Quotes About Doubt

It was seldom that I attended any religious meetings, as my parents had not much faith in and were never so unfortunate as to unite themselves with any of the religious sects.

When people say perhaps its cause theyre lying. Either they dont believe the thing theyre saying, or they do believe it only they dont want to admit they do.

I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later.

This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true were really true, there would be little hope of advance.

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.

If the Christian faith is true, it is true even if no one believes it, and if it is not true, it is false even if everyone believes it. The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

An "open mind" can be an "empty head," and "tolerance" can be indistinguishable from believing nothing. These are no help in finding honest answers to honest and important questions.

Part of the glory of the Christian faith is that at its heart is a God who is a person. "He who is," the father of Jesus Christ and our father, is infinite, but he is also personal. The Christian faith therefore places a premium on the absolute truthfulness and trustworthiness of God, so understanding doubt is extremely important to a Christian.

Under the impact of the modern world, there has been a definite melting down of the assurance of faith. Secularization makes the Christian faith seem less real, privatization makes it seem merely a private preference, and pluralization makes it seem just one among many.

In a world congenial to skepticism, skeptics love to play the skeptic's card nonchalantly as if it were the royal flush that trumped all other cards and could not be countered. For many, it has become the skeptics' way of hanging out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Simply raise a skeptical objection and retire from all argument. But of course, the simplest response is to turn such skepticism back on itself.

Christian advocacy always goes wrong when we become the focus of our efforts, rather than the Lord. For when we are the focus, we subtly come to believe that God is no more certain than our defense of him. Argue and defend God well, and the world of faith appears unshakable. Defend him badly, and doubts creep in or crash down on top of us.

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.

Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.

Not only do Christians believe, they are those who "think in believing and believe in thinking," as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith's shoulder.

The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

Christians," as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, "would sooner die than think—in fact they do.

Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.

unbelief turns on an act of will and a habit of mind shaped by choice.

The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.