“Our concern is with the search for truth. A religious belief can do all sorts of things for us – it can sustain us in life and in the approach of death; it can provide a thread of meaning in what would otherwise be a labyrinth of inanity – but it cannot do these things with integrity unless it is founded on the truth. I have great sympathy with David Pailin when he says that ‘Attempts to defend theism by ignoring the question of truth… are fundamentally atheistic. They worship human wishes rather than ultimate reality.’... The religious believer wishes to be found in the company of honest inquirers and not of polemicists for a cause.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason public officials pivot ataxically from one certainty to another on SARS-CoV-2 (yes, that’s the virus) is that the public won’t accept that the government doesn’t have all the answers.

“The fundamental question to be asked about any theological statement is, ‘What is the evidence that makes you think this might be true?’”

Author’s Introduction to John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist

“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort.”

C.S. Lewis “Christian Apologetics” in The Grand Miracle

In my latest Epoch Times column I reflect for Remembrance Day on the moving ritual of sounding the Last Post at the Menin Gate every single night for 77 years and counting.

“’Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?’ This is the question on which I have been asked to write, and straight away, before I begin trying to answer it, I have a comment to make. The question sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself, ‘I don’t care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I’m not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the materialists say. All I’m interested in is leading a good life. I’m going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I think them helpful.’ Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathize with this state of mind…. Christianity is not a patent medicine.”

C.S. Lewis “Man or Rabbit?” in The Grand Miracle

“It would be no sort of a life if we felt entirely comfortable in it.”

P.J. Kavanaugh, quoted in The Economist May 5, 1990

“It is only the fetish of some economists (e.g., Hirshleifer, 1985) that rejects the idea that one person’s self-interest cannot include the welfare of others.”

W.T. Stanbury in Walter Block and George Lerner, eds., Breaking the Shackles: Deregulating Canadian Industry