Tim Keller debates atheist Norman Bacrac on The Reason For God

[Music] good evening welcome along to the show this is unbelievable with me justin briley and looking forward to bringing you a classic replay today featuring well-known christian thinker author and pastor tim keller all the way back from 2009 remember you can keep up to date with unbelievable via our newsletter also the video channel social media all the ways to give and support the show links are all there at the show page premier christian radio dot com forward slash unbelievable and if you're a regular listener you'll know that recently we launched on pathos as well a new blog in fact there are four blog posts that you can now view uh most recently this last week we put one up called can skeptics find a welcome in narnia reflecting on that show between laura miller and michael ward and just recently tom holland as well we've blogged on tom holland and a couple of the shows he's appeared on as well why he changed his mind about christianity you're looking for the unbelievable blog over at pathos if you want to check those out you'll also receive them if you simply subscribe to our newsletter and as you'll hear if you're receiving this show in the us as a podcast we've got some very special offers and resources just for you over our new us websites live now unbelievable dot show sign up there for additional resources if you're out in the usa but you won't be left behind if you're listening anywhere else in the world just sign up by our regular newsletter too over at the show page again premierechristianradio.com forward slash unbelievable make sure that all of the links to those are there from today's show as well i mentioned tom holland just there and he's actually just edited a volume of essays on jesus the revolutionary for sbck uh it's by both christians and non-christians so looking forward to hopefully setting something up with him and perhaps one of the contributors on that as well uh and and mentioning newsletters actually just uh recently on before we get to uh to norman backrack and and tim keller for today's show um it was great to receive some responses when i asked for what you've been doing creatively uh to engage people in conversations on a recent newsletter uh this came in from nigel who said i've been concerned for a little while about my lack of contact with people who aren't christians after starting a new job in a theological college this became more acute in lockdown so i decided to open a new twitter account made up an alias and started following various atheist forums and people with atheist and skeptic aliases from across the world and it's been a fascinating time of learning what people really think and what the real issues are that they have with christianity i've really started conversations but do respond to other tweets and comments and it's led to many deep and personal conversations what an interesting idea thank you very much someone else got in touch actually uh with the fact that they they still do the good old-fashioned you know door knocking and uh handing out tracks as well uh in their parish but you know there's lots of ways you can engage people in a conversation aren't there well today's show is a classic replay that means we're pulling something out of the archive from 2009. this was not long after the publication of tim keller's best-selling book the reason for god uh at the time i didn't know tim very well we got to know we've got to know each other a little bit over the years since uh there have been some health updates as well from tim keller i'll fill you in a little bit on that uh just in the last few months um but for the moment let's get into this classic replay uh he's opposite norman bachrach on today's show i'll be introducing them both in just a moment's time hope you enjoyed today's show let me know what you think we'll be hearing some of your feedback as well to recent editions of the show a little bit later on in the programme for now here's tim keller and norman bachrach on the reason for god [Applause] [Music] you're listening to unbelievable with justin brierly [Music] uh timothy keller is pastor of redeemer presbyterian church in new york and the author of the reason for god published by hodar and stozen and it's available in many good book shops uh norman bachrach is editor of the ethical record norman coming on in uh if you like with his atheist hat on today uh and we're gonna have a fascinating discussion i'm sure between timothy and norman as the program progresses but let me introduce those two guests uh before i go any further first of all um timothy great to have you with me on the program today um those who are regular listeners to unbelievable may remember that uh i spoke to you a couple of months back uh we had a brief conversation uh but it's great to have you in uh the chance to have a proper discussion in this sort of context today uh tell us a little bit about redeemer presbyterian church in new york where your pastor uh it's a it's a fairly young church it's about 20 years old we started it um in 1989 it's a church that's largely uh young people it's uh 70 80 percent single uh most people are in the 20s young professionals about it's very large uh in a in a very secular city which uh it grew to several thousand people uh and interestingly enough we we don't own a building we rent space and we have our services on a sunday and one of the services is in the ethical culture society of new york city and there you go that's right um so it's very much not a traditional church in that sense in as much as you don't have a central big ornate building you're very much you meet in in different locations yeah we rent uh colleges uh uh churches um other venues and uh we we rent office space but we don't have a we don't have a building no and yourself um i mean is this you the first church that you planted did you come from a previous church it's the first church i planted i've actually only been a pastor twice one in a small town in virginia blue collar town and one in manhattan that's it but it's the only church i've ever planted yes and your own christian journey did that begin at a a young age no i was i became a christian in college embraced christian faith in college struggle with doubt i actually mentioned not much about that but a little bit about it in the book the reason for god books and uh so your journey was one of coming to overcome those doubts presumably yes but it was in college right and i wouldn't i if somebody said did you ever disbelieve in god and then came to believe in god i would say like a lot of people i when i got to university age i was willing to question the christian teachings i had growing up and i went through a period in which i did question them all i held them loosely let's say and then overcame the doubts i had about them and embraced them and the reason for god very much emerged i understand from your ministry in new york because it's it's a kind of a skeptical place new york oh yes i'm pretty much as skeptical as london i would think but um in a way i had to redo my struggle that is when i was a college student thinking it through um i came through it and decided i'd be a christian but then when i went to new york surrounded by all these young people right out of university i had to work through all those things over and over and over again for the last 20 