God at Google
March 10th, 2008 by JohnO
I was really surprised to see this: Tim Keller speaking about God at Google.
You can find out a little more about Keller at his wikipedia page. He is an author, part-time seminary professor, and founder and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
I am truly shocked that the employees of Google would have him speak, that the company would allow it, AND that is would be the highest attended talk! It seems from the limited description of the talk that he was doing the very basics of apologetics and intro to philosophy of religion type things:
1. Why the reasons for God are important.
2. How the reasons for God work.
- Intellectual Reasons
- Personal Reasons
- Social Reasons
“You can’t reduce belief or non-belief to just one of these three reasons.”
In other words: monotheists, atheists, and religious skeptics each hold their respective faith positions due to a mixture of intellectual, personal, and social reasons.
3. What the reasons for God are.
“Reasoning that ends in belief in God moves up a ladder, a three rung ladder.” These three rungs generally operate in this order:
- Rung #1: You come to see that belief in God takes just as much faith as non-belief.
“To live as though there is no God is an act of faith.”
“If you’re living as though there is no God, that’s a risk.”
- Rung #2: You come to see that it takes more faith to disbelieve in God, than to believe.
“Belief in God makes more sense of life than non-belief.”
The two examples that Keller gave here, and spent a good bit of time working with:
1) The Fine-Tuning of the Universe (ie., the complexity of the universe)
2) Human Rights.
- Rung #3: You come to see that it takes personal commitment to get certainty.
“The second rung only takes you to a place of probability, not certainty…At a certain point you’ve got to move from probability to certainty.”
“Weak faith in a strong object is infinitely better than strong faith in a weak object.”
Apparently the video is going to be released on YouTube soon (Google owns YouTube). I look forward to that and will update this post (or make a new one if lots of time has gone by). It is sad to me that almost no one in society knows how to effectively talk about religion. Everyone could use a mandatory philosophy of religion class in college (even high school?) - I know mine was fantastic.
I certainly agree with those three “Rungs”.
In fact “Rung #2″ is the premise to the book I’m currently reading - “I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist“, by Norman Geisler & Frank Turek.
Has anybody read this already? So far it seems pretty good - if you can look past the typical Trinitarian apologetic parts.
I think Sean might have that book? couldn’t say if he read it cover to cover or not
Nope, don’t have it, but I’ve seen it around. It looks pretty good though. You’ll have to let us know if it is as good as it’s title sounds.
I have an mp3 of a speech that Frank Turek gave by the same name. It’s about 30 minutes long and if memory serves me right it was pretty good. Unfortunately I can’t remember from what site I downloaded it.
Brian,
Thanks for you post! Because of it, I did a Google search and found some mp3 audio clips from BOTH of the books two authors (Norman Geisler & Frank Turek).
And theres a very good clip of Frank Turek on it there. Now I don’t know if this is THE specific speech you have since it is only 15:51 long, but it is him talking about the book. And I might add he’s quite an inpressive speaker in the clip.
Check it out at:
http://www.standfortruthministries.org/sound-1.htm
(6th clip down the page).
Ron
Oh, and I just ran across quite a few videos of Frank Turek going over several different parts of the book out on Lee Strobel’s web site.
See them here:
http://leestrobel.master.com/texis/master/search/?sufs=2&thesaurus=1&s=.1&q=Frank%20Turek
The video of Tim Keller’s speech along with the questions that the Google people asked of him are now available on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
He focused more on showing the reasons for God’s existence than on exclusivism.
Hey guys, I’m Shawn (the owner of the Stand for Truth website that you found Frank Turek and Dr Geisler on). Frank and Dr Geisler are friends of mine. You can go to impactapologetics.com or crossexamined.org to get more information on Frank.