I began my critique of Keller’s The Reason for God with an exposé of everything up through Chapter 1, then Chapters [2] [3-5] [6] [7] [8] [9]. Here I will cover Chapters 10 through 12. Then I’ll end the series with Chapters 13 and 14.

Today, Keller finally gets to his snake oil pitch. All the rest up to now has just been the con. Now we get to the sham cure he has to offer for all our woes. Which is a bunch of nonsense about sin, and how all your problems can be solved by ancient blood magic.

• Christianity Makes No Sense
• Christianity Is Factually False
• The Real Sin Problem
• Christian Pseudopsychology
• Real Forgiveness & Atonement
• Conclusion

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Christianity Makes No Sense

To explain exactly what crazy Keller is selling, the famous internet meme is spot on:

Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

I’m not kidding. That’s exactly what Keller believes.

It’s nonsense from top to bottom.

The basic notion Keller tries selling you is that “sin” entered the world when Adam and Eve (who science confirms never existed) disobeyed God with respect to what food to eat (a food that science confirms never existed), and that this fucks up everything in our lives (even though all known science confirms the causes of what we don’t like about ourselves and each other and the universe were entirely other things instead), and the solution is to ritually “buy in” to the spell-effects of an ancient blood magic ritual, by which the human sacrifice of a godman buys you a magical ticket to an invisible eternal fantasy land. This magic spell, however, has no effect on this world, for some reason; it can only fix things somewhere else, that you can’t verify even exists. Conveniently. (The rest of us call that “Suspiciously.”) So Keller’s God kind of sucks as a wizard.

Not only is there no evidence any of this is true, and all the evidence we have is that it is not and never was true, but it doesn’t even make internal sense.

In Keller’s myth, Adam and Eve were instructed not to eat a magical fruit that would bestow upon them the knowledge of what’s right and wrong. So by definition they could not even know that what they were doing by eating it was wrong! In any court of law today, by every civilized standard of justice, that’s an absolute defense. They are not guilty. But even in terms of “intelligent design” principles, why would you put that fruit there for them to eat at all, if you didn’t want them to eat it? God later puts over another tree (the one that cures death) an angelic guard with a flaming sword. Um…why wouldn’t he just do that in the first place?

But more importantly, why wouldn’t God want them to eat it? Doesn’t he want us to know the difference between right and wrong? And why did he let the snake in there anyway? And where was he during that whole conversation with the snake? Sleeping? What an incompetent, lazy-assed God he is! Doesn’t that make him guilty of everything—having badly designed the whole system, and then having fallen asleep at the watch? According to Keller’s wild tale, God is a total loser. And also such an immoral asshole, that he blames everyone else for his own folly. Such a toad should be an object of disgust and derision, not worship and service.

And then for some reason this mighty God can’t just fix it. He has to wait thousands of years (for some reason) and half-assedly patch it up with a bizarre ritual of human sacrificial blood magic (for some reason), that required killing himself (for some reason) to assuage his own anger at what was entirely his own fault to begin with. And even after all that, he still doesn’t fix a single thing. People aren’t set right. Their flaws aren’t repaired. Their brains are still badly designed. The world is still full of predation, starvation, death, disaster, and disease. Nothing in the world was improved in any way whatever. Nope. All God could do, even by this elaborate and implausible wizardry, is set up some other invisible place that is better designed than this one, so we can end up there (somehow) and magically be entirely fixed there (somehow), even though no one can ever see any of this to confirm it ever even really happens, and even though all the evidence He gave us, confirms that in fact God can do neither (because if he could do either, he’d have done them here already). That’s a shit God. By any standard. It’s also not a believable God. By any standard worth a shit.

Hell, even children know the value of building a window so you can see what’s inside, and not be in the dark. God couldn’t even build a window for us to see this other perfect world he supposedly made, and see who ends up there, and how improved there they are. But it already makes no sense why God has to build a whole separate other place, rather than simply fix this one…or not have fucked it up in the first place. Bad designers build things that are easily broken. Perfect designers build things that never break. What lousy God is it, who can’t even cast a spell that repairs our brains so we reason better and care more? And if God can just will anything to be—being, after all, God—what’s the point of all this mucking about with late-to-the-game, self-incarnating, suicidal blood magic?

