J.J. Richardson > J.J.'s Quotes

“If there is no God, then humankind is not designed, purposed, or planned: there is nothing we are intended to be. All that we hold dear, all of our dreams, ambitions, goals, and accomplishments are pure accidents of atoms. Furthermore, no matter how high we squirm up the greasy pole of existence, no matter how enlightened we become, all of it – the whole cathedral of human accomplishment – is destined to become no more than rubble, buried beneath the debris of the end of the universe: utterly ruined, pitch dark, cold as death, achingly alone.”
― Andy Bannister, The Atheist Who Didn't Exist: Or the dreadful consequences of bad arguments

“When morality is reduced to personal tastes, people exchange the moral question, What is good? for the pleasure question, What feels
good?”
― Francis J. Beckwith, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air

“Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence… It is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. That provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion.”
― John Lennox

“Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.”
― John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Innumerable conditions must be exquisitely optimized for the support of humanity and of civilization. Many of them are highly time variable. Evidence showing that a wide variety of independent conditions all reached optimality during the identical narrow epoch when human beings appeared on the cosmic and terrestrial scene testifies of supernatural design and purpose rather than mere coincidence.”
― Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is

“Rather than seeing ourselves as insignificant specks in the immensity of the cosmos, we can consider that immensity an indicator of our worth. It seems the Creator invested a great deal—a universe of 50 billion trillion stars, plus a hundred times more matter, all fine-tuned to mind-boggling precision—for us.”
― Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is

“The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. From a speech by Martin Luther King Jr”
― Edgar Andrews, Who Made God?: Searching for a Theory of Everything

“The hypothesis of God predicts that man’s sinful heart can never be changed by mere instruction, no matter how good and noble that teaching may be.”
― Edgar Andrews, Who Made God?: Searching for a Theory of Everything

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“...if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, 'There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.' I have heard one torturer even say, 'I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.' He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”
― William Lane Craig

“PC advocates deny the existence of objective knowledge and morality, and thus see no point in employing moral suasion and logical argument to convince their fellow citizens that their viewpoint is correct. Their only means available is therefore using the instruments of political power, such as coercion, intimidation, marginalization, and name-calling. To put it philosophically: Ideas are not the power by which to change the world, but rather, the world’s ideas are changed by power.”
― Francis J. Beckwith, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air

“You cannot deduce whether or not something is true, or whether something exists, from how you feel about it.”
― Andy Bannister, The Atheist Who Didn't Exist: Or the dreadful consequences of bad arguments

“Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs.”
― J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul

“God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he's there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.”
― J.P. Moreland

“Atheistic New Testament scholar Gerd Ludemann concludes, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."6R”
― Gary R. Habermas, The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus

“Cicero calls it the most horrendous torture.' So hideous was the act of crucifixion upon a man that he also writes that "the very word `cross' should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears.”
― Gary R. Habermas, The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus

“I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. And that is why we find ourselves emptied of meaning with our pantries still full.”
― Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God

“The person who demands a sign and at the same time has already determined that anything that cannot be explained scientifically is meaningless is not merely stacking the deck; he is losing at his own game.”
― Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message

“Any behavior we resort to in order to avoid feeling what we are really feeling in any given moment is an addiction.”
― Michael L. Brown, Alchemy of the Heart: Transform Turmoil into Peace Through Emotional Integration

“Faith feels many different ways. It can be buoyant; it can be depressed and lifeless. Feelings don’t define faith. Instead, faith is simply turning to the Lord.”
― Edward T. Welch, Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness

“The belief that objective good and evil do not exist (relativism) is in conflict (rivalry) with a rejection of God based on the existence of objective evil.”
― Gregory Koukl, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions

“Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Loving God with the mind is not a passive process. It is not enough to have sentimental religious thoughts. Rather, it involves coming to conclusions about God and his world based on revelation, observation, and careful reflection.”
― Gregory Koukl, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions

“We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.”
― Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture -- in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the death of man in art and life.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason

“The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God's world because God made us to be creative.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent

“In passing we should note this curious mark of our age: The only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute”
― Francis A. Schaeffer

“The mere fact that a belief is unpopular at present (or at some other time) is interesting from a sociological point of view but evidentially irrelevant.”
― Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil

“The existence of God is neither precluded nor rendered improbable by the existence of evil. Of course, suffering and misfortune may nonetheless constitute a problem for the theist; but the problem is not that his beliefs are logically or probabilistically incompatible. The theist may find a religious problem in evil; in the presence of his own suffering or that of someone near to him he may find it difficult to maintain what he takes to be the proper attitude towards God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God's face, or even to give up belief in God altogether. But this is a problem of a different dimension. Such a
problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care. The Free Will Defense, however, shows that the existence of God is compatible, both logically and probabilistically, with the existence of evil; thus it solves the main philosophical problem of evil.”
― Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil

“Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.”
― Eric Metaxas, Seven Women: And the Secret of Their Greatness