Quotes from Nancy Pearcey

if determinism is true, then "we are, in the final reckoning, merely playthings of fortune.

As long as Christianity is treated as "moral poetry" and "tales of consolation," it poses no threat to the sovereignty of secularism.

if you cannot identify the divine in any positive way, how do you even know it is real?

On one hand, Kant thought science led to the conclusion that humans are elements in a vast machine operating by the laws of physics. On the other hand, he said, to salvage morality, we must act as if we were free. And to ratify our moral standards, we must act as if God existed. And because morality makes no sense unless justice prevails in the end, we must act as if there were an afterlife.

Powerful logical or metaphysical reasons for supposing we can't have strong free will keep coming up against equally powerful psychological reasons why we can't help believing that we do have it.… It seems that we cannot live or experience our choices as determined, even if determinism is true.

But of course, by carving out an exception for themselves, they have introduced a logical inconsistency into their system. They have stated that there is one thing (namely, their own thinking) that their system does not cover.

The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression.

When a worldview fails to account for all of reality, what do adherents do? Do they say, "I guess my theory has been falsified; I'd better toss it out"? Most people do not give up that easily. Instead they suppress the things that their worldview cannot explain, walling them off into a conceptual area separate from reality—an upper story of useful fictions. Wish fulfillment. Illusions.

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.

If moral knowledge is impossible, then we are left with only political and legal measures to coerce people into compliance.

Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.

Government policy merely followed where the universities led.

Western culture is regressively falling back into a dualism that denigrates the material realm, just as paganism did.

Christianity explains why truth is not merely a human construction. The world is not a creation of my own mind. It is the handiwork of God. The human mind cannot usurp the Creator's role and function. The biblical concept of creation gives logical grounds to support what humans inescapably conclude by experience from the time we are toddlers.

No one is a consistent moral relativist.

Ancient Greek culture was permeated by philosophies such as Gnosticism and neo-Platonism that regarded the material realm as the realm of death, decay, and destruction. Gnosticism taught that the world was so evil that it could not be the creation of the highest, supreme deity but must be the handiwork of an evil sub-deity.

People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics." 37 In short, they apply their postmodern skepticism selectively

To the Greeks, this was not spiritual progress; it was regress. Why would anyone want to come back to the material world, the realm of evil and corruption? The whole idea was utter foolishness to the Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23 KJV).

Like every alternative to Christianity, the mechanistic worldview was essentially a substitute religion, a mental idol.

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.

The Galileo saga is typically told as a conflict between science and religion. But in reality it was a conflict among Christians over the correct philosophy of nature. Was it Aristotle's quality or Galileo's quantity? Galileo's victory was the triumph of the idea that the nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint.

Put bluntly, abortion supporters have lost the argument on the scientific level.

An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity—which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it itself fails to meet. Therefore it refutes itself.

The reason we are justified in trusting our minds is that God designed them to "fit" the world he created.