The Definition :Atheism - The Religious Belief in a Spontaneous, Causeless, Sourceless, Purposeless, Meaningless, Existence.
“Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.”
"If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene, if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out all the excess verbiage, if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summary of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably by comparison.”
—'A Few Buttons Missing: The Case Book of a Psychiatrist' James T. Fisher
Sir Isaac Newton constructed a small scale model of our solar system. It simulated the various sizes of the planets and their relative proximities. It also rotated and orbited when a crank was turned.
A scientist friend of Newton’s seeing the model, said,“Who made it?”
Newton answered, “Nobody.”
“Evidently you did not understand my question” the visitor said. I asked, “who made this?”
Newton said,“Nobody. What you see just happened to assume the form it now has.”
“You must think I am a fool!” the visitor retorted heatedly, “Of course Somebody made it, and he is a genius.”
Newton replied:
“This is but a puny imitation of a much grander system whose laws you know, and I am not able to convince you that this mere toy is without a designer and maker; yet you profess to believe that the great original from which the design is taken has come into being without either designer or maker! Now tell me by what sort of reasoning do you reach such an incongruous conclusion?”
— Sir Isaac Newton
In the early expansion of the universe there has to be a close balance between the expansive energy (driving things apart) and the force of gravity (pulling things together). If the expansion dominated then matter would fly apart too rapidly for condensation into galaxies and stars to take place. Nothing interesting could happen in so thinly spread a world.
On the other hand, if gravity dominated the world would collapse in on itself again before there was time for the processes of life to get going. For us to be possible requires a balance between the effects of expansion and contraction which at a very early epoch in the universe’s history (the Planck time) has to differ from equality by not more than 1 in 1060.
The numerate will marvel at such a degree of accuracy. For the non-numerate I will borrow an illustration from Paul Davis of what that accuracy means: He points out that it is the same as aiming at a target an inch wide on the other side of the observable universe, twenty thousand million light years away, and hitting the mark!
In the face of such chances, isn’t it a fair supposition that something other than this great chance is at force here?
— John Pokinghorn
“It would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus, and if it is true that what we have in the Bible is a giant forgery, then let us worship the individual who was so brilliant as to think up a picture of a person like Jesus of Nazareth and the story of the Word of God.
— Earnest Renan, French Skeptic
“When you look at all the evidence of the resurrection “But, if not withstanding every appearance of truth, you suppose their testimony (the testimony of the Apostles) to be false, then, inexplicable circumstances of glaring absurdity crowd in upon you. You must suppose that 12 men of mean birth, of no education, living in that humble station which placed ambitious views out of their reach and far from their thoughts without any aid from the state, that they formed the noblest scheme which has ever entered into the mind of man, adopted a most daring means of executing that scheme and conducted it with such address as to conceal the imposture under the semblance of simplicity and virtue.
“You must further suppose that men guilty of blasphemy and falsehood united in an attempt the best contrived and which proved the most successful for making the world virtuous and that they formed this singular enterprise without seeking any advantage to themselves with an avowed contempt for loss and prophet and with the certain expectation of scorn and persecution and that although of one another’s villainy, none of them ever thought of providing for his own security by disclosing the fraud. But, that amidst sufferings the most grievous to flesh and blood to conceal their conspiracy they continued on until all of them had been killed with no one ever-changing his story. Those that can swallow such suppositions have no title to complain about miracles. No one ever yet gave his life for what he knew to be a lie.”
— Principal Hill of Scotland
“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”
“In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support for such views.”
“Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source . . . They are creatures who can’t hear the music of the spheres.”
(The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000)
“If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity. It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.” -The World as I See It (1935)
“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things.”
The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
. “As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene….No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”
— Albert Einstien
— Robert Murray M'Cheyne
“Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics. This is why, when pressed, the atheist will often attempt to hide his lack of conviction in his own beliefs behind some poorly formulated utilitarianism, or argue that he acts out of altruistic self-interest. But this is only post-facto rationalization, not reason or rational behavior.”
