The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

In the opening sections of The Reason for God, Keller introduces his readers to his characteristic method for addressing questions of religious truth. That method is personal and pastoral and uses appeals to commonsense arguments.

It is personal in the sense that Keller weaves much of his own experience into the text of the book, beginning with a frank overview of his own spiritual journey of doubt and faith in the Introduction. It is pastoral in deriving its material from Keller’s interactions with real people, conveying their concerns and questions rather than solely addressing arguments from atheist polemics. It also appeals to commonsense arguments, seeking to ground each step of the process of rational exploration in terms that match ordinary people’s everyday experience. At the same time, Keller makes extensive use of outside sources, drawing from literary classics and works of philosophy, both in the quotations that form each chapter’s header and in the extended extracts that mark many of the pages in The Reason for God. This mix of academic depth and everyday accessibility forms the heart of Keller’s approach to Christian apologetics.

The major themes of the book get their first introduction in these opening sections. First, The Reason for God is framed around Addressing Objections to Christianity, and this is especially true in Part 1 of the book. Keller’s intent is to respond to many of the objections he heard in the course of his ministry, and the Introduction and Chapter 1 both help to establish the context for those objections. Keller relates his many years of conversations with skeptics during his ministry in New York City, both in informal interactions and in question-and-answer sessions held after his sermons. Chapter 1 introduces the first and most common objection he has faced, a reaction against the exclusive truth-claims of Christianity: that there cannot be just one true religion. Keller claims that Christianity might have valid reasons for exclusivity and may indeed be true.

The objection addressed in Chapter 1 is rooted in a relativistic view of the world and so supports another major theme, The Insufficiency of Relativism. When skeptics criticize Christianity for its exclusivity claims (which necessarily deny the truth-claims of other religions), they think they are defending the rights of other religions to believe as they do. One of the problems with that belief, however, is that the other religions also tend to be exclusivist in their own truth-claims and so would view the skeptics not as an ally but as an opponent. Further, Keller demonstrates that relativism assumes too much of an objective perspective for its own views and thus contradicts its own central claim that no one can claim an exclusively objective perspective.

A third major theme, that of Rational Arguments for Belief in God, pervades the whole book but is still relatively understated in this opening section. Part 2 of the book is structured with a view toward providing rational arguments for God, but the Introduction already points in that direction by depicting Keller’s spiritual journey and the realizations that assisted him in establishing his faith.