years and so the book is just a a pray see of those experiences absolutely well we'll we'll get to talking about some of the issues you tackle in the book and i'm sure norman will will want to uh very much put the side of the skeptic uh this afternoon during the programme um norman do you ever remember having had a faith at any point in the past no i uh i've always been an atheist i mean someone once said that um no one is born an atheist because there is some kind of inherent belief in god and then another person said no everyone is born an atheist because you inherit a some kind of belief in god from what what do you think the natural state is of someone who's who's just been born i think it's a mixture i think everyone is technically born an atheist but i think there may be some this is something we may come on to i think there is some genetic predisposition in human beings because we are social animals possibly if you think of a group of chimpanzees they have their chief their leader whom they follow and there may well be something like that that lingers on in genetics amongst social animals to look towards a leader of some sort and that might be genetic i don't know and that might manifest itself as a higher power of something can do yes and that may be a reason for belief in uh god you're you're the editor of the ethical record tell us what that is it's the journal of the south place ethical society that began in 1787 an american alpha nan winchester came to london he did not believe in hell he believed that people went to heaven he was a christian but he had a he was a dissident christian and founded that just little community and it grew and a few years later they disbelieved in the trinity and they became unitarian right and then one of their ministers wanted to get divorced which the unitarians didn't believe in so they became independent of unitarianism and towards the end of it towards the 19th century they gave up prayer and all beliefs so now for the last hundred years you could say it's a humanist society what a very interesting journey that has been then um but uh obviously it now represents if you like yes a humanist outlook um and and that that is the the worldview you would say you inhabit i think so yes yes we'll we'll talk more about that but thank you very much for joining me on the program today those are our guests for this afternoon we're gonna i'm sure have a very interesting discussion here on unbelievable the program as i often say that brings christians and non-christians together uh we're going to be particularly uh looking at aspects of timothy's book the reason for god it's been a a bestseller stateside it's just starting to really gain uh some notoriety over here in the uk as well so we look forward to um to delving into some of the issues that tim brings out in the book what struck you if we start out with you norman about the book uh did it um raise any issues for you which were pertinent any any give you any new angles on any of the uh the thoughts about god and christianity yes i was quite interested in the book and in particular tim's view towards the end about the function of grace and its connection with forgiveness because i have a different secular view on that whole problem right that's all i'm sure we'll have time um there are a number of issues which he didn't mention which i think are interesting about um for example the existence of consciousness the fact that human beings it's not just that we evolved but we evolved from inanimate life and all the complexity we now see appears to be as a result of the operation of natural law darwin himself ended his book the origin of species says there's grandeur in this view of life to think to paraphrase it that all this complexity he described a tangled bank with birds and insects and worms all carrying out their apparent purposive activity and all this resulted from laws just like the law of gravity the physical laws and you thought that was what interested him and that's what uh basically i believe and you from that point of view do do just believe in the natural world in in the the laws of nature uh nothing beyond that nothing supernatural certainly um that we are simply the product of um highly complex if you like interactions of chemicals and atoms there's there's no such thing as a soul or or any meaning beyond the physical universe is that is that fair to say well that appears to be the picture that science now gives us it wasn't accepted always even i can you go back 50 years and people were saying in sermons you can't explain heredity by physics and chemistry how can you pack all that information for a human being in molecules how could it come about then dna was discovered and we now realize that you can explain all the complexities of the human being with the same laws of physics and chemistry that apply in the natural world rest of the world well maybe we'll start off in this area then um though we're going to be covering this in a great deal of depth next week as well so i won't won't take up too much time today but um you do deal with science in one of your chapters um hasn't science disproved christianity what's what's your main line of thought on this then timothy that science is a science is a boundaried discipline when you ask i think real scientists how do you explain why there's something rather than nothing they say that's not my job when you ask them why uh what makes you think there are human rights you know why should human beings have more be treated with more dignity than a rock or a tree and if they say well they're more complex and i say well no that that that doesn't tell you why they should have dignity and they say well that's not something that i can we can speak to a science scientist i i guess i would say that i don't see great contradictions and i actually feel like to some degree that this the contradiction between science and religion have been aggravated and maybe exaggerated by people on both sides of the fence who feel that it's a way for them to accrue a little bit more power if you're uh if a scientist is saying religion is a farce because we've disproved it then it gives you more cultural power if religious people say science is uh um a great enemy well you know religious people like to accrue power by finding an enemy i actually if somebody could press me a little bit on if you could press me or norman i don't i don't see huge um huge conflicts what are the conflicts for you then norman that you do see well the archbishop of canterbury accepts evolution so there doesn't have to be let's assume he can take him as a mainstream christian and uh tim also accepts evolution right he didn't specify in his book whether he takes evolution right up to and including human beings i don't know if you would care to answer that yes or no you do yes let's see i mean the catholics or i don't know maybe i would i'd go with at a certain point at certain point something supernatural a soul had to be put into human beings to make them different either conception for each human or adam and eve whereas the scientific picture dispenses with that yes how do you uh react to that one well i don't think i would say that the scientists can't tell me about the soul i mean i i know that there have been efforts to weigh have you heard about this i thought this is silly um there have been efforts to weigh a person right before