Tim Keller has always been a meaningful thinker for me. You may recall (if you’ve read here for a while now) that he passed away in May of this year. But pretty much every bit of his stuff endures. I still recommend The Reason for God and Making Sense of God as two of my top books for both Christians and non-Christians (if you’re in the area and would like to borrow them, let me know).
One of the things I’ve loved about Keller for as long as I’ve known of him is his intellect. When presented with tough questions, he never mumbled his way through or misdirected. He faced them head-on with humility, courage, and clarity. I just finished a podcast series he recorded in 2019 called Questioning Christianity in which he presents seven lectures to non-believers, then fields their questions, and the material is gold. I recommend you listen to it.
In his last Q & A of the series, finishing the lecture on “Hopefulness,” he says something I’ve really appreciated (and I’m going to massively paraphrase here). In most of the lectures, there was usually an undercurrent of “Oh yeah? Well, just because ‘x’ doesn’t prove there’s a God,” in the questions, and this isn’t wrong at all. But Keller explains it something like this: “Well, of course not. But when you get to the heart of the matter, each example of ‘x’ serves to strengthen your intuition that God could possibly exist.” He goes on to present the example that just because an objective moral standard does not prove God, it certainly points to him in ways all of the other options do not. Greg Koukl explains it like this: Christianity is that which best explains reality (and he goes on to address this in his book The Story of Reality). If Christianity is true, then the existence of an objective moral standard would certainly be expected
We don’t have every single answer. We might be confused and unclear on a lot of the loftier principles of whatever life means. But I enjoy those who take the time to thoughtfully explain me through it. Keller was a great man for this, and I’ll always appreciate him for it. I hope you give him a chance too.