[APPLAUSE]

TIM KELLER: Hi, thanks for having me here.

It's always hard to convey a book,

especially one as dense as this one, quickly.

I'll try to think about half the time

conveying the book, what the book's about, and about half

the time questions and answers.

So the book is about how belief in God

or religious faith or Christian faith

can make sense to somebody today.

It's about how it's possible for that to make sense.

Now, I would like to make the case right now that

should be of some interest to you, no matter who you are.

Chapter one tries to make that case

that no matter who you are, you should at least care about how

people come to their faith positions,

how their beliefs come to make sense to them.

In chapter one, I make the case that there's actually

two trends that are marked in the world with regard

to religion.

Here's the one.

The one is-- and I know what I'm going

to say is going to sound counter-intuitive to you,

but the book explains it and there's really

not much doubt about this-- that in general, the world

is becoming more religious and will for the next 30

to 50 years at least.

It's getting more religious.

The reasons for that, which are laid out there-- everything

here is brief.

You can always ask more later-- is that both Christianity

and Islam are both converting people at a rate

faster than the population is growing.

And that's the reason why they're growing.

Secondly, it's also true that religious people

have a lot more children than secular people and unbelieving

people.

So you put all that together, all

of the demographic projections are

that actually the number of people today in the world

that say they're secular, no religious preference,

is close to 17%.

Over the next 35 years, that's going down to about 12%

because of these trends I've just mentioned.

So on the one hand, the world's becoming religious.

On the other hand, parts of the world

are becoming more secular than they've ever been before.

Parts of the world are going to be

marked by more and more people who say religion

doesn't make sense to me.

Belief in God doesn't make sense to me.

Now, what this means is that there's two kinds of slogans

that you should never believe.

One is that religion is going away.

It's just not.

I mean, I do hear it a lot that religion is dying out.

Younger people are less religious.

What younger people?

The people I know.

OK, we have to look at the world.

And it's not true that religion is dying out.

And it won't.

So the idea that religion is going away is just not true.

But the idea that in some triumphalistic sense

that religion will triumph or Christianity

will triumph in the world, that's

not going to happen either.

And since both these trends are true,

religion is not going away, and yet part of the world

are going to become less religious than they've ever

been, what that does mean is it should matter to us how people

come to their various positions.

Increasing numbers of people are finding

that belief in a universe without God

makes sense to them.

They believe in a universe without God.

And that makes sense to them.

And other people are finding that belief in God

and a universe filled with God makes sense to them.

How do they get to those positions?

We actually often do not really talk enough about

that because people don't want to say, how do you get there?

By the way, people who lose their religious faith usually

say, I just saw the truth.

And people who get converted usually

say, I just saw the light.

But that's not very illuminating.

Instead, I'm going to make the case

that the process by which we come to our beliefs,

to believe in a universe without God

or believe in a universe with God,

are actually more complicated than that.

So in chapter two what I do-- and I

want to spend a little time here with you

just for a moment to lay out what

I do there-- is I tackle this simplistic idea.

So for example, one of the things that people say a lot--

I see it on the internet all the time,

and I talk to people in New York all the time who say this.

And that is this.

It's a popular belief to say belief

that there is no God is arrived at mainly through using reason.

So if you come to the conclusion that there is no God,

that happened through reason.

But if you come to believe there is a God,

that's a leap of faith.

So belief that there is no God, through reason.

Belief that there is a God, through faith.

I'm here to tell you actually that is wrong.

It's naive.

It's simplistic.

The fact of the matter is both sides

use a combination of reason and faith.

So to press a little bit, here's a thesis

I put out in chapter two.

And I'll try to defend it in about four or five minutes

here.

And here's the thesis.

The move from religion to secularism,

the move from religious faith to a secular belief that there

is no God or maybe there is no God--

so to move from religious faith to secularism

is not so much a loss of faith as a shift

to a new set of beliefs, to a new community of faith

where the lines between orthodoxy and heresy

are just drawn in different places.