— Vox Day
“According to PhD astrophysicists and qualified American science professors, the odds of the more than 2,500 prophecies found in the Bible being fulfilled by chance are 1 with 2,000 zeros after it. According to the mathematical science of probability, if a number has more than 50 zeros after it, the odds of that happening by chance is virtually impossible. This is irrefutable proof that the Bible is inspired by God!”
— Hugh Ross
“The best defense that anyone can have against the wiles of the devil is a humble heart”: “Nothing sets a person so much out of Satan’s reach as humility.” Humility is a great protection against falling headlong into Satan’s trap. Besides, it is hard to fall down when you are already prostrate before God.”
— Jonathan Edwards
“I was at this time of living, like so many Atheists or Anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?… Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
“No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that ‘In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth’.”
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
— C. S. Lewis
“The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”
— Louis Pasteur
“What will matter when this life is over? Wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It will not matter where you came from, what your skin color or gender. It will not matter what you bought but what you built. Not how much you made but how much you gave. Not how much you learned but how much you taught. It’s not competence but character that will count. What will matter is what you did with what you had. Every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered, or encouraged others to emulate the example of Jesus Christ, that is what will be rewarded throughout eternity.”
— ' Where Did God Come From?' By Philip DelRe“Try imagine nothing exists. There is no sun, no moon, no stars, and no galaxies. There are no elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, or oxygen. There are no such things as time, space, matter or energy. There is no universe, no God, nothing.
“If there ever was a time when nothing existed, then nothing would exist now. Therefore something must be eternal. You only have two choices: either God is eternal and uncreated, or matter is eternal and uncreated. There is no third option. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity provided a basis for proof that time; space and matter had a definite beginning. That leaves us with our only other option.”
For the scientist who has lived by
his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He
has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the
highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a
band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow
— Robert Jastrow
“Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.”
“A study was done a while back into all the famous atheists of history, Jean Paul Sartre, Camus, Friedrich Nietzche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and every single one of them had something in common. They either lost their father when they were young, their father abandoned their family, or they had a terrible relationship with their father. That is very interesting because often these doubts aren’t really driven by intellectual questions; they are being driven by an emotional issue that really blocks them from wanting to relate to a heavenly father because they feel so abandoned, or cheated, or hurt by their learthly father.”
— Lee Strobe
"If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene, if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out all the excess verbiage, if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summary of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably by comparison.”
—'A Few Buttons Missing: The Case Book of a Psychiatrist' James T. Fisher
Sir Isaac Newton constructed a small scale model of our solar system. It simulated the various sizes of the planets and their relative proximities. It also rotated and orbited when a crank was turned.
A scientist friend of Newton’s seeing the model, said,“Who made it?”
Newton answered, “Nobody.”
“Evidently you did not understand my question” the visitor said. I asked, “who made this?”
Newton said,“Nobody. What you see just happened to assume the form it now has.”
“You must think I am a fool!” the visitor retorted heatedly, “Of course Somebody made it, and he is a genius.”
Newton replied:
“This is but a puny imitation of a much grander system whose laws you know, and I am not able to convince you that this mere toy is without a designer and maker; yet you profess to believe that the great original from which the design is taken has come into being without either designer or maker! Now tell me by what sort of reasoning do you reach such an incongruous conclusion?”
— Sir Isaac Newton
In the early expansion of the universe there has to be a close balance between the expansive energy (driving things apart) and the force of gravity (pulling things together). If the expansion dominated then matter would fly apart too rapidly for condensation into galaxies and stars to take place. Nothing interesting could happen in so thinly spread a world.
On the other hand, if gravity dominated the world would collapse in on itself again before there was time for the processes of life to get going. For us to be possible requires a balance between the effects of expansion and contraction which at a very early epoch in the universe’s history (the Planck time) has to differ from equality by not more than 1 in 1060.
The numerate will marvel at such a degree of accuracy. For the non-numerate I will borrow an illustration from Paul Davis of what that accuracy means: He points out that it is the same as aiming at a target an inch wide on the other side of the observable universe, twenty thousand million light years away, and hitting the mark!