and right after they died have you heard about that and apparently there is a minute amount of differences supposedly supposedly there's a minute and that's the soul that's gone i just again here i have a feeling we're not gonna get we're not gonna butt heads much on this i i don't think that science can tell me whether i've got a soul or not is it a matter of faith then that you have a soul or do you believe there is reasons beyond just kind of well listen i know this might be where we can butt heads a bit i believe the idea that that this the future is going to be like the past or even if there is a past it takes an act of faith because to trust your memory is an act of faith you can't you can't prove your memories right or any of our memories right unless you make a real leap of faith because the only way to to um talk about the past is to rely on your memory and you know in other words you have to assume the reliability of your memory to prove it i believe the idea of human rights and the idea of justice is essentially something that can't be proven and i therefore also believe that the soul can't be proven i believe that an awful lot of things that we use right now all people secular people and christian people this is my my view we use to live our life our faith assumptions that actually can't be empirically proven and one of them for me is the soul well i think that the only way i can understand the word soul is to assume that when religious people use it they're thinking of consciousness the fact that we can experience everything we do experience color sound emotion pleasure pain the whole lot if that's what they mean by the word soul then it appears to depend on the brain and this is what neuroscience appears to suggest you can go to a laboratory not far from here where they will put some electrodes on you etc they will be finding out or other by other means seeing what parts of your brain are active and they can work out from that what you're thinking of you can be rendered unconscious by an anesthetic which suggests that whatever consciousness is and we haven't totally tracked it down yet of course it's some thing that depends on certain chemical processes which can be interrupted by ether or other chemicals and therefore at death one the natural assumption to make is that there is no further consciousness and there is no life after death so i think that would be a point of difference um tim did mention some other points perhaps we'll come back to them any response on that level are we simply just you know experiencing the effect of millions of years of evolution and what may appear to be something very special is is explainable by natural cause well norman's norman's right and and he was fair in saying uh perhaps what tim means or what christians mean or people mean by soul is consciousness i would say consciousness my idea of consciousness and my idea of what the soul is would be overlapping overlapping circles i can't help but believe that higher primates have something like consciousness um uh well it's difficult to be sure you know we can't get inside quite uh my idea really the soul is something that some some kind of uh personal some kind of personal um residue that actually lasts past the dissolution that doesn't mean that doesn't mean everything that would be our consciousness would be attributable to a soul because then actually i'm stuck because i think norman's right that an awful lot of what we could call consciousness is brain activity i mean and you seem to be suggesting that you you have as it were extra reasons for believing we might have have a soul because we do seem to invest so much value in human beings over any other living thing you know what if you listen i don't know how all the other christians reason i believe in a soul because i because i believe that jesus rose from the dead because i looked at the evidence for that because i read nt writes 890 page you know um this thesis ev you know working on here's the historical reasons why jesus was in the dead but now i mean i i believe that before he came along but he helped me um because i believe jesus raised from the dead i actually believe the scripture and because the scripture tells me about the soul i believe in the soul i don't believe in the soul because i sit there and i look at norman and justin and other people and i say oh look at how their brain look at how they operate they must have a soul i don't i wouldn't get there from there let's move the the discussion on because if um you are interested in the whole science religion area we'll have a fascinating discussion on that with my guest next week i'll tell you about that a little bit later i mean um maybe starting off with the first chapter norman um that is a chapter called there can't be just one true religion and um i guess from your point of view as an atheist you don't believe there is actually one true religion you believe they're all false um i mean but do you see the claims that christianity makes of being the truth and jesus being the way the truth and the life and the only way if you like to heaven as being presumably incredibly arrogant in in some sense i suppose if if one believes that firmly that is not arrogance it's their belief but looking at the whole thing from a slightly greater distance it appears that every culture in every continent throughout the ages has devised their own form of religion it could be ancestor worship it could be the major religions which are still around and now you've got about four or five major religions with hundreds of millions of adherents who go through their lives believing they're doing the right thing and they would they believe in that and therefore from my point of view i see them all as human inventions that's the humanist view that so there can be plenty of wisdom in there plenty of good sense in it but it was all created by human beings and ultimately we've got to judge what bits of it we like and what bits of it we don't like which comes on to something to mention just before human rights morality that whole issue i don't think there is a morality out there objective i think all morality is created by human beings we each have to devise and decide our own morality there is simply no logical alternative even if you decide you're going to adopt some other creed or some other doctrine or follow other person that's your decision you can't avoid making that personal decision and we simply don't accept everything that previous religions have devised we don't think that homosexuality is an abomination that adulterers should be stoned to death well even jesus didn't seem to think that i'm not sure about that but that raises an interesting question but certainly if you go to nigeria now there's a woman on death row who's going to be buried up to her waist and going to be stoned to death unless someone can persuade the president to grant her a pardon that's i think islam not christianity but it still goes on and therefore i'm just saying that we have to decide which bits of the holy books and the scriptures of the different religions are applicable today we can't avoid that in my opinion well there's there's a few issues there but maybe starting off at least with the whole question then tim of isn't it obvious that religions are man-made because they appear in different forms all over the planet et cetera ethical human i mean uh