Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn’t
Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn’t: The Beauty of Christian Theism
By: Gavin Ortlund
“The fact that we desire something to be true does not make it true. At the same time, desire is not irrelevant to truth either… For example, hunger might not prove you have food, but it might suggest to you that there is such a thing as food out there, somewhere.”
This is, perhaps, a more academic version of Tim Keller’s The Reason for God book. However, this book has its own twist.
Instead of merely trying to convince readers that Christianity is true, Gavin Ortlund has written this book to look at the beauty and goodness of Christian Theism.
He is not looking at all religions but focusing on Christianity versus Naturalism:
“Which is telling us a better story— a story that better accounts for the strangeness, the incompleteness, the brokenness, and the beauty of our world?”
I was intrigued when I saw this book but also a little hesitant. I’m a truth seeker so my first reaction is just- focus on the truth! Show the evidence! Share the good news!
But I admire what Ortlund has accomplished in this book and I think it is a very valuable endeavor. Because as he states,
“The greatest impediment to the hearing of the gospel is usually not opposition but indifference… Beauty is a powerful tool for cutting through disenchantment and apathy because it has a kind of persuasive power that reaches down to the heart.”
People today aren’t really asking if Christianity is true. They’re more commonly asking- is it good?
Ortlund is applying Blaise Pascal’s threefold strategy for commending God by showing religion to be “respectable, desirable, and true.”
Knowing that people make sense of the world through narratives— stories— he formats his book accordingly.
A good story has four essential pieces: a beginning, a meaning, a conflict, and a hope.
These are the four chapters/arguments in his book.
He does not begin with Christian Theism but rather comes to the story by looking at the pieces and gradually showing how supernaturalism, rather than naturalism, makes sense, then theism and eventually how Christian Theism is the best story to explain the world as we see it.
Disclaimer
I feel it necessary to let you know that this book is not an easy read. The Reason for God is a pretty approachable and non-intimidating read. Ortlund’s book will appear intimidating to broad readership.
However, I would encourage you to still try it. Even if you don’t grasp every sentence, you will understand his main points and will be able to follow his logic.
I had to look up several words. There were parts that he talked about that required more brain power than I was ready to give, but to his credit, he usually follows up those segments with a ‘In short…’ or ‘This means that…’ to help us follow along.
I think if you know what to expect coming in to the book and decide that it’s okay if you can’t re-explain the entire book to a friend, then you will be ready to hear what Ortlund presents and find its value.
Plus, I am reading this book with several friends and we plan to get together to discuss it. Allow a variety of minds help you parse out the truths of the book. I’m sure the conversations will be lively!
A Taste of Each Chapter
The Cause of the World: Why Something is More Plausible (and much more interesting) than Nothing
The Big Bang Theory right? God spoke and bang the earth was created?
You can’t create something out of nothing. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Unless you’re God.
One of the first things Ortlund says is this:
“You start off wanting to say, innocently enough, that the universe didn’t go “Poof!” from nothing, but to defend the point you find yourself talking about oscillating universes, quantum mechanics, eternal inflation theories, various definitions of the word “nothing,” “no-boundary” conceptions of time, and so forth.”
And I was like… I do?! The only word I understand from that sentence is ‘and so forth.’
Ortlund has done such a comprehensive job researching all of the theories and analyzing not only opposing explanations but the Christian ones as well. What are the weak points and what questions do each theory beg?
I don’t share that quote to scare you away from this book but to show you that he’s not just flippantly giving ‘answers’ to the hard questions. He is digging deep to consider all the options and figure out which one is the best explanation!
Some of the main points in this chapter:
- Who created the Creator? (and why this is not a helpful question)
- God as the ‘Uncaused Cause’
- The world expanding from a singularity, collapses, and repeats the process
- Is God necessary?
- Is there supernature?
- Can the world explain itself?
The Meaning of the World: Why Things Like Math, Music, and Love Make More Sense if There is a God
“A book has transcendent meaning because there is an author. The book has a meaning because the author has intentions for writing it; and that meaning is transcendent because the author is outside the book (rather than a character within it).”
