Theism Quotes

Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.

~ William A. Dembski

Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

[T]here is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject … [T]he predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject … [T]he essence of religion … conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as divine relations[.]

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

I by no means say … God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, … . I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them[.]

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

[T]hese days illusion only is scared, truth profane. … [S]acredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, … for it has been substituted … the appearance of religion[.]

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

If you invoke faith as justification for your belief, you must accept the same from others. And every person who retreats to faith bears a measure of responsibility for every act of hate and violence justified by it.

~ Nate Phelps

Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.

~ Criss Jami

There is nothing new under the sun but that of the Son. Man's rebellion against God has always been because he would rather fall in pride than rise in humility.

~ Criss Jami

The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false, the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless.

~ Criss Jami

Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.

~ Bertrand Russell

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche).Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs.In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.

~ Antony Flew

Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god.

~ William Lane Craig

If there's a god, it knows exactly what it would take to convince me and has refused to provide it. In fact, it has gone to great lengths to hide any evidence of its existence. That doesn't seem like a deity that wants to be worshiped to me.

~ David G. Mcafee

Religion is a non-alcoholic man's alcohol. Alcohol is a non-religious man's religion.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.

~ Diego Rivera

If heaven really exists: then, technically, living is an activity that believers keep themselves busy with — while they wait for their death.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Intellect, at its best, can make you agnostic. Being theist or atheist is still a matter of choice.

~ Raheel Farooq

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is “Worship us or we perish.” A dethroned monarch may retain some of his human dignity while driving a taxi for a living. But a god without his thunderbolt is a poor object.

~ Chapman Cohen

In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the God of Nature did not write the Bible, this God at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this God has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question -- not as to whether the Bible is inspired and not as to whether Jehovah is the real God, but whether there is a God or not.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

~ Alexander Pope

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, materialism would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.

~ Melanie Phillips

No man will say, There is no God 'till he is so hardened in sin that it hasbecome his interest that there should be none to call him to account.

~ Matthew Henry

Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

~ Thomas Nagel

The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as “How did everything begin?” “What are we all here for?” “What is the point of living?

~ Sir Peter Medawar

High heels are a short (theist) woman's (subconscious) way of telling God to go to hell … in public.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

~ Stephen Batchelor

The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.

~ David Bentley Hart

Theology is never any help, it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

~ Peter Kreeft

I see the gods—the names, images, stories—as the poetic encapsulation of our human experience, our relationship with the ineffable forces that shape human life. While this makes the gods no thing, it does not make them nothing. I see the gods as representing very real, powerful, even dangerous forces. I believe the gods are real. It doesn’t matter what we call them or don’t call them. They are real and dangerous, and we will contend with them. This for me is the message of the Bacchae. - M. J. Lee, Being Human When Surrounded by Greek Gods

~ John Halstead

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.

~ Thomas Nagel