Reasons for God at Google

Earlier this year Tim Keller talked to 150-200 Google employees about his book The Reason for God. Tim talks about how there is always an intellectual, personal and culture reason for believing or not believing in God. The Christian or the atheist can not claim to base their decisions solely on reason. Likewise the atheist or the Christian can not claim that other team only believes something just because they grew up in that culture, as what does that say about their own belief?

Keller talks about the three rungs (or stages) of belief in God. First you have to see that there is no water tight argument for or against God and both sides have faith (if you don't see that then your not even on the first rung).

The next stage/rung is seeing that belief in God makes more sense than not. eg it is possible that the earth was formed by a very, very small chance or that God made it, or trying to work out why human rights are important if everything else in nature favours the pack and not the individual. These not so much are proof, but a better explanation for things that you already believe.

The next stage is to make a personal commitment to believing in God, you have to take a leap from probability to certainty.

Keller had an hour and so was rushed in his delivery as he wanted to take questions in that time. It is well worth a watch, and the questions the Google employees ask were quite good as well.


Youtube link

You can also download the FLV of it here (142mb)

If you want to hear more from Keller about this before buying the book you can download 7 talks on the subject that he gave at his church. They are a bit philosophical as he covers more in detail the issues of exclusivity, suffering, absolutism, injustice, etc.. of Christianity.