secular humanism is man-made certainly so and and here's where i would say that i'm actually sitting in the very same chair as norman an ethical humanist or a secular humanist says that i think my take on reality and that is religions are all relatively right and wrong and we need to my take on reality is actually the more accurate one than any one of these religions where they believe that they have all the truth but basically i would say it's a secular humanist is saying actually my take on reality is more true than theirs and even though i can take some good things here my take on reality is more true than theirs i think as a christian my take on reality is more accurate my christian take is more accurate than the normans and i therefore am no more or less narrow than norman i actually also think that my that the world would be better if more people believed what i believed uh norman i think would think that the world would be better if more people saw things the way he believed so neither of us is more narrow than the other do you accept that norman that that in fact you you're in a sense got just as much a kind of the same way of looking at it as as as timothy does because you're saying well i can see everything actually i can see the big picture whereas you can't timothy um so so in a sense you you're just as making just as many assumptions as tim is i think in principle yes with one difference and that is i think humanists are perhaps more because they don't have a holy book and a doctrine and a lay down kind of thing like that they can be more open it seems to me to be to new evidence about how humans get on with each other how best to what kind of legislation have in the country what laws etc they can be more open it seems to me and they can adopt i mean i personally would use what i call utilitarianism it's a it's a complicated word but it actually means you look for the consequences of an action and what is its effect on other people's consciousness does it cause them pleasure or pain i don't mean pleasure and pain in any simple sense by the word pleasure anything which is a positive feeling it could be enjoyment or or anything whatever positive and by the word pain anything which is negative and you look at the consequences you can decide how best in that way to adapt to life so i think humanists are freer to do that than people who are committed willy-nilly to a certain doctrine and just have to make that doctrine make sense and twist it around to do so timothy response well yeah i mean first of all that was that was generous of norman to say in principle yes that we both have we're both in a sense equally in belief that our view of things is better but i would say there's religion in this religion and christianity for example frees me to be pretty open to all kinds of new ideas and here's the reason why actually as long as the bible is it seems very long but essentially it doesn't say that many things the bible doesn't tell me what kind of music is the right kind of music the bible doesn't tell me actually it doesn't give me a whole lot of even if i believe and i do in the infallibility of the bible it gives me it gives me an anchor in other words just i know that genocide is wrong i know that breaking promises is wrong i know that there's a whole lot of things that are absolutely wrong and some things that are right and probably i would think norman would feel there's certain things that are absolutely wrong and some things are right and then from that core he moves out and he's open to other ways of doing things and new ways of doing things so am i you're listening to unbelievable here on premiere christian radio i'm justin briley bringing you this classic replay between tim keller and atheist norman bachrach we'll be back very shortly what i want to invite roger to comment on is why couldn't the mental realm include an infinite consciousness it's too much like us it's true necessary source i admire this noble aspiration to find the highest possible ideal it's almost as if you're proposing a new religion to meet this new challenge it's not a new religion what it is is something that sits in the same place it addresses some of the same needs but it is not founded on the same principle if the new testament says that jesus did x y and z did he do it or not i don't think it's a story that's made by committee am i going to have a later literary genius who comes up with a great story like this or am i going to say no jesus is the genius and somehow that story has basically been preserved [Music] [Applause] [Music] you're listening to unbelievable with justin brierly [Music] hey welcome back to the program it's justin brown with you for unbelievable bringing you a classic replay on this week's edition of the show this is from a 2009 discussion between norman bachrach and tim keller who for some reason i insisted on calling timothy throughout the discussion i've got to know tim a little bit better over the years since and i will bring you a little bit of an update on both norman and tim and how they're doing but for now let's get back into today's conversation [Music] if the bible and i believe the bible the bible hasn't spoken to something that i'm free to uh figure out well what would be the most wise thing however the bible tells me something about what is good for people one of the things i find difficult about utilitarianism or other ethical uh see and the bible says some things are good for human beings this is what a human being this is what a good human this is what human beings were made for if you don't think human beings are made for some reason that they're here by accident then you are back to this idea of well i guess just what gives people pain or pleasure but you know it gives people pleasure to be mean uh some people i actually i actually have get pleasure out of doing some things that aren't good for other people so i i'm not sure that utilitarianism maybe i'm sure i've misrepresented it but i would say i like i like having an ethical anchor that actually within the bible are you saying that humanism doesn't have that ethical anchor that it is essentially blown by whatever there's so many kinds that i need to hear from you i'd just like to chip in here on a misunderstanding of utilitarianism which is pretty rife you're not you can it may say pleasure is good pain is bad but you're not allowed to get your pleasure from another person's pain that is definitely not allowed so for example sadism or stealing something or anything like that just because it makes the person who does it happy makes them happy it doesn't mean it's right because utilitarianism properly understood means just think of it this way don't cause any pain or any suffering if as well as doing that you can cause some pleasure fair enough but you certainly can't it sounds a bit like yeah do unto others as they would have as you would have them do unto you that's the sort of golden rule that could be part of it certainly now i was going to say why is that wrong since it's very natural to cause i mean evil you and i are here if evolution is true and i believe i believe in a very supplemented understanding of evolution i believe in god i believe in the bible but the point is that evolution says that we got here through the strong eating the weak through weak people weak weak organisms being squeezed out by the strong that's absolutely