Making Sense of God

I’ll start by saying I am a Christian and have been since my freshman year of college, over 6 years now. I have read a ton of Keller’s books, and this one is primarily meant to be a commentary on certain beliefs that the modern western culture holds and how Christianity makes more sense in many ways by being more beneficial to the self and to society.

There is a 1 Star review of the book from a skeptic, who read the book as a philosophical/theological argument. While the book does have arguments, they are meant to be commentary and comparison of the beliefs found within a culture, not necessarily the moral/natural/existential understandings that we seek within philosophy. Reading this as pure philosophy is wrong because it is not that genre. Something closer to that would be Keller’s book “The Reason For God”, also my personal favorite. That book addresses many more philosophical questions and issues than this one. The person says a relative introduced the book as Christian philosophy, which makes their misunderstandings completely understandable. Also, using examples within an argument of people who hold secular beliefs is fair, not argumentatively perfect, but fair because he does the same for singular examples of Christian beliefs being shown as well.
He cannot account every varying belief in our society, just the primary ones that many people hold without sometimes even realizing it.

I personally loved this book as a commentary on the cultural beliefs that fill many of the storylines of our western society. It made me aware of how to have better conversations and see in a different way how our beliefs are shaped by elements of the culture we find ourselves in.

Keller himself has said that this book is meant to make the reader understand why Christianity is appealing personally, while “The Reason for God” is meant to by an argument for faith in Christ not being as absurd as it may seem to be.

Thanks for reading my review/response!

Admitingly, I'm a skeptic. This book was given to me by a Christian relative who introduced it as one of the best books he's ever read. (I'm assuming that excludes the Bible but, who knows) In fact, he read it multiple times because the "philosophy" was difficult to understand. Being a big fan of philosophy and not a fan of religion I was intrigued.

The book started off giving an outline of the chapters to come. The author was extremely confident in the book's ability to sway a skeptic through reasoning. The problem is, there wasn't any reasoning in the entire book. At times I found myself reading aloud in an effort to insure forward motion. Many times I found myself yelling at the pages in an attempt to point out the absurdity of the lack of reasoning used by the author. I started writing down every misquote, false equivalence and misinterpretation in the book but it became too time consuming.

Here's the basic reasoning throughout the book:

Seculars believe X, Here's an example of one person who's secular who believes X therefore, all seculars must believe X. (That's not how any of this works)

Continuing:
The reason seculars believe X (wait, we haven't established that any seculars besides the one you're (mis)quoting actually agree but never mind) is either A or B. (Actually the reasoning Is A, B, or ANY OTHER REASON).

He continues:
Here's my response to A and here's my response to B. Haha, I win! Point for Christian God!

Here's the problem..... you created the question, you created the hypothetical answers to the question therefore, you're only responding to your own questions and answers. This painfuly continues chapter after chapter.

I see the draw if you're a committed Christian. He's preaching to the choir and you've probably never looked at things from any perspective other than your own. The problem is, that's the exact problem with today's religion(s) You know what you want to hear and publishing companies (and churches) know what you want to hear therefore, they can print garbage like this and plenty of people will buy it, read it and never question it.

The author continually groups people together using words like "seculars" and "us Christians", as if there are only two responses to the question not only on religion but on Christianity. This not only cheapens religion but it dumbs down humanity by saying you're either "one of us" or "one of them". I like to think there are more than two stances on the greatest question ever presented to our species.

*The title of this review is an adaptation of a description by Richard Dawkins on an unrelated topic.