One thing about Pastor Keller's book that I really enjoyed was his quotations from an array of different thinkers whether scientists, atheists, Christians outside his own denomination, literary authors, etc. One particular quote that struck me was from Raimond Gaita, an atheist thinker, who states:
"Only someone who is religious can speak seriously of the sacred...We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious, that they are ends in themselves, that they are owed unconditional respect, that they posess inalienable dignity. In my judgment these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources [i.e. God] we need to say it...Not one of [these statements about human beings] has the power of the religious way of speaking...that we are sacred because God loves us, his children" (p. 154)
One thing I have been struck by when reading atheistic thinkers is there use of descriptive words like sacred and wonder and awe and beauty and good and evil. They sound religious, at times, when speaking of nature or the human being or the rights of the destitute. In many ways they want to have there cake and eat it to. They want to use moral language in religious categories, yet deny God. They seem to want the morality and dignity of God in this world but not the accountability and responsibility before the God of this world. This issue of moral obligation for the atheist is a big problem if one remains an atheist. A strict evolutionism and bare scientificism does not ever answer the greatest problems of the world or provide the greatest remedies, but the strict evolutionist and scientist, usually, desires at least in some aspects things like human rights and morality but evolutionary and scientific categories alone cannot give this. It is the desire they have to give it, indeed almost an inner compulsion that leads Keller to say the following of another atheistic thinker, "despite the fact that we can't justify or ground human rights in a world without God, we still know they exist...Without God he can't justify moral obligation, and yet he can't not know it exists" (p. 154-155).