natural that's completely normal so why should we now turn on the natural order and say even though we got here by uh some some beings getting pleasure out of somebody else's pain why is it suddenly wrong well two points first of all human beings are cooperative as well as competitive certainly nature is read in tooth and claw there's a you know tremendous amount of suffering in the natural world this is one of the reasons that charles darwin gave up christianity 99 of the species have been eliminated think of the suffering that they may have undergone the second point is we don't have to follow automatically because we can choose the kind of morality we wish to adopt we don't have to say this or that is natural so although i've said although competition and cooperation well you can find them both in primitive communities shall we say it's up to us today to devise our own morality you can't go from is to ought in any simple connection you can't just say because this is the way wild animals behave therefore this is the way i mean you're saying we've developed to a degree that we can actually now choose the class we follow absolutely i still don't know why why do you have to choose um you know why why choose generosity and why choose cooperation why choose it ultimately it comes down to me or other people who believe this persuading everyone else to adopt these values most people in civilized societies have already adopted them that unfortunately don't require me to tell them about it because they can do it anyway so in other words you have to persuade people who might not understand the point of generosity why they should be generous but isn't it even more than that it's actually saying human life if you go and rob someone we're actually going to put you in jail for it it is actually wrong to do that so so there's a sense in which it's not just about you persuading people it's about saying there's something that's actually wrong about what you're doing okay well this this brings us on to perhaps the most important issue we might have to discuss here because certainly a society needs sanctions it needs to be able to put people who've robbed or whatever who are dangerous in prison to stop them doing it again possibly to deter them to deter others those are valid reasons for having a prison system but ultimately you want to go get to a reformative system because the the crucial point is that from the scientific point of view every human being is simply a collection of atoms which obey the laws of physics they could not have done otherwise than they did that's an astounding thing to say so even someone who has committed a murder or some other terrible act from the humanist or from the scientific point of view properly understood you have no right to be vindictive and engage in retributive punishment so you don't actually need to be told this by god or have jesus to tell you about it or use his example it's the automatic and necessary consequence of the fact that we are human beings and peace parts of the world of nature so okay you might have to stop just as you put a tiger in a cage you might have to stop someone uh restrain them but there's no need for blame in that sense just got a few minutes in the remaining part of this program for you to respond tim and then we'll move on to a different topic well i would say it's it sounds like norman is saying that that uh cruelty isn't actually wrong it's just impractical that if we're going to have us if we're all going to get if we're going to have a uh an organized harmony society um acts of violence and cruelty are wrong no they're not wrong they're just impractical because he doesn't have a basis for saying they're wrong he can only say yes of course strong eat the week that's how we did it up to them but now we can choose this because it's more practical um and then we have to say that means you shouldn't do it because uh for really the only way to appeal to people to live like this to live generously and kindly et cetera would be to appeal to their selfishness to say well i we want you to be generous not because it's right and to be stingy and violent is wrong but because um this is how you'll be happy so you're actually encouraging self-centeredness and you're jury rigging their self-centeredness you're not dealing with your self-centeredness by saying this is the right and you need to submit to it you need to humble yourself before the truth and the right instead you're saying well this is the best way for you to be happy and for you to get your needs met but you know some people are going to realize by that that they can get away with cruelty because there's nothing really wrong with cruelty it's just impractical and as long as it's just impractical not wrong they're going to do it over here and over here wherever they can do it i don't think you're going to get this this great ethical society without belief in god what really makes us human i suppose is what timothy is saying is is is that we choose the right thing because it's the right thing it's the right thing because it doesn't cause harm and causes shall we say pleasure or happiness that's the definition i've i gave now if you're dealing with uh criminals it was suggested by tim that unless they understand about god or what have you they can't be reformed i think that's not not the case at all one of the biggest problems of course is that many people many criminals leave their prison and they just go and commit another crime so it's clearly important to have programs which make them clearly understand in detail the harm they've caused etc and make them come to realize what it is that they've done which they may not properly do and also the factors in their own upbringing thing that cause them to behave in that way and this i think is the right way a secular way for like perfectly good way a practical way of trying to get down the prison population and to make sure that people who want to get into that system don't return to it it doesn't have to involve belief in god or what some other transcendental thing it doesn't need to do that i mean you may not disagree with that tim oh i i i know that there's ways to uh for people who don't believe in god to be very very decent and moral i would never say that an individual can't lead a very moral and decent and humanitarian life unless they believed in god i was just actually i'd think that logically throughout a society on the whole it will be difficult for many many many people to be moral unless they believe that the right thing is the right thing because it's the right thing but i would never i would never say that you couldn't rehabilitate a prisoner without belief in god and i didn't mean to say that well let's um i mean unless there's anything you wanted to add norman shall we move on to another section of the book anything you want to pick up in particular um in in regard to other chapters in the reason for gardened and uh i mean perhaps in the area of um whether whether the bible is is uh a good book for us to be referencing i know that you've spoken to me before on how you can't see how the bible can can give a kind of moral mandate if you like for christianity given some of the episodes that occur in it i mean even if one believed that the bible was the word of god that it contained revelation from some transcendental being that would still not solve the problem