From Timothy Keller and his book ‘The Reason for God’:
On the other hand, secular people should also examine their own self-narrative, namely that they are not exerting any faith, that they are simply using their reason and “seeing things as they are.” Philosopher Charles Taylor’s critique is compelling. To a secular person—to believe, for example, that there is no God and yet there are nonetheless human rights—is to base one’s view of the world on a combination of reason and faith, just like religious people do.5
If we are going to have any hope of social peace in a religiously polarized culture, we will need to hold two attributes in tension. First, since our respective views of reality are based in great part on faith, we must stop expecting the rest of the world to simply bow its knee to our particular set of faith assumptions. We should not attack, mock, and speak as if our beliefs are self-evident to all decent people. On the other hand, since all worldviews are also based on reason, we would try to help the other side see the reasons for our faith, seeking to make our views as intelligible as possible to people who inhabit different moral frameworks. If we practice both this modesty and this confidence as we speak one to another, that would at the very least enhance mutual respect and would begin to create an atmosphere in which people of deeply different beliefs can work together in our common life as co-citizens. It might also lead us to revise some of our beliefs.
This book, The Reason for God, and a subsequent book I have written, Making Sense of God, are dedicated to the belief that it is possible to hold these two attitudes at once. Of course, the books are, as it were, cases for belief in Christianity to those who don’t believe.6 But I sought to conduct the discussion with both respect for skeptics and yet the confidence that Christian faith is cogent. My efforts to do this are far from perfect. Yet the response to the book shows that the project has borne some fruit.
I have been surprised and gratified at the response to The Reason for God. In one sense, the reactions are what one would expect—many Christian have professed that it was convincing, and many non-believers have claimed that it was not convincing. What I did not expect was the number of those in the middle—the ones who said either “I don’t believe, but this is a well-executed effort that makes me think,” or who have actually said “This makes it possible for me to believe. The quantity of these kinds of “middle responses” was greater than I had ever expected, and they indicate the kind respectful yet thoughtful talking and listening that changes minds and hearts. ~Timothy Keller, (The Reason for God, Penguin Books, New York, N.Y. 2008, 2018) xii-xiii