In the face of such chances, isn’t it a fair supposition that something other than this great chance is at force here?
— John Pokinghorn
“It would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus, and if it is true that what we have in the Bible is a giant forgery, then let us worship the individual who was so brilliant as to think up a picture of a person like Jesus of Nazareth and the story of the Word of God.
— Earnest Renan, French Skeptic
“When you look at all the evidence of the resurrection “But, if not withstanding every appearance of truth, you suppose their testimony (the testimony of the Apostles) to be false, then, inexplicable circumstances of glaring absurdity crowd in upon you. You must suppose that 12 men of mean birth, of no education, living in that humble station which placed ambitious views out of their reach and far from their thoughts without any aid from the state, that they formed the noblest scheme which has ever entered into the mind of man, adopted a most daring means of executing that scheme and conducted it with such address as to conceal the imposture under the semblance of simplicity and virtue.
“You must further suppose that men guilty of blasphemy and falsehood united in an attempt the best contrived and which proved the most successful for making the world virtuous and that they formed this singular enterprise without seeking any advantage to themselves with an avowed contempt for loss and prophet and with the certain expectation of scorn and persecution and that although of one another’s villainy, none of them ever thought of providing for his own security by disclosing the fraud. But, that amidst sufferings the most grievous to flesh and blood to conceal their conspiracy they continued on until all of them had been killed with no one ever-changing his story. Those that can swallow such suppositions have no title to complain about miracles. No one ever yet gave his life for what he knew to be a lie.”
— Principal Hill of Scotland
“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”
“In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support for such views.”
“Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source . . . They are creatures who can’t hear the music of the spheres.”
(The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000)
“If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity. It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.” -The World as I See It (1935)
“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things.”
The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
. “As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene….No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”
— Albert Einstien
There is greater rest and solace to be found in the presence of God for one hour, than in an eternity of the presence of man.
— Robert Murray M'Cheyne
“Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics. This is why, when pressed, the atheist will often attempt to hide his lack of conviction in his own beliefs behind some poorly formulated utilitarianism, or argue that he acts out of altruistic self-interest. But this is only post-facto rationalization, not reason or rational behavior.”
— Vox Day
“According to PhD astrophysicists and qualified American science professors, the odds of the more than 2,500 prophecies found in the Bible being fulfilled by chance are 1 with 2,000 zeros after it. According to the mathematical science of probability, if a number has more than 50 zeros after it, the odds of that happening by chance is virtually impossible. This is irrefutable proof that the Bible is inspired by God!”
— Hugh Ross
“The best defense that anyone can have against the wiles of the devil is a humble heart”: “Nothing sets a person so much out of Satan’s reach as humility.” Humility is a great protection against falling headlong into Satan’s trap. Besides, it is hard to fall down when you are already prostrate before God.”
— Jonathan Edwards
“I was at this time of living, like so many Atheists or Anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?… Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
“No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that ‘In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth’.”
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
— C. S. Lewis
“The chief danger of the Twentieth Century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God . . . and heaven without hell.”— General William Booth
“The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”
— Louis Pasteur
“God gave you two ears and one mouth so you could listen twice as much as you talk. He could have given you two mouths, one on each side of your head and one ear in the middle of your forehead so you could talk to two people at the same time. Notice also the distinct difference between the mouth and the ear. The ears are always open, always ready to receive instruction. But for the mouth, God provided three lines of defense to keep it shut. The tongue is completely surrounded with a double row of sharp teeth, above and beneath. It also has two powerful jaws, and two lips, capable of being tightly compressed in order to keep that little two ounce piece of flesh from causing any more trouble.”
— Philip DelRe
“What will matter when this life is over? Wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It will not matter where you came from, what your skin color or gender. It will not matter what you bought but what you built. Not how much you made but how much you gave. Not how much you learned but how much you taught. It’s not competence but character that will count. What will matter is what you did with what you had. Every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered, or encouraged others to emulate the example of Jesus Christ, that is what will be rewarded throughout eternity.”
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