you'd still have to quit you still have to decide yourself whether it was good how do you know that god is good and not a devil or evil so this was pointed out by socrates over two thousand years ago that just because the gods say something is good it's not a reason for obedience that in other words you've got to you can't can't get out of the fact that each individual has to themselves appreciate the value of it and if you say that that means we must we must have our own independent way of judging what we think is good and bad right and wrong and that that means okay we can look up the past and we can see what other clever people i've said just as you might read shakespeare you don't think shakespeare is divine just because you couldn't have written that particular form of words you know it's done by a human being similarly we may find great profound sayings amongst people in the past there's still the sayings of human beings and we we have to judge it and appreciate it so i don't believe in what's called an objective morality and the mere fact that god says it doesn't to me mean anything we still it still has to be he just gets one vote like anyone else and and we we at the end of the day are the people who process what we believe is right and wrong yes uh so so i mean i mean on that level tim you might say it's all very well saying that christianity gives us a an ethical framework within which to to to work but at the end of the day aren't you the one who decides yes that is the right way of looking at life and that isn't aren't you you know so so that you know you you may come to different conclusions to a muslim who who sees in a different way when they look at their own scriptures etc yes i mean um our choices matter and we have choices to make and the choices really matter but once once you have made the decisions in other words when i decide that the bible's true then uh i actually do have to do that i have to make that decision but but uh what what norm is suggesting is i never take that hat off that is that i all my life continue to use my own intuition my own consciousness as the straight edge by which i decide what in the bible is right and what in the bible is wrong so there's two ways to do this one is i can use my consciousness and my sense feelings thoughts as the straight edge and some things in the bible fit that some things the bible don't which case i'm god in a sense i mean i'm you know i'm the one i am the uh you know wisdom i have the wisdom or i can turn it around and i can actually have the bible make make the bible the straight edge and i have some feelings that wow this fits in with the bible there's other things that i actually don't like that the bible says but i submit to it so i either either i make the bible the straight edge and i pick and choose from in my own heart what's right and wrong or i can make myself and my own consciousness the straight edge and then i have to choose what's right and wrong in the bible the scary thing about that is everybody straight edge is different and hitler had a straight edge there were things in the bible he liked and things he didn't like and um if i just say you know the way which we decide right or wrong is is is my my own consciousness then i really think that what's wrong with what the way hitler lived i mean you can go back to the utilitarianism of course and i i granted a number of things that norman said there but i that that if you're just asking me how do i see it is it my choice or not the answer is you have to start with i have to decide this is where the truth is but then i have to take that hat off and submit when hitler came to power he closed down all the atheist societies and believed that christianity should be taught in schools so i don't know using hitler gets us very far just going back to the question of the straight age and using the bible or the koran as your guide just think of one practical example divorce now it just so happens that in jewish and islamic law a man can divorce a woman by some fairly simple process but the woman can't divorce the man by an equally simple process that seems to be the way it's practiced and if you suggest to a rabbi or an imam that this really is is out of date these days surely it should be more more symmetrical and what have you they say well this is god's law we cannot change it it says it in the bible so i think that is the reason why humanists and atheists say this is just um a shackle that you've put on yourself by adopting this allegedly divine law and you're simply causing actual real misery to people today by adhering to it i mean once we do get into specific instances of moral situations it gets a lot more complicated because we then have to work through things but but i mean if if we were to take this and and go around with it a bit what do you think i guess you have to speak from a christian point i'll be more general right you're right we could we could and you do have a certain a limited period of time here see i i would say the bible actually sits in some judgment on both individualistic societies and collectivistic societies and what norm is talking about is is you have some societies in which the individual like has no rights the woman has no rights uh the child has no rights there's you know some societies in which uh the father can kill the child if they want if he wants they have that kind of power uh on the other hand in in the west we have i would call radical individualism where my needs are more important than than than the common good i think actually christianity is really look at where it came up from where the bible came from it's really neither a western or eastern it's not really um a faith that that lifts up the family or the clan is the absolute or the individual i think it sits in judgment on both and actually i would say many of the things that you know norman would consider many of the things i can tell normally would consider atrocities and and very bad for saudi i actually as a bible-believing christian would agree with that's all so i still believe in in taking a straight edge because something's going to be a straight edge is either going to be my my personal heart and consciousness or something that millions of people have found over the years to really be a you know source of wisdom i'd rather submit to a tradition and set myself up as the uh as you know the arbiter of all truth and is that because you don't believe humans have the capacity to i don't know yes i don't trust my own heart i used hitler admitting norman rightly so kind of you know did a little number on me there i mean hitler isn't a great example because of what he did but the point is that i there's there are plenty of atheists there are plenty of atheists um official atheist societies that were violent official muslim societies that were violent official christian societies that were violent and i would say as a bible-believing christian all of them were violating the things the bible says about the golden rule which and therefore i still would rather say this is right because it's right and you need to submit to it submit your self-centeredness get out of your self-centeredness submit your consciousness to it and frankly if you do do the golden rule an awful lot of the atrocities that we're talking about here wouldn't would never have been picked up so i you know i don't look to christianity i