Quotes About Reality

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.

You can be utterly confident that any non-biblical worldview will be too "small" to account for all of reality.

If reductionism is like trying to stuff all of reality into a box, we could say the problem is that the box is always too small. Idols deify some part of the created order. But no matter which part they choose, a part is always too limited to explain the whole. The universe is too complex and multi-dimensional to fit into a box composed of just one part. Invariably something will stick out. Something will not fit into its restricted conceptual categories.

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?

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.

In order to communicate the gospel in the West, we face a unique challenge: We need to learn how to liberate it from the private sphere and present it in its glorious fullness as the truth about all reality.

People who have the power to control the "'official' definitions of reality" are in a position to impose their own private worldview across an entire society.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.

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.

In the past, most civilizations held that reality consists of both a natural order and a moral order, integrated into an overall unity. Therefore, our knowledge of reality was likewise thought to be a single, unified system of truth.

Christianity is total truth—consistent, coherent, and comprehensive. It can be lived out in the real worldview without contradicting our most basic human experience.

When we hear people talk about ideas that are false, yet necessary for a humane social order, that is a signal that they have bumped up against the hard edge of a reality that does not fit their worldview. They have stumbled upon the truths of general revelation. And they are seeking to suppress those truths by demoting them to useful fictions.

We live in a moral wasteland where human beings are desperately seeking answers to hard questions about life and sexuality. But there is hope. In the wasteland we can cultivate a garden. We can discover a reality-based morality that expresses a positive, life-affirming view of the human person—one that is more inspiring, more appealing, and more liberating than the secular worldview.

Daryl said Amanda was "a good mother, except for the cleaning up after, the feeding, and the caretaking part.

we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

There is no such thing as an immutable truth, much as our hearts might yearn for it and our justice systems demand it; there are only the stories we tell ourselves.

When you're living your life in endurance mode, you don't expect anything good to happen. I'm not saying you don't dream about some miracle that would change everything for the better. But you pretty much know it's only a fantasy, and that you have no real control over anything.

I am no wise man. Every day shows me how little I know about life, and how wrong I can be. But there are things I know to be true. I know I will die. And I know that the only sane response to such a horror is to love.

Things make sense. There are rules and realities that will not change to suit your needs. It's your job to understand those rules. If you do, and if you work hard and work smart, you will be all right.

When hope is lost, the mind protects us with denial, and my denial protected me from facing what I knew.

I had to laugh at the arrogance of anyone who had ever thought that human beings have conquered the earth.

Life is a dream but the controls are in your hands.

In the last episode of the Magnificent Steiner he probably turned back into a normal human being. -Wolfgang Grimmer