian
because you were raised here, okay, not Madagascar." But, see, what’s the comeback? The comeback
is--here’s a person that says, "I’m a secular person who believes that religion
is, you know, all religions are relative, and you’re this Christian. If you were born
in Madagascar, you wouldn’t be a Christian." And the comeback is, yet, if you were born
in Madagascar, you wouldn’t be a secular relativist. Does that mean that your position
is all socially constructed? "Oh, no, no." Yes and no. To some degree, the reason he
doesn’t believe is because his belief was somewhat, somehow socially supported but it’s
not totally. It’s also reason. It’s all three. It’s absolutely wrong. It’s disdainful.
It’s almost exploitative to say, "My position is based only on reasoning and your position
is based on, you know, cultural and personal issues." That’s not true. And by the way,
if you’re a Christian, you must never think that it’s all a matter of reason. If you’re
a Christian, you believe that the human being, we as human beings are made in the image of
God, all of us, not just our reason, our emotion, you know, our social aspect, our emotional
aspect, our intellectual aspect. We’re all in the image of God, and all those things
have to play a role on belief. Now, lastly, but this, you know, the main event. What are
the reasons for God? And I would say that there’s a lot of ways of stacking this,
but I would like to suggest to you that, by and large, reasoning ends with belief in God,
moves up a ladder, and I’m going to suggest three rungs. Now, I’m not saying that everybody
actually who comes to believe in God moves along the ladder in exactly these ways. But
I would say there’s a lot of ways of stacking all of the things that happen. Here’s how
I’m going to do it. I think, at least, it's a way of making sense of it. The first rung
of the ladder is you come to see that disbelief in God takes as much faith as belief in God.
That’s the first rung. It takes as much faith to disbelieve in God as to believe.
That’s the first rung. The second rung is it takes more of a leap of faith, when you
come to see, it takes more of a leap of faith in the dark to disbelieve in God than to believe
in God. And the third rung of the ladder is you come to realize that whereas you can reason
to a point of probability, it takes personal commitment to get to certainty. And if you
move up those three rungs, you believe in God. Let me show how that works. The first
rung--and, by the way, there’s a lot in here so that’s why I feel like if anything
I’m saying intrigues you at all, I suggest get the book. And I’m really saying that
not as an author who's trying to sell books but as a minister who’s trying to get a
message across. You can believe that or not. You can be cynical or not. And I hope I mean
right. I mean, I hope that’s really what I--I hope that’s my motive. I think it is.
So if you can possibly get the book because I have a feeling what I’m going to say in
the next 15 minutes is too short. Do so. Now, the first rung is this: It takes more--it
takes as much faith, excuse me, to believe, to disbelieve in God as to believe. How do
I back that up? Well, here’s how: All of the arguments that purport to prove there
is no god fall flat. See, all the arguments that you’ve ever heard that say, "There
can’t be a god or even Christianity can’t be true," if any of those stood up, they need
to be say, "Christianity