Review: Tim Keller's Reason for God

Creationism gets a bad rap - even from Christians who believe in creation and who should know better than to totally misunderstand the movement. This is true of Tim Keller in his otherwise thoughtful new book, The Reason for God, in which he exposes the flaws in atheist Richard Dawkins' "hard rationalism," and tries to lead us to a new paradigm, but falls and bruises his knees because he doesn't take a big enough jump. He fails to grasp the creationist viewpoint because he fails to fully understand Darwin.

Keller, like many Intelligent Design proponents, is a theistic evolutionist. In his own words, "I think God guided some kind of process of natural selection, and yet I reject the concept of evolution as All-encompassing Theory." In other words, he accepts the modern assumption that all life-forms are connected through a bloody family tree of mutant genes and adaptation, but denies that it took place in a vacuum without the guiding hand of God.

And what of Creationism? Keller says there are four different views of how science and religion relate to each other:

"...conflict, dialogue, integration, and independence. At the one end of the spectrum, in "conflict," are both the proponents of 'creation science' and, ironically, thinkers like Dawkins. Each side has bought into the warfare model of the relationship of science to faith."

This characterization is so flawed that, had Keller named a specific creation scientist, he could have been sued for slander. Even on the face of it, his accusation is absurd (creation science is anti-science?), and his only way around the problem is to put "creation science" in quotation marks, as if to imply that it isn't really the science it claims to be. Sadly, despite Keller's acute awareness of modernity's contradictions, he makes the common modern-day blunder of accusing warring factions of the same error and then planting his flag in the "balanced" position.

But accusing creationists of wanting a conflict between faith and science is like accusing Jews of conspiring to exterminate the Germans. Keller tells the truth when he says Dawkins' version of science makes war on religion. Dawkins sees no room for God in a rational world, and he actively opposes all efforts of mankind to connect with the spiritual. Dawkins' locks his philosophical cross-hairs on the cathedral walls and isn't satisfied until no stone is left standing.

By contrast, the whole point of the creation science of Ken Ham and John Morris is to tear down the barbed wire fences isolating the Christian faith from the tools of modern science. They might deflect Dawkins' cannon fire, but they have no intention of turning their own guns on science. A brief glance at creationist materials makes it obvious that their war is not with science, but with an anti-God philosophy of science. Their theory - which, by the way, is the same theory that motivated most of the earliest scientists - is that if God is the God of the universe, then all truth must be in conformity with his truth. Science should not be burdened by the assumption that the natural world is all that exists or can be known. Rather, we should expect science to confirm what God has already told us about the world, because the same God who gave us the Bible gave us nature.

Ken Ham freely admits that he doesn't begin with a blank slate. But neither, he insists, do the naturalists. In other words, creation science opposes the same hard rationalism that Keller claims to oppose. Does that make Keller anti-science? Surely not. But Keller's sloppy treatment of the issue could lead readers to that conclusion.

Keller's argument that Christians have many different opinions on the subject, and that our view of Christianity should therefore not be influenced by this secondary issue, might appease his Christian readers; but it won't satisfy the unbeliever who sees a definite contradiction between the Bible and science. Instead of worrying about his atheist readers who feel compelled to believe in Darwinism, Keller needs to realize that, having discarded pure naturalism, he himself is no longer obliged to believe Darwin. The irony is that scientists originally embraced, and continue to embrace, Darwin's theory of common ancestry for one reason - because it provides them with a naturalistic way to explain their own existence that doesn't seem to require God. Evolution "freed" science from religion.

That being the case, what possible reason could Keller, or any other believer in the authority of Scripture, possibly have for trying to harmonize Darwin's assumptions with our traditions? Even aside from the complex issue of whether they can be harmonized, the fact remains that evolution is really only necessary to the atheist. And the burden of that necessity is enormous, to the extent that Dawkins himself must postulate the existence of millions of alternate universes to account for the unlikelihood of life - any life - ever coming to exist. And as the Intelligent Design movement is demonstrating, our world may not only be unlikely, but impossible without divine intervention.

Keller might reply that that is the point - God intervened in evolution. But just as God becomes unnecessary when all things have a natural cause, evolution becomes unnecessary when all things begin with God. We are so accustomed to being told that evolution is science, and science is evolution, that we forget what a wild and complex and hard-to-verify concept it is. A century from now, society will be mocking our barbaric assumption that all life as we know it can be accounted for by a process of genetic mutation and natural selection that occurred before any of us were here to observe it, a process too slow to test in a laboratory and so shapeless that every contradictory evidence is potentially overcome by simply altering the theory.

Keller's confusion about the naturalism/theistic evolution/creationism debate came out in an interview with First Things, where he admitted that in his opinion, "all three of these positions have perhaps insurmountable difficulties.... How could there have been death before Adam and Eve fell? The answer is, I don't know...."

While Keller's honesty is refreshing (who among us has all the answers?), his call for unbelievers to look to Christ and then worry about the complicated stuff later is only going to appeal to those who didn't care about the issue in the first place. A man who meets Christ on the road to Damascus and puts his finger in his wounds might not give a second thought to whether humans and apes share a common ancestor. But if all of us were that man, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

But what about those who do care - the literature professor who cannot reconcile his belief in evolution with what the Bible in its literary context seems to say, or the biologist who decides that the Bible might be spiritually true, but not scientifically or historically true? Christians must sometimes begin with faith in things they don't understand (hence, the ancient Christian motto of "faith seeking understanding"). But Keller doesn't say, "We can believe this particular doctrine because God revealed it." He says something more like, "None of us are sure what to make of this complex issue, so even though it is a stumbling block to you, and even though the implications of your particular position might drastically change the way we interpret the whole Bible, please just forget it for now."

The story of Christ is, as Keller himself knows, inextricably tied to the story of creation. The credibility of the book of Genesis has a real impact on the credibility of the rest of the Bible and the credibility of the church. This is not a side issue. It's an issue as big as the heavens and the earth. Sure, a hypothetical God could hypothetically predestine the process of evolution to make a hypothetical man. But Christianity is not a hypothetical religion, and the world is not asking hypothetical questions.

Fortunately, the creation scientists are giving the specific and convincing answers that Keller isn't able to. It's too bad that few are listening.