From Timothy Keller’s book, ‘Making Sense of God’~ An Invitation to the Skeptical:
. . . . A popular book that makes . . . points is the best selling When Breath Becomes Air, the reflections of a young neurosurgeon, now deceased, who wrote about a journey back toward faith when he was dying of cancer. 20 Paul Kalanithi had been a “radical atheist.” His primary charge against Christianity was “its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos . . . a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview.”21 But the problem with this whole conception became evident to him. If everything was to have a scientific explanation and proof, then this is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning— . . . world that is self-evidently not the world we live in.”22
All science can do, Kalanithi argues, is “reduce phenomena into manageable units.” It can make “claims about matter and energy” but about nothing else. For example, science can explain love and meaning as chemical responses in your brain that helped your ancestors survive. But if we assert, which virtually everyone does, that love, meaning, and morals do not merely feel real but actually are so—science cannot support that. So, he concluded, “scientific knowledge [is] applicable” to the “central aspects of human life” including hope, love, beauty, honor, suffering and virtue.23
When Kalanithi realized there was no scientific proof for the reality of meaning and virtue, things he was sure existed, it made him rethink his whole view of life. If the premise of secularism led to conclusions he knew were not true—namely that love, meaning, and morals are illusions—then it was time to change his premise. He found it no longer unreasonable to believe in God. He came to a belief not only in God but also in “the central values of Christianity—sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness—because I found them so compelling.”24 Paul Kalanithi had also found that, in Habermas’s phrase, the completely secular point of view had too many things “missing” that he knew were both necessary and real.
Kalanithi refers in passing to forgiveness as one reason he left secularism behind. He does not elaborate, but another account may shed light on this. Author and teacher Rebecca Pippert had the opportunity to audit some graduate-level courses at Harvard University, one of which was “Systems of Counseling.” At one point the professor presented a case study in which therapeutic methods were used to help a man uncover a deep hostility and anger towards his mother. This helped the client understand himself in new ways. Pippert then asked the professor how he would have responded if the man had asked for help to forgive her.25 The professor responded that forgiveness was a concept that assumed moral responsibility and many other things that scientific psychology could not speak to. “Don’t force your values . . . about forgiveness onto the patient, he argued.” When some students responded with dismay, the professor tried to relieve the tension with some humor. “If you guys are looking for a changed heart, I think you are looking in the wrong department.” However, as Pippert observed, “the truth is, we are looking for a changed heart.”26 Secular reason, all by itself, cannot give us a basis for “sacrifice, redemption, and forgiveness,” as Paul Kalanithi concluded in his final months. ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (New York, New York 10014: penguin.com, 2016), 14-15 (continued)
