Back to the book "The Reason For God". Today: Chapter 9

I thought it would be great to get back to Tim Keller's book today. This is what I think are his most important points of chapter 9 titled "The Knowledge of God". Please think about how this might be relevant to your life:

It is common to hear people say "No one should impose their moral views on others, because everyone has the right to find truth inside him or herself". This raises a question. Why is it impossible (in practice) for anyone to be a consistent moral relativist even when they claim that they are? The answer is that we all have a pervasive, powerful and unavoidable belief not only in moral values but also in moral obligation.

Moral obligation is a belief that some things ought not be done regardless of how a person feels about them within herself (...) Though we have been taught that all moral values are relative to individuals and culture, we can't live like that. People who laugh at the claim that there is a transcendent moral order do not think that racial genocide is just impractical and self-defeating, but that it is wrong. The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn't feel it was immoral at all. We don't care. We don't care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it.

If human rights are created by majorities, of what use are they? Their value lies in that they can be used to insist that majorities honour the dignity of minorities and individuals despite their conception of their "greater good". Rights cannot be created - they must be discovered, or they are of no value.

If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is "moral" and another "immoral" but only "I like this". If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law? You may say "the majority has the right to make the law", but do you mean that then the majority has the right to vote to exterminate a minority? If you say, "No that is wrong", then you are back to square one.

If you believe human rights are a reality, then it makes much more sense that God exists than that he does not. If you insist on a secular view of the world and yet you continue to pronounce some things right and some things wrong, then I hope you see the deep disharmony between the world your intellect has devised and the real world (and God) that your heart knows exists. If a premise ("There is no God") leads to a conclusion you know is not true ("Napalming babies is culturally relative") then why not change the premise?

Once we realise this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out the implications of all this. The other option is to recognise that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity - all because you know God exists.