Answers won’t be forthcoming. Because there aren’t any. It’s just a really dumb idea. Made up by primitive ignorant fools. And backed by no evidence worth the name.

Christianity Is Factually False

“It is hard to avoid the conclusion,” Keller says, “that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world” (p. 159). Yeah. It isn’t designed or governed by any intelligent, compassionate, or just being. That’s what’s fundamentally wrong with it.

Keller can’t accept the obvious. He has to obsess over a bizarre, convoluted, space-alien-magical-wizard-weirdo reason for why people are badly designed, and why the world is callous and unresponsive to human needs or desires, and why there is no justice or compassion that doesn’t come from us. The simplest explanation is the absence of anything that would make it otherwise. After all, you can’t get simpler than nothing. There simply isn’t anything that designed us, cares about us, or built or governs the world in any fashion we would want. But Keller can’t do simple. He needs convoluted wizard magic.

And that’s what Christianity fundamentally is: the factual assertion of cosmic wizard magic. Never mind that it makes no sense and there is no evidence any of it is true (not its claim of what happened to the world, nor its claim of what the solution is).

Of course, as an Evangelical Christian, Keller has to argue we are all “a very flawed human being, a sinner” (p. 161). And once again, he has no intelligible explanation for why that would be. Why would his perfect and amazing and loving and just God, make us so badly, so easily broken—and not do anything to maintain or fix what he made? We have a simple explanation: we weren’t designed; and the world isn’t governed. Seen objectively, outside cultural influences and delusions, only one of those explanations isn’t batshit crazy.

Keller also has no plausible explanation for why this feature of us, would cause the whole world even apart from us to be so cruel and indifferent and unjust. “Adam sinned, therefore half of all children had to die from disease for a hundred thousand years, until humans wholly unaided by God discovered antibiotics and vaccines on their own,” really makes no sense even on the internal logic of the Bible. And Keller has no plausible explanation for why this feature of us would also cause God to be a total do-nothing no-show in response to either our malfunctioning or the world’s.

Cognitive evolution, psychology, sociology, genetics, economics, political science, game theory, cultural anthropology all provide real scientific data and internally consistent logic regarding the ways we are flawed, and why. The remaining physical and biological sciences do the same for the rest of the world. Like a typical Evangelical, Keller is wholly uninterested in what science has learned about why humans think and act as they do, or why the world actually works the way it does (and doesn’t). Instead, he resorts to a primitive, ignorant, superstitious explanation dating back thousands of years, one that is so ludicrous, it was regarded as ludicrous by many educated people even then. And still to this day, there is exactly zero evidence for any part of Keller’s explanation; it doesn’t even make internal sense.

The Real Sin Problem

The Christian theory of “The Fall of Man” is superstitious nonsense, as silly as ghosts and demons and astral projection. And it’s not superstitious nonsense because people aren’t flawed. It’s superstitious nonsense because its theory of how people are flawed and why is completely fantastical and divorced from any evidence or science. It’s a faerie tale. Science has a much better explanation for why we are flawed, and in what ways precisely we are flawed, and what can actually be done about it. And it has nothing to do with being designed by a perfect engineer, which of course makes no sense anyway. Because we wouldn’t be so imperfect if we were.

By definition, an engineer who builds a flawed machine, cannot be perfect. Quite the opposite. Keller’s definition and explanation of sin in these two chapters is also unintelligible gobbledygook that has no basis even in his own Bible, and would have been wholly incomprehensible to the Apostles. In short, he’s making shit up; a modern day Freud inventing a bogus psychology on no evidence and even less sense. At best we can try to replace all his factless, uninformed, pseudoscientific nonsense with actual factual science; we could redefine “sin” as simply error (the original meaning of the word, in both Hebrew and Greek, was “to miss the mark,” hence make a mistake), and explain it perfectly well (people err, because they are not perfectly informed or perfectly rational; and all bad actions can be explained by a combination of those causes). There is no need for magical myths about people who didn’t exist eating non-existent food at the behest of a fictional animal.

