“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.”

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to– ironically-fait h!

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.

When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth!

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

As water by cooling and condensation becomes ice, so thought by condensation assumes physical form. Everything in the universe is thought in material form.

The potential infinite means nothing other than an undetermined, variable quantity, always remaining finite, which has to assume values that either become smaller than any finite limit no matter how small, or greater than any finite limit no matter how great.

we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves… But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves — unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.

Never assume that you can make it alone. You need the help of the Lord. Never hesitate to get on your knees in some private place and speak with Him.