Quotes about Belief

How would you explain the fact that atheists just know that harming an innocent human being is wrong, and can live good lives, without believing that God is the ultimate source of values and duties? To repeat: Belief in God is not necessary for objective morality; God is.

The United States is following at some distance down this same road, with Canada somewhere in between. If the situation is not to degenerate further, it is imperative that we shape the intellectual climate of our nation in such a way that Christianity remains a live option for thinking men and women.

Christians have an unfair advantage in the marketplace of ideas: We have truth on our side!

Today there is virtually a consensus... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God's place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]2

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends that life has meaning.

if you're a first-century Jew, and your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you've basically got two choices: Either you go home or else you get yourself a new Messiah. But the idea of stealing Jesus' corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead is hardly one that would have entered the minds of the disciples.

Christians find in God a source of moral strength that helps us to lead better lives than those we would have led without Him, still it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers don't often lead good moral lives—in fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame.

Thus, although arguments and evidence may be used to support the believer's faith, they are never properly the basis of that faith.

Something is objective if it is independent of people's opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people's opinions.

Left to himself, natural man would never come to God.

The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist.

Dostoyevsky said, "All things are permitted." But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.