Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical

Please give me a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1D1OF6ZBJ0QR5/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This is an erudite and informed book about the answer to the problem of secularism. Keller's knowledge and use of sources to make his points is impressive. Keller has read and thought about the issue of modernity and religion through Charles Taylor, Richard Bauckham, Thomas Nagel, John Updike, Terry Eagleton, Heidegger, Chekov, Camus and others. Every page reflects an engagement with some thinker or writer in a way that illuminates the subject.

This book is a self-conscious prequel to Keller's earlier “The Reason for God.” In this book, Keller seems to be adopting the method of Pascal by trying to explain why a person should start the journey toward God by inciting the desire for God. The way that Keller seeks to incite that desire is by pointing out the shortcomings of a purely secular human existence. Keller's thesis is that by itself humanity is left with purely secular meaning - fixed only on the here and now - and purely human identity - fractured and crushed - and purely human values - unconnected to anything transcendent. Keller makes his case in a practical way that explains things we all know, if we are honest, from our own experience.

Keller's writing is subtle, inductive and engaging. Here he discusses the problem with meaning:

“Let's look first at the issue of consistency. Terry Eagleton points out that when postmodernism denounces all absolute values and inherent meanings in the name of freedom, it “secretly smuggles . . . an absolute into the argument.” 26 Why, for example, is freedom so important? Why is that the absolute, unquestioned “good”— and who gets to define it as such? Are you not assuming a value-laden standard that you are using to critique all other approaches to life? And are you not, then, actually giving a universal answer to the Meaning question, namely, that the meaning of life is to have the freedom to determine your own meaning? Are you not, then, doing the very thing you say should not be done?
So the postmodern approach to meaning is not very consistent. However, is it workable at a practical level? Eagleton finds it wanting at this level as well. He finds the “life is what you make it” view “seems troublingly narcissistic. Do we ever get outside of our own heads? Isn't a genuine meaning one which we feel ourselves running up against, one which can resist or rebuff us? . . . Surely life itself must have a say in the matter?” 27 He questions whether we can really take anything in life and “construct” a meaning around it of our own. “Nobody actually believes this,” he answers, and gives an example. You could try with all your might to “read” tigers as animals that are coy and cuddly, but if you try to do that, you would “no longer be around to tell the tale,” because to some degree the world is “independent of our interpretations of it.” 28
I once knew a young man who had grown up to be far below average in height, size, and weight. Yet he wanted to play football. He was continually injured as he competed with players who were far bigger than average. His parents tried to dissuade him from football, but he reminded them that all his life he had always been told by his teachers that he could be absolutely anything he chose to be and that life was what he made of it. “And didn't you see the movie Rudy?” he asked them. Someone should have gently but firmly given him Eagleton's illustration and conclusion. Life isn't simply what you make it. Often it is what it is. We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits in with the world as it is.”

Keller distinguishes between “discovered meanings” and “assigned meanings”:

“But I also say no. Secular people are often unwilling to recognize the significant difference between what have been called “inherent” and “assigned” meanings. Traditional belief in God was the basis for discovered, objective meaning— meaning that is there, apart from your inner feelings or interpretations. If we were made by God for certain purposes, then there are inherent meanings that we must accept.
The meanings that secular people have are not discovered but rather created. They are not objectively “there.” They are subjective and wholly dependent on our feelings. You may determine to live for political change or the establishment of a happy family, and these can definitely serve as energizing goals. However, I want to argue that such created meanings are much more fragile and thin than discovered meanings. Specifically, discovered meaning is more rational, communal, and durable than created meaning.”

Keller concludes that the post-modern failure to distinguish between the two, or, worse, to privilege “assigned meaning” is problematic:

“If this life is all there is, and there is no God or life beyond this material world, then it will not ultimately matter whether you are a genocidal maniac or an altruist; it won't matter whether you fight hunger in Africa or are incredibly cruel and greedy and starving the poor. In the end what you do will make no difference whatsoever. It might make some people happier or sadder for a brief time while they are on the planet, but beyond that, your influence— good or bad— will likely be negligible when viewed on any grand scale. Everything you do, and everyone you have done things with and to, will be gone forever. Ultimately, everything we do is radically insignificant. Nothing counts forever.
Now, as we have said, many people in the postmodern culture believe we should train ourselves to not ask this “metaquestion” about the point of life. We should discipline ourselves not to think about the ultimate outcome of all we do, which in the secular view is sheer nothingness. We should put that out of mind and concentrate on today. But this establishes my first point. When secular people seek to lead a meaningful life, they must have discipline to not think so much about the big picture. They must disconnect what their reason tells them about the world from what they are experiencing emotionally. That is getting a feeling of meaningfulness through a lack of rationality, by the suppression of thinking and reflection.
The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote to a friend and said that if one “thinks coldly,” a modern person has to admit that there is “no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.” By this he meant that if the modern secularist thinks out the implications of his view of a strictly materialistic world in which all life evolved randomly and accidentally, human beings have no importance at all. But then he added that when he begins thinking like this it is time to “go down stairs and play solitaire.”

Without saying it, Keller is making the point made previously by Aristotle and Aquinas and Joseph Pieper that prudence - the ability to perceive reality as it is - is the first virtue because without it no one virtue is possible.

Likewise, Keller also points toward the virtue of Christian hope which is the answer to the hopelessness of modern identity.

“The alternative to secular optimism in progress is hope. Real hope, as Lasch defines it, “does not demand a belief in progress” at all. “The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder . . . three names for the same state of heart and mind— asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity.” 19 Why not? Elsewhere Lasch points to the example of African slaves in America. How did they keep hope alive? As Eugene D. Genovese and other historians of slavery have made clear, “it would be absurd to attribute to slaves a belief in progress.” It was Christianity, Genovese showed, that gave them “a firm yardstick” with which to measure and judge the behavior of their masters and “to articulate a promise of deliverance as a people in this world as well as the next.” 20 Hope does not require a belief in progress, only a belief “in justice, a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, [that] the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.” 21 Hope that stands up to and enables us to face the worst depends on faith in something that transcends this world and life and is not available to those living within a worldview that denies the supernatural.

This also follows Aquinas' point that Christian hope is the virtue that is opposed to despair.

There is a lot in this book that bears pondering.