Sermon quotes on atheism
Douglas Adams (For Contrast)
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Thomas Aquinas
To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
Karl Barth
The statement that ‘God is dead’ comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.
Frederick Buechner
Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn’t.
Luis Buñuel
Thanks be to God, I am still an atheist.
Quoted in Le Monde, 16 Dec. 1959
G.K. Chesterton
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
William Lane Craig
Atheists themselves used to be very comfortable in maintaining that the universe is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that they can no longer hold that position because modern evidence that the universe started with the Big Bang. So they can’t legitimately object when I make the same claim about God-he is eternal and he is uncaused.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
If God does not exist, everything is permissible.
Epicurus (For Contrast)
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
Sam Harris (For Contrast)
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.
Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 51.
Ernest Hemingway
“All thinking men are atheists.”
A Farewell to Arms
Peter Kreeft
Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.
Timothy Keller
If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?
Jay Leno
The atheists have produced a Christmas play. It’s called Coincidence on Thirty-Fourth Street.
C.S. Lewis
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
C.S. Lewis
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.
C.S. Lewis
Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.
C.S. Lewis
Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.
Alister McGrath
Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.
Ronald Nash
Objections to theism come and go. … But every philosopher I know believes that the most serious challenge to theism was, is, and will continue to be the problem of evil.
Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988), 177.
Friedrich Nietzsche (For Contrast)
Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man?
Karl Rahner
Today’s atheism becomes then the willful refusal to mature in the dark purgatory of a debris-covered heart for the sake of the God who is always greater than the God who was perceived and loved the previous day.
The Mystical Way in Everyday Life, Orbis Books, 2010, p.43.
Michael Ruse
The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.
Heinrich Böll
I don’t like these atheists; they are always talking about God.
Pope John Paul II
When the sense of God is lost, the sense of man is also threatened and poisoned.
Evangelium Vitae, Vatican.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
See also quotes on Questioning God
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