He talks about the realism, durability, and usefulness of math that undermines the arbitrary context of naturalism:
“Mathematical realism turns out to be a rather strange bedfellow to the broader metaphysical assumptions of nature. Specifically, it is difficult to explain why a finite space-time universe that is in constant flux should produce a mental realm characterized by apparently eternal, necessary truths. Where did this distinct realm come from? How did the temporal produce the permanent?”
A Christian theism viewpoint looks at numbers as eternal truths because they came from an eternal mind/Truth— they are something to be discovered, not invented.
Another question that naturalism cannot really explain is how music affects people. Music feels meaningful and important.
“Neuroscientists note that music affects the same part of our brains as sex and food. But unlike sex and food, it has no obvious survival function— so, from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, why does it affect us so emotionally?”
What if music is not just a dream, an accident of biology that worked out this way, but a window— a glimpse of something beyond?
Without transcendent meaning in our lives, we lose a significant part of our humanity.
Some of the main points in this chapter:
- Can the multiverse theory explain the fine-tuning of our universe?
- Is love permanent? Is love accidental, biological, and functional or essential, spiritual, and purposeful?
- The meaning we find in math, music, and love speak to something transcendent and personal
The Conflict of the World: Why Good and Evil Shape the Plot of Every Story You’ve Ever Heard
“I propose that a worldview that allows for the supernatural provides both a more plausible and a more meaningful explanatory framework for [conscience and a ‘Happy Ending’]. Specifically, such a worldview can 1) ground objective moral reality and 2) offer hope. By contrast, the story that naturalism tells is a dreadful tale in which moral drama is fundamentally illusory, for conscience is deceiving us and no Happy Ending is coming.”
Virtually every movie and book we read has some sort of conflict between good and evil. Where did this idea of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ come from?
Ortlund asks us to consider a crocodile killing and eating a gazelle. This is not an immoral act to us. However, a human murdering another human is. If we are believers in a worldview of naturalism, at what point in the evolutionary process did the moral objection to human murder take place?
Where do we get our idea of human rights and equality? [this is a driving point in Rebecca McLaughlin’s book The Secular Creed]
“We intuitively recognize that it matters whether we exploit or help the poor, whether we love our families or abuse them; to consider that such intuitions are illusory feels not like a minor loss but like something unspeakably horrible. The theistic story, by contrast, infuses nobility into human life and struggle; it has the potential implication that how you live will matter forever.”
Some of the main points in this chapter:
- Why do we all have a sense of moral justice and the ‘rightness’ of what the world should be?
- What outcomes do we see in terms of moral justice when God is removed from the equation?
- Are morality and justice arbitrary illusions?
The Hope of the World: Why Easter Means Happiness Beyond Your Wildest Dreams
“Christ’s incarnation and resurrection are the true Story every other story is searching for.”
If we’ve determined that the Earth and humans were created on purpose, with a purpose, to experience glimpses of a different and better reality, a place where all the injustices in the world will be made right, then this chapter is where we see the object of our hope.
He talks in length about C.S. Lewis’ famous ‘Liar, Lunatic, Lord’ argument. It is not a question of whether Jesus existed, but who he really was. Lewis’ argument goes: Jesus claimed to be God so either he was lying, he was crazy, or he was who he said he was.
Ortlund provides another option: legend. Did Jesus actually claim to be God? This then becomes a discussion on the truthfulness and reliability of Scripture.
He uses Bart Ehrman as his main counter-source for this section. As such, I will insert a plug for you to check out the book ‘Surviving Religion 101’ by Michael Kruger. Kruger had Ehrman as a professor in college and is now a scholarly voice on the canonization and historicity of the Bible.
Ortlund lays out the arguments for believing the Bible is true and that Jesus is who he says he is. And if Jesus is who he said he is, his death on the cross was for us and provided a way for us to have eternal life in Heaven where all is right in the world. That is good news!
Some of the main points in this chapter:
- Does ‘religion’ cause violence? If religion is the problem, why have (atheistic) “Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million.” ?
- Is the validity of a belief determined by how it came to be?
