The Language Of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief Quotes
"You are displaying a welcome curiosity. But you are also countering several current trends."
"The increasingly secular Western world seems to be losing touch with the long history of intellectual arguments supporting a rational basis for faith."
"Our postmodern culture questions whether there is such a thing as absolute truth, and our philosophers cast doubt on the foundations of morality."
"We increasingly hear from those who borrow the latest findings from science to argue that humans are purely naturalistic beings."
"The stars and the whole system which they display always move on the same courses... suggesting to men that they are endowed with intelligence."
"God is good, and no jealousy about anything is ever found in the good."
"God wished that all things should be good, and that as far as possible there should be nothing wrong with anything."
"The good is not the cause of everything, but the cause of things that are good, and not the cause of evil things."
"Mathematical truths are incorruptible, and they are common to me and to all other rational persons."
"The orderliness and the truth of mathematics are not perceived by the bodily senses, they are absolutely unchangeable and indestructible."
"Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. Then maybe I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence."
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
"I do not know everything; still many things I understand."
"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
"If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?"
"That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along."
"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
"Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person."
"Truth is demanding. It won’t let us sit comfortably. It knocks out our cozy smugness and casual condemnation."
"Karl Barth wrote that he took the Bible far too seriously to take it literally."
"There is a prevalent illusion that nonfiction is factual and objective."
"But what," asked Pilate of Jesus, "is truth?"
"If truth and reason appear to be in conflict, then both must be re-examined."
"The Bible is not objective. Its stories are passionate, searching for truth."
"One of the highest and noblest functions of man’s mind is to listen to God’s Word."
"The great doctrines of creation, revelation, redemption, and judgment all imply that man has an inescapable duty both to think and to act upon what he thinks and knows."
"If men have known the Living God we have a right to expect two consequences."
"Counting noses does not, however, make the result 'right' and other preferences 'wrong.'"
"There is no way to prove one ethical system superior to any other, unless at some point an evaluator is asserted to have the final, uncontradictable, unexaminable word."
"Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved."
"There is in the world such a thing as evil. All together now—sez who?"
"If there is evil, there must be an absolute good in order for us to judge it to be really evil."
"Evil is a Christian concept. Good and evil exist only on a relative scale."
"If there is no such thing as good or evil, then Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all false."
"Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine."
"Our moral view is I firmly believe, much better than any compelling view, even though there are many people to whom you will never be able to convert to it."
"But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony."
"A third way is open in our quest for freedom, namely, nonviolent resistance, that combines toughmindedness and tenderheartedness."
"My belief is that this method must guide our action in the present crisis in race relations."
"Through nonviolent resistance we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system."
"The greatness of our God lies in the fact that he is both toughminded and tenderhearted."
"God has qualities both of austerity and of gentleness."
"God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to surround us with justice, and one is gentle enough to embrace us with grace."
"I am thankful that we worship a God who is both toughminded and tenderhearted."
"If God were only toughminded, he would be a cold, passionless despot."
"God is neither hardhearted nor softminded. He is toughminded enough to transcend the world; he is tenderhearted enough to live in it."
"When days grow dark and nights grow dreary, we can be thankful that our God combines in his nature a creative synthesis of love and justice."
"When faith opens out into a deep spiritual understanding and advances beyond the range of concepts into a darkness that can only be enlightened by the fire of love, a man truly begins to know God in the only way that can satisfy his soul."
"Concepts tell us the truth about God, but their light is so far from being perfect that the man who is fully content with conceptual knowledge of God, and does not burn to possess Him by love, has never really known Him."
"The contemplative life demands detachment from the senses, but it is not therefore a complete rejection of sense experience."
"Ultimately, the highest function of the human spirit is the work of the supernaturally transformed intelligence, in the beatific vision of God."
"Love is both the starting point of contemplation and its fruition."
"God is the principal agent in this sublime work. Contemplation is His gift, and He is free to dispose of it as He sees fit."
"Mystical contemplation comes to us, like every other grace, through Christ."
"The chief of these questions concerns the relations of the intellect and will in contemplation."
"Religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier against the human intellect's freedom to destroy itself."
"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."
"The authority of a man to think was the central authority defended by religious systems."
"The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honoring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising him."
"Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to believe in objective truth."
"The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it."
"What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought."
"You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves."
"You cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world."
"It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers."
"It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild skepticism runs its course."
"It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin."
"Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one."
"If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set."