Quotes About Theism

Theists believe there's not more than one God; Deists that there is not less than one God.

H.P. Owen's book "Concepts of Deity" provides a good standard version: "Theism may be defined as belief in one God, the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent" (Owen 1971, p. 1).

What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists; he thinks that the theory has this consequence because he thinks that the Design Argument was the only remotely plausible argument for God's existence and evolutionary theory destroyed that argument.

The source of knowledge must be rational. If this be granted, you rule out Mechanism, you rule out Naturalism, you rule out Agnosticism; and a lofty form of Theism becomes, as I think, inevitable.

We say we believe in God, trust in God, and are sustained by God; but in our actions we do everything for ourselves, trusting in ourselves and anxious about the providence of God, which unravels our theism.

Too often we believe like theists (a personal God) and act like deists (a distant, impersonal, noninteractive, uninvolved god). We say we believe in God, trust in God, and are sustained by God; but in our actions we do everything for ourselves, trusting in ourselves and anxious about the providence of God,

the origin of wickedness is the cliff upon which theism, just as much as pantheism, is wrecked; for both imply optimism. However, evil and sin, both in their terrible magnitude, cannot be disavowed; indeed, because of the promised punishments for the latter, the former is only further increased. Whence all this, in a world that is either itself a God or the well-intentioned work of a God?

Throughout the entire Christian era theism has lain like an incubus on all intellectual, especially philosophical endeavor and has prevented or stunted all progress; and when anyone has possessed the rare elasticity of mind which alone can slip free of these fetters, his writings have been burned and sometimes their author with them, as happened to Bruno and Vanini.

I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe.

The absence of theistic belief... { Defining the word 'atheism' }

It is certain that no man can be firmly and honestly convinced of the non-existence of God. For, in the first place, no human being enjoying the full use of reason can find a really conclusive argument for the thesis that there is no God.

Every theistic religion, including Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Judaism, Mormonism, and Islam, has traditionally held homosexual congress in moral opprobrium.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

There's some invisible guy, up in the sky, who can kill you, because he loves you.

It is not at all uncommon, even among ourselves, to hear persons and parties branded as atheistical, only because individuals who so stigmatize them have not been able, and perhaps are not in the least willing, to appreciate the sort of theism which they profess.

if there were no theists, there wouldn't even be any atheists.

Atheists must make a positive case that only material things exist. That's why instead of debating "Does God exist?" I prefer to debate the question "What better explains reality: atheism or theism?

I believe in the Big Bang. I just know who banged it.

Toute erreur doctrinale s'accompagne d'une erreur psychologique à l'égard de ceux qui en sont indemnes : l'athéisme par exemple se prend volontiers pour un héroïsme moral; il ne peut concevoir de théisme libre de toute faiblesse, de tout désir sentimental. Suspicion injuste, car on peut tout admettre par sentimentalité, l'inexistence de Dieu aussi bien que le contraire.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?

Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

Una consecuencia aún más importante del deísmo es la pérdida de la fe. En la medida en que la razón es la norma, la fe pierde, y los teístas del siglo XVIII lo sabían.