From Timothy Keller and a previous post of April 13, 2023: ‘The Argument for God from the Violence of Nature: Continuing . . . .
‘The Endless, Pointless Litigation of Existence’. . . . I have not tried to prove the existence of God to you. My goal is that you already know God is there. To some degree I have been treating the non-existence of God as an intellectual problem, but it is much more than that. It not only makes all moral choices meaningless, but it makes all life meaningless too. The playwright Arthur Miller reveals this vividly through the character Quentin in After the Fall. Quentin says: “For many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; finally, how wise or powerful or [whatever.] But underlying it all, I see there is a presumption. That one moved . . . on an upward path towards some elevation, where . . . God knows what . . . I would be justified or even condemned. A verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day . . . the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself, this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench. . . . which, of course is another way of saying—despair.” 20
What is he saying? We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than to destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it matters which way we choose to live. Yet if the Cosmos Bench is really empty, then the whole span of human civilization, even if it lasts a few million years, will be just an infinitesimally brief spark in relation to the oceans of dead time that preceded it and will follow it. There will be no one around to remember any of it. Whether we are loving or cruel in the end would make no difference at all. 21
Once we realize this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out the implications of all this. We can hold on to our intellectual belief in an empty Bench and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. Why would we do that? A cynic might say that this is a way of “having one’s cake and eating it, too.” That is, you get the benefit of having a God without the cost of following him. But there is no integrity in that.
The other option is to recognize that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity—all because you know God exists. It is dishonest to live as if he is there and yet fail to acknowledge the one who has given you all of these gifts. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Penguin, Random House LLC, New York, NY 2008, 9, 18), p.162-64
20. Quoted in Peter C. Moore, One Lord, One Faith (Thomas Nelson, 1994),p. 128
21 C.S. Lewis, “On Living in and Atomic Age” (1948), reprinted in the volume Present Concerns,pp. 73-80.
