“for the first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.”
C.S. Lewis Miracles (having conceded the enormous difficulty of evaluating directly whether the Incarnation happened or not).
“How can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things really matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.”
The king in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“The truth is, whatever you can’t talk about is already out of control in your life…”
Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life
“The question of the existence of God is the single most important question we face about the nature of reality…. Neither question [does the concept of a personal God make sense and should we believe in one] is easy to answer. God is a different kind of being from any other that we might speak about.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the mania for booster shots for vaccines that don’t work very well to stop a variant they may not work against at all is not science.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say if there’s really a burgeoning mental health crisis over hair loss we’ve lost more from our heads than just the stuff above our scalps.
“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