Quotes about Doubt

If you want to know why the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term "assurance." They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying "religion" is gone

As we should know, there is nothing inevitable about such things.

Old soldiers sometimes say, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (A foxhole, in military slang, is a shallow pit in a dangerous place on the battlefield.)

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from teh dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticism of various sorts have long been hiding.

Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

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.

One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.

Even if there were doubt as to when life begins, the benefit of the doubt should be given to protecting life—reasonable people don't shoot unless they're absolutely sure they won't kill an innocent human being.

Mark Twain had a point when he concluded that it was not the parts of the Bible he did not understand that bothered him—but the parts he did understand!)

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.