But if we admit the truth, that all error is a product of ignorance and bad design, the solution is education, including better training in the skills needed to bypass or work around our brain’s bad design, or compensate for its inevitable failures. By contrast, Keller’s theory entails a snake-oil solution: “Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God” (p. 162). Evidence for that statement? None. Logic in that statement? None. Does it play any plausible role in the modern science of criminal psychology? No. Does it play any plausible role in the modern science of psychotherapy? No. Does it play any plausible role in the modern sciences of game theory, economics, political science, sociology, pedagogy, or anthropology? No. Any applied science? No.

Keller likewise utters meaningless deepities, like “Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially ‘deify’” (p. 163). A more intelligible thing to say is that what we all want most is to matter. But that doesn’t require a god. It doesn’t require deifying anything. It just requires anyone to whom we matter, and any way in which we matter. And to desire that, requires only the evolution of a conscious awareness of who we are, which inevitably evokes the question of why anything matters. Atheist philosopher Dr. Rebecca Goldstein has more wisdom on this than Christian Apologist Timothy Keller (see The Will to Matter). (Yes. That’s right. Keller has no doctorate in anything. Only a masters in Divinity. A degree that, in matters of how the world really works, is informationally useless.)

Keller thinks it’s some cosmic cyber-implant from God that “every person must find some way to ‘justify their existence’, and to stave off the universal fear that they’re ‘a bum’” (p. 164). But really, that’s already fully explained by our naturally evolved motives as a social species. Prosocial cooperation and the achievement of goals (like comfort and survival and propagation) is not aided by people wanting to be bums; it’s aided by people wanting to matter.

The real solution to people being flawed (and thus selfish, shortsighted, ignorant, illogical, deluded, mentally unbalanced, and every other actual thing that leads us to make things worse for ourselves and others) lies nowhere in the superstitious blood magic or fantasy-world escape-capsules Keller is trying to sell. It lies in education. It lies in spreading and advancing our skills and knowledge regarding the natural facts of who we are and our actual predicament. It lies in improving people’s training and encouragement in critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, in improving access to psychotherapy and scientific knowledge regarding how to think better and live better and be more satisfied with ourselves and our lives. It lies in working together to improve our political and legal and social systems. It lies in purging our cultures of outdated assumptions, prejudices, and mental blocks. It lies, in other words, in a fully realized and evidence-based humanism. It lies in being a better philosopher.

Note that this is (a) obviously true and (b) exactly what Evangelical Christianity condemns Adam and Eve for (and by proxy all human beings): gaining knowledge. Evangelical Christianity is therefore exactly the opposite of the truth, and in fact is actively setting itself in the way of the truth, by condemning the only actual cure that works, and offering in its place ancient superstitious nonsense that demonstrably has never worked in two thousand years. Christianity is basically The Beast in the film Poltergeist, the evil monster that tricks lost souls into not finding their salvation, by hiding the truth, and selling them a fake promise in its stead.

Christian Pseudopsychology

Keller tries to build out some psychotherapy advice, on no scientific basis whatever—with his god magic (p. 164):

Without God, our sense of worth may seem solid on the surface, but it never is—it can desert you in a moment. For example, if I build my identity on being a good parent, I have no true “self”—I am just a parent, nothing more. If something goes wrong with my children or my parenting, there is no “me” left.

Unless you build your identify on many things; or when the parenting thing fails, you change your identity to a new thing…or do better at parenting, or find someone new to parent. In other words, Keller’s conclusion simply doesn’t follow. Even from his own worldview. There are simply, and always, many other solutions to the psychological problem he is talking about. Meanwhile, there is no scientific data showing Keller’s imagined solution, actually works, or works any better, or works without many more harmful side-effects compared to alternatives. In other words, he is just spewing fake medicine. It’s just pseudoscience.

Moreover, this is not even an argument.

If God doesn’t exist, then even on Keller’s own advice, any identity based on that will simply, arbitrarily, just become a definition based on your local social construct of god: whatever religion and sect and era, and thus theology and concept and character of God, you happen to be born into, or contingently fell most easily into because of historical and geographical accidents (see John Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith). Which is no more stable than anything else you might anchor your identity to. People often doubt their god or that they have the right one; so there is nothing stable about choosing a god even if there was one.

