Exploring Christianity · 4 min read

Why bother believing in God in a modern era?

Let's name the assumption out loud, because it's floating in the air of every city, including PJ: religion is what people needed before we had science, medicine, and psychology. We've grown out of it.

Tim Keller spent thirty years pastoring in Manhattan — arguably the most secular square mile on earth — and his answer to that assumption was surprisingly cheeky: nobody has actually grown out of faith. We've just moved it.

Secular people believe unprovable things too

Consider a few things most modern people hold with total conviction: every human being has equal dignity and rights. Love matters more than power. The strong ought to protect the weak. Your life should have a purpose.

Beautiful beliefs — and not one of them can be proven in a lab. Science can tell you what is; it cannot tell you what ought to be. Strictly speaking, nature runs on the survival of the fittest, not the protection of the weakest. As Keller pointed out in Making Sense of God, the modern secular person doesn't have fewer beliefs than the religious person — they have a different set, held with just as much faith. The question was never "faith or no faith?" It's "which faith fits reality best?"

The modern experiment has a data problem

If leaving God behind made people freer and happier, we'd expect the most secular, most connected, most prosperous generation in history to be the most at peace. Instead we're recording historic levels of anxiety, loneliness, and burnout — in KL and Singapore as much as in New York. We were promised that self-creation would be liberating. For a lot of us, it just feels like a second full-time job: build your brand, define your worth, be your own saviour. Exhausting.

"If you don't live for Jesus you will live for something else — and if you live for career and you don't do well, it may punish you all of your life. Jesus is the only one that if you receive Him, He will forgive you, and if you fail Him, He will still embrace you." — Timothy Keller (paraphrased from his teaching on idolatry)

Christianity isn't anti-reason — it invites investigation

Here's what surprises many skeptics: Christianity makes historical claims and invites you to examine them. It doesn't say "empty your mind and just believe." It says "come and see." The resurrection of Jesus is either the best-attested miracle in ancient history or it isn't — and thoughtful people have changed their minds in both directions after actually looking. Most people who dismiss Christianity have never examined it as an adult; they're rejecting a Sunday-school cartoon version they outgrew at twelve.

So why bother?

Because if God exists, it's the most important fact about your life — and "I never really looked into it" is a strange policy for the most important question there is. And because the alternative isn't a belief-free life. It's a life of faith in things — career, romance, reputation — that were never built to carry that weight.

You don't have to believe anything today. But maybe it's worth one honest conversation.