So who is the bigger idiot: the person who believes that God created the world and who wonders at the same time whether any given scientific theory can really fully account for that, or the person who believes that having a high degree of confidence in a particular empirical hypothesis can give certainty (or even a very high degree of probability) about the falsity of a metaphysical thesis?
A system which denies all transcendence ends in the abolition of persons.
Book: What is Faith?
The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view, it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain. How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity has the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by a performance of the Mass in B Minor, and on to the mystic’s encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the center of our encounter with reality, and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless.
Book: quoted in Dr. Francis Collins, The Language of God
If humans evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human sequences, interesting as it is, does not tell us what it means to be human. In my view DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things than make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates.
Book: The Language of God
If I am lying when I say that I am lying I ruin the effect of my statement, and if my judgment about matter is the same as the matter, my judgment ceases to be a judgment.
Book: Death and Life
To be flotsam and jetsam with alternating moments of delight and misery, to feel the passage of time and have no charge of it, no power save to say good-bye to part of oneself swept away with it, to be covered over with the scurvy of contemporary fashion and vice, this is the malaise of our day, the aftermath of unbelief.
Book: Death and Life
Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.
Book: Orthodoxy
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. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?”
Book: Orthodoxy
The rights of man towards other men can only arise from the nature of man. A walking combination of water and chemicals has no rights arising from its nature, and it is no use advocating materialism on one platform and demanding respect and freedom on another… . It is man’s immortal soul that is his passport not only to existence in the next world, but to freedom in this. His individual destiny is the basis of his rights against theories backed by physical force, whether they are the theories of dialectical materialism, or of Germanic racialism. If the world belongs not to man but to God, the powers of rulers are subject to a law higher than their wills, but if the world is man’s world, as progressives like to describe it, its character will be determined by the wills of the most determined and cunning men.
quoted in Arnold Lunn, Within That City
We are living to-day in…a period which it was fashionable to disbelieve in miracles and anathema to disbelieve in evolution. Mental snobbery might be defined as the uncritical acceptance of beliefs merely because they are modish, and it is undeniable that for every man whose belief in evolution is the outcome of examining the evidence, there are a hundred whose views on these questions are determined by the mental fashions of the age in which they live.
Book: Within That City
How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
The Marquis de Sade, took the argument to its logical conclusion: If human passions are mere physiological itches, man’s proverbial dignity is a fraud, and there is nothing—not even our normal revulsion against rape and torture—to stand in the way of treating other human beings as sex tools. From the materialistic perspective, nothing can be entirely unnatural.
Book: The Morality of Everyday Life
If there isn’t any God, there isn’t any problem of evil. And if there is no God, then there is a problem of good! … . As Nietzsche pointed out, atheists who follow through on all the implications of their beliefs are nearly nonexistent. Most atheists do create an as if world. They act as if reason is connected to reality, at least for pragmatic purposes. They act as if, in a rough sort of way, things make sense. They act as if progress is the law of history. They act as if reason, justice, truth, compassion, solidarity, and love were more than mere breath expelled by lying lips. But they do not say how and why they believe that reason, justice compassion, and the rest are in some way better than irrationality, oppression, the big lie, ruthlessness, and cynicism. What metaphysical commitments justify these beliefs?
Book: Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God (New York: Pocket Books, 1998), 89, 97-98.
If conscience is not the voice of God, but only the voice of your parents, or your society, or your animal instincts, or your genes, then why do we all believe that it’s always wrong to disobey your own conscience, to deliberately do something you honestly believe is evil? Even moral relativists believe that. They may say, “Different strokes for different folks,” and “What is good for you is good for you and not for me; don’t impose your morality on me,” but they always have one absolute left: If you sincerely believe that it is wrong for you to do something, you shouldn’t do it. It might be alright to sin against society, against religion, against traditional morality, against the Ten Commandments, but it’s never right to sin against your own conscience. But why, for goodness sake? Why treat your conscience as if it were a prophet with divine authority, unless it is?
Ethics: A History of Moral Thought (from the Recorded Books series: The Modern Scholar: Great Professors Teaching You!)
Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else… An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one… The ultimate question is why they go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question, and most certainly he will not think the question answered by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change.
Book: The Everlasting Man
Either truth is our highest epistemic goal and there is a state of the person called “believing truly”, or else we have no epistemic goal and we can engage in various cognitive projects without being held to an absolute standard by which those projects can be judged.
Book: C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason
What seems to us serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous.
Strange the affection which clings to inanimate objects - objects which cannot even know our love! But it is not return that constitutes the strength of an attachment.