Indeed, if Keller agrees Muslims are staking their identity on a false God, how can he be sure it isn’t the other way around? Maybe he is the one staking his identity on the wrong God. But more importantly, just look at the facts: the people who wholly define their identities in respect to their fabricated gods rather than the betterment of humanity, do not reliably end up good contributors to society, but often meddlers, oppressors, and terrorists (as I’ve noted in this series before). Even Hitler defined his identity in relation to God: he believed he was God’s chosen agent on earth and was enacting God’s Providence (see Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist). Keller even admitted as many Christians are vile or oppressors as non-Christians are. So is Keller’s “solution” really all that effective? No. So why recommend it?

So the evidence establishes that Keller’s fake cure doesn’t work. Any more than a placebo would. Which means any religion, up to and including Secular Humanism, may do just as well. Or better.

Keller likewise claims that “if you lose your identity through the failings of someone else you will not just be resentful, but locked into bitterness” (p. 165), but that’s just more pseudoscience. Is there any scientific research in psychology that supports what he just said? Not to my knowledge. And he presents none. He just makes this up, from the armchair. That’s pseudopsychology. In reality, if you “lose your identity through the failings of someone else,” you can just rebuild a new identity, one based on more diverse and robust things, one more flexible and adaptable. And I’m pretty sure that’s what every scientifically trained expert in psychotherapy would tell you. Because, you know, science.

Similarly, when Keller says “sin does not only have an internal impact on us but also a devastating effect on the social fabric” (p. 167), he’s not saying anything that isn’t already better explained without his weird Christian worldview. Certainly, humans who behave just like the people they themselves loathe, will grow to loathe themselves, or drive themselves mad trying to avoid it. The solution is simple: behave like the people you admire and like. Then you will like yourself. And you won’t have to tell a single lie to yourself to do so. And just as certainly, human misbehavior also causes negative effects on the social system that they themselves then have to live in. That is not some god thing. It’s just science. It’s how all naturally evolved social systems would be. By contrast, the evidence shows that Christianity never fixes this. It even makes it worse.

Keller’s “solution” to these two facts is likewise pseudoscience. He is not giving sound social or psychological advice. His recommended adoption of fake beliefs and superstitions, to replace a self-examined and self-directed life of responsibility and commitment to betterment, is actually harmful. As shown scientifically and factually by psychologists Valerie Tarico, Marlene Winell, and Billy Wheaton, and journalist Janet Heimlich. Christianity is like anti-vaxxers claiming magic crystals will prevent polio: a fake solution that all science proves doesn’t work, replacing a solution that science proves actually does work.

Keller continues his pseudoscientific assertions when he says “everybody has to live for something” but “whatever that something is becomes ‘Lord of your life’, whether you think of it that way or not” (p. 173). That’s simply not true. It’s again a false dichotomy. What we live for does not simply ‘dominate’ us, in abject worship or any other way. We can be multifaceted, and flexible, and learn and grow. Nothing becomes our absolute lord. Because if we are reasonable and sane, we question everything, and we are ready to change to accommodate new circumstances and new knowledge. We do not bow unquestioningly to anything. Nothing is our Lord. Not even ourselves.

Thus when Keller insists “Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally,” he is simply stating a falsehood (p. 173). No such person exists. Nor will believing in him remove all your dissatisfactions with yourself and life, or cure any mental illness or social or personal problem. Nor does any such future state exist for Jesus to give you. Keller has presented no evidence that any eternal life exists. He has presented no evidence Jesus still exists, or has any relevant powers we can benefit from. He hasn’t even presented any evidence that Christians are more satisfied or happier or fulfilled, or less insane or criminal or miserable, than anyone else. His “solution” is thus as bogus as that of Scientology or Hinduism. Or that apocryphal anti-vaxxer and their magic crystals.

How Forgiveness & Atonement Really Work

Keller’s entire “cure” is also based on an illogical doctrine of atonement, whereby your own bad decisions and problems can be fixed by someone else’s suffering or someone else assuming responsibility for your actions and choices, which is exactly the opposite of anything healthy, just, or true. (See the chapter by Dr. Ken Pulliam in The End of Christianity on how illogical Christian atonement theory is.)

