Quotes About Philosophy

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.

Even materialists often admit that, in practice, it is impossible for humans to live any other way. One philosopher jokes that if people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, "Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get.

And the reason is that they thought matter was eternal.

Choosing a religion, says philosopher Ernest Gellner, has become akin to choosing a wallpaper pattern or menu item—an area of life where it is considered acceptable to act on purely personal taste or feelings. Most

a self-creating universe is a contradiction in terms.

We can call this view liberalism, employing a definition by the self-described liberal philosopher Peter Berkowitz. In his words, "Each generation of liberal thinkers" focuses on "dimensions of life previously regarded as fixed by nature," then seeks to show that in reality they are "subject to human will and remaking.

A worldview can be replaced only by another worldview.

Hegel taught that no idea is true in an absolute or timeless sense.

Long before pragmatism was developed into a full-blown American philosophy (see chapter 8), it had already been formulated and practiced by evangelical leaders.

Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, "The impossibility of free will … can be proved with complete certainty." Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. "To be honest, I can't really accept it myself," he says. "I can't really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?

We must reject the presumption that holding Christian beliefs disqualifies us as "biased," while the philosophical naturalists get a free pass by presenting their position as "unbiased" and "rational." Most of all, we need to liberate Christianity from the two-story division that has reduced it to an upper-story private experience, and learn how to restore it to the status of objective truth.

When a postmodernist asserts that there is no universally valid truth, he is implicitly claiming that his own assertion is universally valid and true. To make the statement, he has to occupy the transcendental position that postmodernism says is not there to be occupied. Thus every time a postmodernist states his position, he contradicts it. The position is self-refuting.

The biblical worldview fulfills both the requirements of human reason and the yearnings of the human spirit.

Outside the ivory tower, ordinary people are not interested in a worldview that spins out a logically coherent system, and yet contradicts human experience. They are looking for a worldview that makes sense of the world we actually inhabit. They want one that explains the undeniable facts of human experience, not one that suppresses those facts for the sake of its own internal logical consistency.

a mind capable of forming an argument against God's existence constitutes evidence for his existence.

Not believing in God is a far more arduous affair than is generally imagined," Eagleton concludes.

why should we acquiesce in letting philosophical naturalists prescribe the definition of science itself? The only reason for restricting science to methodological naturalism is if we assume from the outset that philosophical naturalism is true—that nature is a closed system of cause and effect. But if it is not true, then restricting science to naturalistic theories is not a good strategy for getting at the truth.47

The danger is that is Christians do not consciously develop a biblical approach to a subject, then we will unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approach.

Secular ideologies preach liberty but practice tyranny.

In every decision we make, we are not just deciding what we want to do. We are expressing our view of the purpose of human life.

C. S. Lewis put it this way: "The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe.

Idol-centered worldviews not only fail to match the external world, they also collapse internally. They are self-refuting. The technical term is that they are self-referentially absurd, which means they propose a standard for truth that they themselves fail to meet.

A reductionistic worldview leads to a lower view of humanity—and thus of the human mind. It reduces human reason to something less than reason. Yet the only way any worldview can argue its own case is by using reason. By discrediting reason, it undermines its own case. It is self-defeating.

Why I Raise My Children without God." Instantly it went viral. The author, a young mother named Deborah Mitchell, listed several reasons why she shielded her children from learning about God—most of them variations on the problem of evil. Mitchell argued that a loving God would not allow "murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind." 1