look to the idea of a biblical straight edge rather than christianity in general just one point tim referred to individualism as though if you're an atheist you have to be an individualist i think he meant someone who was selfish and only looked after himself i don't see that as necessarily following at all if i just quote jeremy bentham who was a utilitarian philosopher in the 19th century he had this phrase the greatest happiness of the greatest number which is the kind of thing you can use in politics you can decide that it's better for the population as a whole that everyone pays income tax and the rich pay more income tax and it gets distributed in various ways to the poor so that that is looking at it from the point of view of the greatest number of people what would increase their happiness so if you're rich you may not want to pay more tax but nevertheless it might be the correct say correct it might be the most moral thing to do so it doesn't follow that because you're an atheist it determines your politics necessarily can i ask questions that are coming through actually and i'm not assuming norman this is true but that what i've heard christians come after jeremy bentham by saying well why if a majority decides that would make them happier would be in their best interest to say rob a minority of all their income because that would be the greatest good for the greatest good i mean how would you say there it was wrong then how would you argue against well i'm sure that they probably did the rich people may have said this is robbery why this is how our money which ours how can the government take it from us but the as we've said before you can cause an increase in happiness or pleasure but not at the expense of causing pain and i don't really think that raising someone's income tax if they're a millionaire uh does cause real pain you know it's just something that you have to decide so of course it's a judgment it's tolerable you're not really causing them to suffer i mean it's interesting though you do keep resorting to you're not allowed to do this you're not allowed to do that it sounds like there's some inbuilt rules underneath your utilitarianism which say these are the non-negotiables and isn't what timothy's just saying is that i i recognize there are non-negotiables and so therefore there is some kind of objective morality i mean you what why why shouldn't we cause pain to other people in order to further our own pain it's doesn't it go beyond this communal aspect it seems like there's justice really does exist it really is wrong to you know steal candy from a baby isn't that kind of something everyone kind of knows if you want a moral absolute then one can put it in that form one can say that it is wrong to cause unnecessary pain that's a period and that's really an absolute moral rule it's not object it's subjective in the sense that it's my opinion and i hope it would be the opinion of everybody else but why do you hope it would be the opinion everyone else because you believe it's true presumably no not because it's true in the sense that paris is the capital of france is a true fact it's not a fact in that sense it still remains a value judgment but it's a value that i mean this is the human predicament we have to persuade people by education by their etc the way they're brought up to come to believe these principles and i don't see any other way i always have these discussions with people on my program and i can never see how that works in practice because at the end of the day it seems like you've got to if you are trying to persuade someone that something is the right thing to do just i just have to ask well why should you do that what's the moral imperative i mean we won't go there though because i i'm just aware that we've been around this today i can just say that i think it's in gibbon's roman empire he talks about the roman religion and how it was regarded there were three different views of it the the populist believed in their religion and their gods and their sacrifices the philosophers amongst the romans believed it was all false but the magistrates those responsible for law and order believed it was useful in other words the religion has a useful function uh in keeping people in order and this has always been one of its functions but uh when it comes if you want to be rigorously true you have to you know it's it's convenient to say there is a god who will is watching everything you do and it seems to work to keep people in order but is it true no i don't think it is i i i'm with you in trying to get to another subject something that's germane it's not it's not a direct response to norman but it's in the book that i thought i might mention there's a there's a uh an article i read it's i i reference in the book a a secular an atheist a really good she was an anthropologist and she taught i think at either brown or university of rhode island i forget where it was and she wrote an article in the chronicle of her education some years ago that i reference and she was doing research amongst uh in africa and she realized that she was very upset with uh you know female genital mutilation she saw women in this pers part of africa being oppressed and when she started to raise her voice about it everyone in in that culture all the powers that be said you cannot impose western values here you cannot this the the which is utilitarianism would be considered by them an absolutely western value they would say uh this is the the greatest you know good for the greatest number for us to treat the women this way you can't come in here with your idea of universal rights and she was as an as an uh as an anthropologist said as a secular person i actually don't believe there's uh an absolute right and wrong i do believe that actually all morality is socially conditioned i also believe i i probably don't have the right to uh therefore say that what's going on here is wrong i'm i'm white i'm from the west i'm you know and yet she said actually in my own view of life i didn't have any reason to actually believe that what was happening was absolutely wrong but she says i couldn't help it and then she decided to go after and she says i'm not going i'm going to do what i can to stop it even though i'm imposing my cultural values i'm imposing my western values yeah and she went after it and she so i and i think as a christian i see that she just needs five words the child who is being uh cut about by a piece of dirt broken glass b by uh on this uh genital mutilation her pain is real it's not a western invention it's universal and that's why this is your belief that we shouldn't interrupt that certainly just your opinion whatever by the yeah by the most appropriate means that they're tradition they do it for some tradition absolutely but they've just got to be told why this tradition is like burning of widows and all the other traditions are obsolete okay once once you've imposed but again it's just your opinion your opinion against their opinion because there's no actual truth but who is the they i'm saying the victim in in this in these particular practices knows perfectly well she does not want to have this operation done on her right what about taking her opinion into account this anthropologist has got it wrong okay well i'm going to leave that discussion there because we've we've um we've we've nearly got to the end