Making Sense of God

What Hacker News says

1. bitbangFeb 2024
   It’s a little hard to answer a question so loaded with presupposition. It seems like you’re initially trying to frame your objection in terms of logic and reason, but your criticism is of the moral implications. My observation is that logical reasoning has little bearing on the divide between Christian and secular. There is no shortage of logical and illogical people in both camps. The objection, as seems to be the case here, is rarely on a rational level but rather a moral level. The idea of a moral authority that transcends humanity, by which humanity is to be judged is highly offensive. We naturally want to be our own moral authority. But if we are our own authority, who are you to determine what I should hold as “contradictions, inconsistencies, stretched truths, thinly veiled metaphor, lies...”? You’re objection appeals to the notion of an absolute objective authority on truth, while at the same time rejecting it.

   If logical reason is truly what you’re interested in understanding the Christian world-view, there is no shortage of resources in the arena of apologetics. For easy reading you can start with something like Tim Keller’s two books, “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” and “Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World” or perhaps C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”. If you want something of a more academic grade: - “Christian Apologetics (2nd edition)” by Douglas Groothuis - “Reasonable Faith, Christian Truth and Apologetics (3rd edition)” by William Craig - “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2nd edition)” by William Craig and JP Moreland

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2. kevindongNov 2018
   > Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.”

   This statement is directly copied from page 24 of 'Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World' by Timothy Keller [0]. I make no judgement of how true/false this is.

   > Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now.

   The citation for this study is [1]. tl;dr on it is that the global population is growing much faster than atheists are growing. But the number of atheists aren't shrinking.

   [0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=kzNODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA24&pg=P... [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/07/why-people-w...

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