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 can’t be true. God can’t be real." But if none of them

stand up, if there’s no way to prove there is no God, and therefore, there is a god,

then to believe that there’s no God is an act of faith. Are you following me? Let me

show you some of the arguments. Here are the arguments that are usually brought up. They

say, "This is why there really couldn’t be a god." The first one, the main one, is

the argument from evil and suffering. And that argument goes like this: Look at all

the senseless, pointless evil in the world. Okay? See it? Now, given that senseless, pointless

evil, there may be a god who’s good but not powerful enough to stop it, or there may

be a god who is all powerful enough but not good enough to want to stop it. But given

evil and suffering in the world, all that pointless, senseless evil and suffering, there

can’t be an all-good and all-powerful god or he would stop it; and, therefore, the all-good,

all-powerful traditional god in the Bible can’t exist. David Hume, Discourses on Natural

Religion, 18th century. It doesn’t work. There’s a guy named William Osteen who is

one of the leading philosophers today from Syracuse University who recently wrote: The

effort to demonstrate that evil disproves God is now acknowledge on almost all sides

in philosophy as completely bankrupt. Now, here’s what he means by this. And I shudder

to say this to you because if any of you actually are going through some real suffering, it’s

not a philosophical issue for you; it’s a personal issue. But I would just hope that

you don’t see this as cold comfort. For many people, it’s philosophical; and people

say, "How could you believe in a god with all these senseless, pointless evil?" Here’s

what the philosophers have been saying for the last 20 years. This is the reason why

there hasn’t been a major philosophical work trying to disprove the existence of God

on the basis of evil and suffering since 1982. Because as William Osteen says, in the philosophical

world, it’s just not washing, and here’s why: When you say there can’t be a god because