of the program and we've only really been around one particular issue but but he's having a good point we are having a great program um and all i will say is that if you want to read the reason for god you won't just find uh an extended argument for um from morality for god you'll find all kinds of different arguments um let me just ask you gents to maybe just prepare a little bit of a summing up as it were as we approach the end of the programme and particularly be interested to find from you um tim how your experience in new york has particularly kind of fed into the book and the kind of questions people are asking before you before you come back with that let me say if you're listening and you'd like to respond yourself to anything you've heard on the program then i'd love to hear from you the email address is unbelievable at premiere.org.uk don't forget this program available online right now at premiere.org.uk forward slash unbelievable if you've enjoyed it and you'd like to send it on to someone do email them the link and maybe uh subscribe to the podcast while you're there if you listen to unbelievable with justin briley on premier christian radio and enjoy the conversations between christians and skeptics then this is the perfect app for you for the latest updates podcasts videos articles bonus content and much more download the premiere unbelievable app today [Music] welcome back to the third and final part of this week's edition of unbelievable with me justin briley the show that aims to get you thinking and doing that with a classic replay this week we'll hear the final part of the discussion between tim keller and norman bachrach all the way back from 2009. uh it was the first time i had tim keller on the show he had recently published the reason for god he's gone to publish many many more books since and we've had it on the show a number of times since and i'll give you a little update on the situation with his health as well uh towards the end of today's show i've got some fresh material for you though next week uh come back for william lane craig he's recently published a major new work on atonement and the death of christ in which he defends penal substitutionary atonement as the core motif of scripture when it comes to how christ's death has paid for sin well william lane craig well known as a christian apologist and philosopher and theologian he'll be discussing that view with another well-known church leader and theologian greg boyd who rejects the idea that god punished jesus instead of us on the cross and champions instead the christus victor view that jesus overcame the powers of darkness on the cross in and rejects the sort of violent view of god that he believes is often portrayed in penal substitutionary atonement so um look out for that a debate on the cross and atonement between william lane craig and greg boyd this time next week if you can stay on this evening here on premier christian radio for the profile at 8 pm uh you'll be hearing from retired police superintendent leroy logan who's the former chair of the black police association and author of the recently published book closing ranks my life as a cop that should be fascinating tonight eight or indeed you can go and find that wherever you get your podcast from before the end of the show we've got plenty of your feedback as well especially on last week's show on coronavirus we had a sort of panel discussion on that as i was joined by guests who had joined me at the beginning of lockdown uh some people saying it was a bit lopsided uh we'll hear why uh during the uh during the feedback section of today's show but for now let's wrap up today's classic replay between tim keller and norman backrack you're listening to unbelievable with justin brierly [Music] norman some of your final thoughts as we uh as we wrap up i don't believe that there is a god who judges people on the basis of what they've done because god is meant to be omniscient he knows everything and therefore he fully understands why every human action is the inevitable result of that particular person's genes plus environment everything that's happened to them and because of that there's no there's no justice whatsoever in retributive punishment or hell or any of these doctrines hell or heaven so since they're an important part of the christian doctrine it that religion must be false because it doesn't make sense okay thank you very much um would you like to respond tim and give your summing up well the response to that would be norman's assuming that uh people can't help but because he's assuming that we are nothing but matter and therefore we are the we're the product of our social conditioning and our genetic makeup et cetera he said originally he says they can't help but do that so if there is no soul if there is no uh if there's if there's no immaterial aspect if there's no such thing there for his free will and i i actually agree with him that if there is no god there really isn't such a thing as free will really um then he's right but you see the premise there was since there is no god and there is no immaterial uh part of the you know human being people can't help what they're doing and therefore retributive punishment is unjust but you know he actually assumed god i think in order to disprove god i actually think that that actually happens a lot um if you say there's so much evil and suffering in the world how could god allow that i can't believe in god but that assumes a standard of right and wrong outside of the natural order which is filled with violence anyway so anyway i i mean over the like here's my something my summing up is that when i listen to norman he sounds really smart and really reasonable i never have felt that people who disbelieve in christianity or in god have aren't smart or reasonable in fact i'm always partly convinced every time i hear somebody doubt and the reason i believe in christianity is because on the whole it makes more sense than the skeptical approaches but i don't think that the skeptical approaches have hold no water i very often find that the skeptics think that that belief in god holds almost no water at all i actually think disbelief in god holds a lot of water it that is there's a lot of reasons to disbelieve in god but on the whole there's more reasons too than not and that's what i try to do in the book is not to say here's a slam dunk proof i just say in general belief in god makes more sense of life i think than disbelief in god once you believe that then you can proceed to sort of look at the christian claims about christianity see for me i can't prove god but i when i decided it was more likely than not that he was there then i was open to looking at what the bible said and when i actually found christ personally that moved me from believing that christianity was probably true to being absolutely true so it's a combination of the intellect and the experience that creates a christian not just the intellect and so i never would look at what norman's saying is that's just crazy that's not actually lots of it makes a lot of sense [Music] for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter you

Channel: Unbelievable?

Views: 32,517

Rating: 4.8543897 out of 5

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, tim keller

Id: svt8i4Vh-gI

Length: 62min 12sec (3732 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020