Quotes About Philosophy

The Buddhists are right -- and so is Kundera -- this lightness of being is perfectly unbearable. Who can accept the idea of having only one life?

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

if there is no God, and life is a chance product of blind material forces, what purpose does human life have? Is it just a chemical accident on a rock flying through the cold, empty reaches of space?

The Christian religion, hand in hand with various philosophical outlooks, has motivated, sanctioned, and shaped large portions of the Western scientific heritage. Modern Christians ought to drink deeply at the well of historical precedent. If we do, we will never feel intimidated by positivists and others who deny that religion has any role in genuine scholarship. In the broad scope of history, that claim is itself a temporary aberration-a mere blip on the screen, already beginning to fade.

Materialists thereby deny the reality of mind (while they use their minds to advance materialism), determinists deny the reality of human choice (while they choose determinism), and relativists deny the fact of right and wrong (while they judge you if you disagree).

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

liberalism denies that there is any fixed or universal human nature.

Mitchell claimed that her materialist view leads to "humbleness." But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots.

philosopher Galen Strawson, the denial of consciousness "is surely the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought." It shows "that the power of human credulity is unlimited, that the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith, is truly unbounded." It reveals "the deepest irrationality of the human mind.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

to define what is rational solely by whether it fits the tenets of your own worldview is an invalid move because it rules out all other truth claims by definition. You do not even have to investigate the evidence. A serious search for truth does not start by stacking the deck.

surprising as it may sound, pantheism is not really all that different from materialism. It is the flip side of the same coin. Materialism states that everything consists of material stuff. Pantheism states that everything consists of spiritual stuff. Both are non-personal. As a result, both worldviews fail to account for human personhood.

But don't you see that as an inconsistency in your views?" the young man asked. Dawkins replied, "I sort of do, yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with, otherwise life would be intolerable.

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.

The only basis for genuine human rights and dignity is a fully biblical worldview.

neither materialism nor pantheism is up to the task of accounting for the origin of human beings.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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