“Forgiveness,” Keller says, “means refusing to make [someone] pay for what they did,” and yet “to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony” (p. 188). He does not cite any psychological science to back any of this. But even in a colloquial sense his statement is misinformed. Forgiveness by definition means letting go. It’s the opposite of agony. It’s the lifting of the weight of agony. How you know you have forgiven someone, is by the very fact that you no longer agonize over the wrong they did. It no longer causes you suffering.

So Keller doesn’t know what he is talking about. And what he is recommending, is psychologically unhealthy.

Because neither is forgiveness required, contrary to what Keller claims. It can be freely given, if somehow that helps you; but you can also demand that it be earned. A functioning social system even requires this to be the usual way of forgiving: forgiving only those who earn that forgiveness by contrition, reformation, and restitution. And that’s why, by its very nature and definition and social function, only the wronged party can forgive. Third parties can pardon. But only victims can forgive.

This is why God cannot forgive sins. The others you actually wrong by your sins are the only parties who can forgive you for wronging them. No third party can bypass you in that process. If you haven’t forgiven them, they are not forgiven. No third party’s forgiveness has any effect on that. Nor can two wrongs make a right. Human sacrifice does not forgive sins. It’s simply another sin. Thus God’s entire “plan” as Keller describes it, is not just illogical, but criminal.

The only atonement that can actually exist and do any good in the world, is your own. No one else can atone for your sins. You have to make it right yourself; or else demonstrate you’ve done all you can to atone, when you can’t wholly fix what you’ve done. And the only forgiveness that can exist and do any good in the world, is the victims’. No one else can forgive a sin. You have to seek forgiveness from those you wronged. Not doing so, and thinking you can bypass the people you’ve wronged and win forgiveness from some third party, is literally an insult to everyone you’ve wronged. It also effects no change in you worthy of anyone’s praise.

Christianity’s entire system of salvation is thus illogical and insulting, and contrary to the very idea of justice or a functional society. That it offers no cure for anything ever scientifically demonstrated to even work, is just the last nail in its illogical coffin.

Conclusion

No one should rely on the terrible, unscientific, and wholly uninformed psychological advice of this chapter. Please, if you are suffering feelings of despair or bitterness, or anything persistent in your mind (resentment or otherwise) that is causing an enduring unhappiness, see an actual scientifically trained professional therapist who actually knows things. And if you can’t afford one, please vote for a health-care system that will provide you with one, like much of the rest of the world has done. Do not heed any of the garbage psych in Keller’s book. Just don’t.

Seek forgiveness not from an imaginary God, but from anyone you have actually wronged. Atone for your own sins. Don’t childishly expect someone else to take responsibility for your own mistakes. Don’t believe any nonsense about some sin you have inherited from anyone else. The U.S. Constitution forbids “corruption of blood,” because it was a humane document based on sensible principles of civilized justice. You can never be guilty for someone else’s crimes. Not your parents’ crimes, not your ancestors’ crimes, not anyone’s. You might have inherited a debt from them (such as our nation’s unpaid debts from its past crimes of slavery and the abuse of Native Americans), but what makes you better than the “sinners” who did those things, is righting them.

So if you want to know how to fix your own failings, and the actual damage done by your ancestors, and the flaws and defects plaguing humanity and the whole world, and find meaning and happiness in life, and build a robust identity that can survive every sling and arrow, please don’t buy any snake oil superstition. Go the only route proven to work: gain knowledge. Learn how people and the world actually work and why. Study what the sciences have discovered about human psychology and sociology, about economics and political science, and anything else. And make a concerted effort to help, by applying real skills and knowledge toward bettering yourself, your neighbors, and the world.

No superstition will ever be required. No blood magic. No demonic human sacrifice. Just earthly wisdom and a will to care.

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Next I’ll close my series by discussing Keller’s Chapters 13-14 (that link will go live in a week or two), in which Keller tries to defend the central myth of his illogical theology: that Jesus really for true rose from the actual dead; and that this somehow proves everything he says.