Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

humanistic moral values of secularism are not the deliverances of scientific reasoning but have come down to us from older times, that they have a theological history.

you cannot prove a norm of rational proof without using it. So reason can make a case that it is the way to truth only by appealing to itself.

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”

The second main reason that the world will become more religious is that religious people have significantly more children, whereas the more irreligious and secular a population, the less often marriage happens and the smaller the families.

Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline.

When secularists endorse human dignity, rights, and the responsibility in order to eliminate human suffering, they are indeed exercising religious faith in some kind of supranatural, transcendent reality.

Why, for example, should you look at love and aggression—both parts of life, both rooted in our human nature—and choose one as good and reject one as bad? They are both part of life. Where do you get a standard to do that? If there is no God or supernatural realm, it doesn’t exist.

Even if you are not a secular person, the secular age can “thin out” (secularize) faith until it is seen as simply one more choice in life—along with job, recreation, hobbies, politics—rather than as the comprehensive framework that determines all life choices.

Belief in God makes sense to four out of five people in the world and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.