Finding Truth Quotes

“At the heart of the human condition, we might say, is an epistemological sin—the refusal to acknowledge what can be known about God and then to respond appropriately: “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom. 1:21). They engage in willful blindness.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“If we do not cultivate the same confidence, the danger is that Christians will tend toward defensiveness and anger. In today’s grievance culture, it seems that some new group is always coming forward to complain that they are offended. It can be easy for Christians to pick up the same victim language. But our motivation for speaking out should not be only that we are offended. After all, we are called to share in the offense of the Cross. We are called to love the offender. Christians will be effective in reaching out to others only when they reflect biblical truth in their message, their method, and their manners.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Atheists often denounce Christianity as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“We must be committed to turning away from idols and toward God as the ultimate source of truth in every area of life. To avoid being “conformed to this world,” we must “be transformed by the renewal of your mind”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“if there is no God, and life is a chance product of blind material forces, what purpose does human life have? Is it just a chemical accident on a rock flying through the cold, empty reaches of space?”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Materialists thereby deny the reality of mind (while they use their minds to advance materialism), determinists deny the reality of human choice (while they choose determinism), and relativists deny the fact of right and wrong (while they judge you if you disagree).”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“When a worldview exchanges the Creator for something in creation, it will also exchange a high view of humans made in God’s image for a lower view of humans made in the image of something in creation. Humans are not self-existent, self-sufficient, or self-defining. They did not create themselves. They are finite, dependent, contingent beings. As a result, they will always look outside themselves for their ultimate identity and meaning. They will define human nature by its relationship to the divine—however they define divinity. Those who do not get their identity from a transcendent Creator will get it from something in creation.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“If movies and music are vehicles for emotionally “hooking” people into Hollywood worldviews, then the best countermeasure is to create more compelling, more beautiful forms of art that express a biblical worldview.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“As students, we took all of this for granted, like oxygen in a lecture hall, and we heaped harsh judgment on the Christian West,” John recalled. “But we rarely asked, ‘Compared to what?’ The ‘what’ was always some form of utopian ideal. But utopian ideals have not fared so well. In the twentieth century, secular utopian idealists presided over the extermination of a hundred million people, killed for ‘a higher good’ by the apostles of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. History has never produced a more efficient set of butchers.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“a mind capable of forming an argument against God’s existence constitutes evidence for his existence. That is, a conscious being with the ability to reason, weigh evidence, and argue logically must come from a source that has at least the same level of cognitive ability.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“A reductionistic worldview leads to a lower view of humanity—and thus of the human mind. It reduces human reason to something less than reason. Yet the only way any worldview can argue its own case is by using reason. By discrediting reason, it undermines its own case. It is self-defeating.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Idol-centered worldviews not only fail to match the external world, they also collapse internally. They are self-refuting. The technical term is that they are self-referentially absurd, which means they propose a standard for truth that they themselves fail to meet.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Christianity is total truth—consistent, coherent, and comprehensive. It can be lived out in the real worldview without contradicting our most basic human experience.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“What do materialists do when they realize that their worldview box is too small to fit the evidence? They suppress the evidence, just as Paul says in Romans 1. They cannot deny that the concept of free will is hardwired into human thinking. What they can do, however, is reduce that concept to an illusion. A useful fiction. You might think of reductionism as a strategy of suppression. If a materialist were to acknowledge the reality of free will, that would give evidence that humans are personal beings whose origin must be a personal Being. Therefore materialists have to suppress the evidence from general revelation. Otherwise it would falsify their worldview.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“So here is Paul’s diagnosis of the human condition so far: God is constantly reaching out to people with evidence of his existence through general revelation. But humans are constantly suppressing those truths by creating idols.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Christians must become independent thinkers with the tools to think critically about diverse points of view—weighing the evidence and judging the validity of arguments.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Why I Raise My Children without God.” Instantly it went viral. The author, a young mother named Deborah Mitchell, listed several reasons why she shielded her children from learning about God—most of them variations on the problem of evil. Mitchell argued that a loving God would not allow “murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind.” 1”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Christian’s motive in apologetics should be a God-inspired grief for the lost. We should be brokenhearted over the dehumanizing reductionisms that dishonor and destroy our fellow human beings. We should weep for people whose dark worldviews deny that their life choices have meaning or moral significance. We should be moved by sorrow for people whose education has taught them that their loves, dreams, and highest ideals are ultimately nothing but electrical impulses jumping across the synapses in their brains. We should mourn for postmoderns who think that (as Schopenhauer said) the “eternal truths” are only in one’s head.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics.” 37 In short, they apply their postmodern skepticism selectively”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Christianity explains why truth is not merely a human construction. The world is not a creation of my own mind. It is the handiwork of God. The human mind cannot usurp the Creator’s role and function. The biblical concept of creation gives logical grounds to support what humans inescapably conclude by experience from the time we are toddlers.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“postmodernists are just as concerned about objective truth as anyone else. Dallas Willard comments, “I have noticed that the most emphatic of Postmodernists turn coldly modern when discussing their fringe benefits or other matters that make a great difference to their practical life.” 35 If we use the metaphor that a worldview is a mental map, postmodernists keep walking off their map. It is too small to account for the full geography of who they are.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain. The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“On one hand, Kant thought science led to the conclusion that humans are elements in a vast machine operating by the laws of physics. On the other hand, he said, to salvage morality, we must act as if we were free. And to ratify our moral standards, we must act as if God existed. And because morality makes no sense unless justice prevails in the end, we must act as if there were an afterlife.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Postmoderns often accuse Christians of being narrow and closed-minded. But postmodernism is itself confined within a particular strand of Western intellectual history. Thus postmodernists are just as restricted by their own historical horizons as the more traditional people whom they tend to look down on. And they are just as exclusive as anyone else in insisting that their view captures the way things really are. In short, the same reasoning that postmodernists use to debunk traditional concepts of truth applies to their own views. Some”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Postmodern architecture has its own version of the pastiche or collage. As one journalist puts it, postmodernism “has brought us girders hanging unfinished out of the edges of buildings, archways cut off in space, and walls which don’t meet walls.” Ravi Zacharias describes seeing a building designed by a postmodern architect. “I had just one question,” Zacharias says. “Did he do the same with the foundation?” 5 It was an apologetics argument put in artistic terms.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“God’s judgment often consists in giving people what they want and letting them experience the self-inflicted consequences of their choices. He allows them to choose ways of thinking and living that are self-destructive, tearing down the honor and dignity of others and themselves.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“Nearly all that we call human history … [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“This reality orientation is the positive intellectual climate in which the core propositions and events of the gospel live and breathe. It is a mentality in which people are liberated by verifiable truth to challenge tradition, question power, and fight for life and healing against death and decay.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes