Tim Keller Speaks at Google

Tonight I'm going to hear Tim Keller speak at Stanford. A few hours ago I heard Tim speak at Google.This last minute speaking engagement was firmed up over the weekend through, I think, Penguin--the publishers of Keller's new book. Thanks to a friend/church member/Google employee, I had a front row seat in a medium-sized room that eventually filled up with, best guess, 150-200 Google employees.Tim spoke for about 35 minutes on "The Reasoning Behind Belief in God," the topic of his new book. Below is an outline and a few quotes and notes from Tim's 3-point message, the bulk of which centered on his 3rd point.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."(You need to hear Keller's Branch & Cliff-side illustration on this)."Every other religion says God is removed. Only Christianity says God wrote himself into the play."(Behind this point you need to hear Keller's illustration, taken from C.S. Lewis, of Shakespeare writing himself into Hamlet, and his illustration of Dorothy Sayers writing herself into her Lord Peter Whimsey novels)."Christianity doesn't so much give you a watertight argument, but a watertight Person."
After his message, Keller took about 25 minutes of Q&A. He handled the secular, Bay Area, Google-engineer questions masterfully--with humility, concern, and intellectual rigor. I'd like to learn how to engage the Bay Area the way Keller engaged the people at Google. Two of the questioners expressed astonishment over the fact that this was the largest turn out they've ever seen for a Google Author Talk event.Today's event was filmed. Rumor has it that it will be uploaded to YouTube in the near future.For me, the great surprise of the event came when, a few minutes before Tim began his message, while he was standing off to the side of the room, he spotted me, nodded at me, walked up to me, and said "Hi Justin, how ya doing...how'd you get in here...how's Buzzard Blog doing?" I didn't think Tim would recognize me from our relatively brief conversation at last year's Gospel Coalition conference or from his occasional visits to/comments on this blog, but he did. What a guy.After his message, and after Google passed out free copies of his book to many of the attendees, I spoke with Tim some more. I took a picture with TIm to prove that I'm almost as tall as him. He's got me by an inch.And, yes, a smile was in the process of forming...