Of Factors and Ladders

I asked for a comment on the Keller talk from Tuesday night. Here is a complete review:

Dear Pastor Clark,

I'm sorry you weren't able to get in (a complete travesty!) to see Pastor Keller last night. It was packed. Every last seat was taken, and they hewed very strictly to fire codes that forbade standing room spectators. I would like to give you a thumbnail sketch of what he spoke on.

One of the most useful things for me that Pastor Keller said was right at the beginning of his talk. He talked about how there is a complex confluence of three factors in the way every person comes to his or her set of religious belief or unbelief: the personal, the social, and the intellectual. In any one person's experience, one may take precedence over the others, but all three are always present. So it is no good, as some people do, to say, 'I carefully thought out my position, but you have come to your conclusion simply because you had this experience in your life, or because you were born in this group, or associated with that group.' Pastor Keller repeated verbally the first idea in his book, that America is simultaneously becoming more religiously fervant on the one hand, and more secular on the other. Each group can become insular and demonize the other side, and the way to overcome this is to recognize that everyone comes to their beliefs in a complex fashion and to show respect for one another.

For the main body of his lecture, Pastor Keller gave the image of a ladder with three rungs. The first two rungs are closely related: the bottom rung is "It take at least as much faith not to believe in God as to believe in God," the second rung is, "It actually takes more faith to not believe in God than to believe in God," and the third rung is "The only way to really know that God exists is to believe." To flesh out those points a little bit more, for the first rung, Pastor Keller talked about some of the common objections to belief in God generally and Christianity specifically: for example, the problem of evil, the fact that so much evil has been committed in the name of God, the fact that Christianity claims to be the only truth. For the second rung, he talked about the anthropic principle in the universe and the fact that it makes more sense to live our lives as if there were meaning in the universe, rather than to live as if we were random atoms that happened to come together in the right ways to produce life. For the third rung, he said that probability can only take you so far, but certainty comes only with commitment in hindsight.

Grace and Peace,
Bryan Park