So if you're religious, you grew up

in a church, say, or a synagogue,

and then you move to being non-religious-- I'm a secular

person, I actually don't believe in God--

that's not so much a loss of faith

as actually a movement from one set

of beliefs to a new set of beliefs,

from one community of faith to another community of faith,

from one standard of orthodoxy and heresy

to another standard of orthodoxy and heresy.

I know that's kind of a provocative thesis

and not most people think that.

Let me show you, I think, how I can demonstrate that.

Secular people that I know-- I'm not saying all of you--

if you say, well, I consider myself

a person who doesn't really believe in God,

so I consider myself something of a secular

person-- I'm not saying this is true of everybody.

I'm saying plenty of people I've talked to who say I'm secular

or I'm a non-religious person actually

have two sets of beliefs.

And they are beliefs.

What are they?

I will call them proofism and humanism.

Now, what's proofism?

It's a coined word.

It's not the most felicitous phrase.

But I'm trying to get at this.

What many people will say to me is,

I'd be happy to believe in God if you could prove it to me.

I'd be happy to believe in Christianity

if you could prove it to me.

But since there isn't any evidence,

you can't prove it to me, therefore

I shouldn't believe it.

Now, that statement is wrong on a number of levels

and actually is a statement of faith.

Well, number one, when you say you shouldn't believe something

unless it can be empirically proven,

the problem is that that statement

can't be empirically proven.

For about 100 years, philosophers

have pointed that out.

To make a claim like that, to make a claim

that you shouldn't believe something unless it's proven,

is itself a statement that can't be proven.

It's an assertion.

It's not an argument.

It's just a sweeping statement.

And it can't be its own criteria.

Secondly, when people say to me, well, I

could be happy to believe in God if you could prove it to me,

But if you can't prove it to me, I can't believe in a god.

The problem is that everybody bases their lives on beliefs

that they can't prove.

If you believe in human rights, if you believe

we ought to take care of the poor and not trample the poor,

can you prove that?

Of course you can't.

Actually, everybody bases their lives on deep convictions.

They just can't be proven.

So it's quite wrong to say, for example to Christians,

you've got to prove your beliefs.

But then I don't have to prove my beliefs.

The fact is nobody, frankly, could

prove the most important beliefs on which their life is based.

And thirdly-- by the way, you probably would guess,

actually those of you with a philosophy background,

is there's not a lot of agreement on what the word

proof means.

It is true that I think most people agree

it's possible to prove that substance x boils

at temperature y at barometric pressure z.

And therefore, if I can demonstrate that,

then we could say that's been proven.

But beyond that, how do you prove historical claims?

When is a historical claim, that something

happened 300 years ago, when has that been proven?

Or how do you prove any moral values?

Again, how do you prove that human rights are important

or that they're there?

The answer is nobody actually agrees

on what proof is, because some people say, that was proven.

Other people say, well, how do you define proof?

So in the end, if you're a person who says,

because of my rationality, I cannot believe in God

or Christianity, what you're actually doing is

you're assuming a set of beliefs about how rationality operates

that are really a set of beliefs.

And they're not self-evident to everybody.

They're contested.

So they're really a set of beliefs.

To say I can't believe in Christianity

because you haven't proven it is a set of beliefs.

Then the other thing besides what

I call proofism, which is a set of beliefs about rationality,

which can't be proven.

Most secular people I know also are

what you might call a humanist.

Humanism means they believe it's important

that every human being be treated

with dignity, that people's rights not to be trampled upon,

that we not oppress people, that we

share our goods and our power with others

and not exploit them.

Right?

When you say most, I mean, let's put it this way--

most of the atheists and most of the secular

or non-religious people I know believe that.

But here's a question.

How do you prove that?

What is that?

Not only is that a set of beliefs,

but frankly, those beliefs take more faith to believe in.

See, if you're a Hindu, you believe

the world is such that you will get off

the cycle of reincarnation if you live a good life.

If you don't live a good life, you keep getting reincarnated.

If you live a good life, you can be taken off

the cycle of reincarnation and go into eternal bliss.

If you believe the bible, so if you are an Orthodox Jew

or you're a Christian believer, you