As a Darwin Day “gift,” a friend of mine presented me with a copy of The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller.  The subtitle reads, “Belief in an Age of Skepticism.”  I guess I’m letting my skeptical nature show a little bit, huh?  At any rate, I love this friend dearly, and I know the gift was well meant, so I felt obliged to read the book, even if it wasn’t the sort of thing I would usually pick to curl up with.  As I made my way through the book, I began to think that it would be an interesting exercise to blog about the book as I went along.  This post, then, is an introduction to that very exercise – hopefully a series of posts about my impressions of the arguments put forth by Keller as he tries to poke holes in the common arguments against Christian belief and support the strongest reasons he sees for faith.

And just so you know how serious I am about this, I’m actually taking notes in the margins.  Close friends of mine know that I never write in books.  Even my medical school textbooks have nary a highlight or underline.  I’ve always had a hard time “defiling” a perfect printed page, and it’s still against my instinct to put pencil to the paper, even for this cause.  The things I do for you people…

As a preamble, I feel it’s necessary to give my initial impressions of the book, so that you can better know my state of mind going into this exercise.  According to the dust jacket, Keller is trying to reach out to “atheists, agnostics, and skeptics” in an attempt to make an “intellectually compelling case for God.”  Ostensibly, Keller seeks to connect with these nonbelievers, to speak in their own language and argue using their own tools – a high goal, to be sure.  But then you look at the back cover, where the first two jacket quotes come from Rick Warren and Billy Graham, with another quote further down from Christianity Today magazine – not exactly ringing endorsements from the nonbeliever crowd.  I’m not crazy enough to expect a Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, but maybe a Francis Collins?  Ken Miller?  Maybe Keller really makes some reasonable logical arguments for faith or against skepticism, but from first impressions I am – frankly – skeptical.