From Timothy Keller’s book ‘The Reason for God,’ He asks the above question:
In Is There a God? Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne argues powerfully that belief in God can be tested and justified (but not proven). . .[xii] The view that there is a God leads us to expect the things we observe—that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains human beings with consciousness and with an indelible moral sense. The theory that there is no God, he argues does not lead us to expect any of these things. No view of God can be proven, but that does not mean that we cannot sift and weigh the grounds for various religious beliefs and find that some or even one is the most reasonable.
God the Playwright
I don’t want anyone to think that I am adopting “critical rationality” as some sort of second best, however. If the God of the Bible really does exist, “critical rationality” would be exactly the way we ought to approach the question of his being and existence,
When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space reporting that he had not found God, C.S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be anther object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree that the author chooses to put information about himself into the play. Therefore, in no case could we “prove” God’s existence as if it were an object wholly within our universe like oxygen and hydrogen or an island in the pacific.
Lewis gives us another 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.”[xiii] Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn more about it. You can’t do it. It will burn 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 recognize 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 at the sun,” as it were, demanding irrefutable proofs of 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 the world is not the way it ought to be. 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 fulfill. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose. Which worldview best accounts for these things? ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2008, 2018), 126-27
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