- Can we trust the Bible?
- Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
Conclusion
This is a long review and it is by no means exhaustive of the content found in this book.
I hope if you find yourself despairing the broken world, wondering what your purpose is in life, or fearful of what comes next, that you would consider hearing what Ortlund puts forth.
It is a thoughtful and explorative book that is meant to draw you in to think and imagine, not sit you down to sign off on his beliefs.
Naturalism explains things in terms of random illusions as evolution works itself out, but what if our deepest feelings and convictions of meaning and morality are not deceptions but clues to reality?
Ortlund truly does reveal the beauty and the goodness of a Creator God who made us, loves us, and will make all things right.
I like to think that I’m a pretty logical person. Though I already believe in God and the truths of the Bible, this book reiterated to me that what I have is not a blind faith. In a world that doesn’t make sense, God really does. His truth really does.
It gives me confidence, hope, joy, and endurance. To know there is intention, design, purpose, and future really changes how I view the world and the people in it, and how I live each day.
What a relevant and important book today.
“In the Christian story, our physical universe is just one tiny contribution to reality, like an island in an immense ocean; therefore the beauty we observe around us does not enclose us but merely whispers of this vast beyond. In the Christian story, music and poetry tug at our hearts for a reason: they are the ancient language by which the world was written. In the Christian story, ideas and math and logic have a kind of stable energy to them; learning them is like discovering an encoded message from someone highly intelligent. In the Christian story, love is at the core of reality; it is what spawned the world, and it will have the final word. In the Christian story, you have every right to be furious with injustice; goodness is real, and your life can be nobly spent in its service. In the Christian story, evil will one day be defeated; happiness will reign forever; every movie you ever watch is whispering to you about this.”
Some Other Quotes
“What is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?”
“Thinking that scientific advance will remove the need for a meta-cause is likely getting two-thirds of the way through Hamlet and thinking that the final third will somehow replace the need for Shakespeare.”
“Einstein could be very critical of organized religion, and he certainly did not profess belief in a personal God. But he was equally (if not more) critical of aggressive atheism, and he often spoke in almost religious terms of the sense of humility and wonder that the world impresses upon us. For Einstein, the more one penetrates into an understanding of the physical universe, the more one is left with this lingering sense of Something else, Something beyond.”
“[Richard] Dawkins maintains that the multiverse is much simpler than God, because although it posits a vast number of universes, they all share the same basic laws. God, by contrast… is the most complex answer… But this depends upon the criteria by which we determine simplicity. Which is simpler: an infinite number of worlds or an infinite person behind the world?”
“If we think evolution has displaced the need for God, whatever else we have done, we have not transitioned from the mysterious to the non mysterious, from the wild to the prosaic. No, we are in a deeply mysterious world any way we look at it.”
“I think it was Chesterton who said the worst moment for the skeptic is when he feels truly grateful but has no one to thank.”
“Think about it: on a naturalistic account of reality, the feeling of love has a similar status to the enjoyment of music. Love came about in the evolutionary process as a by-product of natural selection. It affects us the way it does because it helped our ancestors survive and pas not their genes. Love is therefore an accidental feature of reality, and the feeling of significance that accompanies it is your brain tricking you.”
“In the modern West, our moral framework is primarily grounded in considerations of harm, whereas virtually all other cultures have developed their moral vision from a variety of other criteria, such as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.”
“Johnathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) argues that conservatives and liberals often talk past one another because they don’t take into account their differing intuitions about the nature of morality. We therefore need to be slower to dismiss others simply because we can refute their arguments and more discerning of the role our moral convictions are playing in us. ‘Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.’”
“… the evolutionary process is interested in survival, not truth.”
“What is needed to explain the existence of a book is not a first sentence but an author.”
“The idea of God as the source of morality is not a claim that believers in God are more moral (which is a sociological question), or that religions have produced moral guidelines for society (a historical question), or that religious people know morality more accurately (which is an epistemological question). The issue is where morality itself comes from (an ontological question).”
“To put it simply: if you are looking for God, you will likely succeed; if you are avoiding him, you will also likely succeed.”
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