Excerpts from "The Reason for God" by Timothy Keller

C. S. Lewis gives us a metaphor for knowing the truth about God when he writes that he believes in God 'as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else'. Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can't do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognise how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it.


Here, then, we have a way forward.We should not try to 'look into the sun', as it were, demanding irrefutable proofs for God. Instead we should 'look at what the sun shows us'.Which account of the world has the most 'explanatory power' to make sense of what we see in the world and in ourselves? We have a sense that we are very flawed and yet very great. We have a longing for love and beauty that nothing in this world can fulfil. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose. Which worldview best accounts for these things?


Christians do not claim that their faith gives them omnisience or absolute knowledge of reality. Only God has that. But they believe that the Christian account of things - creation, fall, redemption and restoration - makes the most sense of the world. I ask you to put on Christianity like a pair of spectacles ad look at the world with it. See what power it has to explain what we know and see.


If the God of the Bible exists, he is not the Shakespeare that Hamlet is looking in the attic of his castle, but the Playwright who relates to us (characters) in a play. That means we won't be able to find him like we would a passive object with the powers of empirical investigation. Rather, we must find clues to his reality that he has written into the universe, including into us. That is why, if God exists, we would expect to find that he appeals to our rational faculties. If we were 'made in his image' as rational, personal beings, there should be some resonance between his mind and ours. It also means that reason alone won't be enough. The Playwright can only be known through personal revelation. That is why we have to take a look at what the Bible says about God and the human condition.


In the Christian view, however, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ himself. If there is a God, we characters in his play have to hope that he put some information about himself in the play. But Christians believe he did more than give us information. He wrote himself into the play as the main character in history, when Jesus was born in a manger and rose from the dead. He is the one with whom we have to do.


 - pg 122 - 123