It was only a matter of time ...

until our daughter's early-morning feeds gave rise to early-morning reading and blog posting.

The following, from Tim Keller's recent book, The Reason for God, are worth sharing:

Albert Camus on suffering:

[Christ] the god-man suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadows, the divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional priviledge, and lived through to the end, despair included, the agaony of death. Thus is explained the "Lama sabachtani" and the frightful doubt of Christ in agony (p.31 in Keller, from Camus' Asseis, Gallimard, 1965, p. 444).

Dostoevsky on how the resurrection colours our view of suffering in this world:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrications of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, and the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened (p.33 in Keller, from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, ch. 34).

If these quotes don't whet your appetite for Keller's book, perhaps an overt plug will: Partly a response to the attacks on Christian belief and organised religion by Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris et al., this book has depth, insight, wit and an all-too-rare sensitivity to the complexity, ambiguity and perplexity of living and thinking in the (post-)modern world -- all this buttressed by Keller's scriptural acumen and encycolpedic knowledge.

Buy and read this book; and, give it to skeptics who you think might be prepared to "doubt their doubts" (a Kellerism).

PS: After talking with someone who knows far more about science than me, and who has read Dawkins, I don't think it's fair to label him a skeptic; by implication, he's probabyly not a direct target of Keller's book. As this person informed me, Dawkins is modern in that he holds that science and rationality can and do explain all things -- no post-modernist doubt is to be found in him. Pity.