Quotes from Norman L. Geisler

Since God by His very nature (love) cannot force anyone to love Him, it would be highly improper to think of a heaven where people were forced to be there.

Forcing people to "freely" believe is a contradiction in terms. God is love (1 John 4:16), and love cannot work coercively – only persuasively.

All moral choices are free choices. No one can be praised or blamed for an act in which they had no free choice. If they were forced to do it, then they can't get either credit or blame. Hence if God destroyed all freedom, He would be destroying all possibility to love, praise, and worship Him – to say nothing of destroying all possibility of our enjoying His or other people's love, praise, and sacrifice on our behalf.

not that he is totally deprived of all creaturely good metaphysically.

Yes, God is the author of everything, including evil, in the sense that He permits it, but not in the sense that He produces it. Evil happens in His permissive will, but He does not promote evil in His perfect will.

Laying a good foundation is important, but the fact remains that we don't live in the foundation; we live in the house built upon it. In that house where daily life is lived, things are not always as they should be.

Many of the central ideas of the major religions cannot be reconciled, which gives the lie to the trendy tenet of pluralism that all religions at their core are the same.

natural laws are not immutable because they are descriptions of what happens, not prescriptions of what must happen.

finite being needs a cause, the Cause of all finite beings (God) does not need a cause: He is the Uncaused Cause and Unlimited Limiter of all limited things.

Romans 2:14–15 (see Ephesians 2:3)—How can those who are by nature sinners keep God's laws of nature?

Belief requires assent not only of the mind but also of the will.

Simply put, that we don't know a good purpose for some evil does not mean there is no good purpose for it. There are many things we don't know. And there are many things we once did not know but now do know. So it should be expected that in the future we will discover good purposes for things for which we do not now know a good purpose.

the greatest miracle of all—the creation of the universe out of nothing—has already occurred, which means Genesis 1:1 and every other miracle in the Bible is believable.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matt. 22:37).4

While passion may induce some people to exaggerate, it may drive others to be all the more meticulous and accurate so as not to compromise the credibility of the message they wish to communicate. As you'll see, we think the authors of the Bible took this meticulous and accurate road.

God can intervene in the universe he created despite what David Hume says.

while God does want to reach our hearts, He does not bypass our minds in the process.

The Law of Noncontradiction is a self-evident first principle of thought that says contradictory claims cannot both be true at the same time in the same sense.

My high school science teacher once told me that much of Genesis is false. But since my high school science teacher did not prove he was God by rising from the dead, I'm going to believe Jesus instead." —ANDY STANLEY

God has provided enough evidence in this life to convince anyone willing to believe, yet he has also left some ambiguity so as not to compel the unwilling

chance" is not a cause. Chance is a word that we use to describe mathematical possibilities. It has no power of its own. Chance is nothing. It's what rocks dream about.

regardless of what the real truth is concerning religion and morality, our lives are greatly affected by it today and perhaps even in eternity.

doubt.Therefore, it takes a lot more faith to be a non-Christian than it does to be a Christian.

In fact, we humans have a fatal tendency to try to adjust the truth to fit our desires rather than adjusting our desires to fit the truth.