Quotations page 2

"Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method."

Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism,(General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 5.

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"It is impossible to devise a scientific experiment to describe the creation process, or even to ascertain whether such a process can take place.  The Creator does not create at the whim of a scientist."

Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism(General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 5.

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"Another point important to recognize is that the creation was 'mature' from its birth.  It did not have to grow or develop from simple beginnings.  God formed it full-grown in every respect, including even Adam and Eve as mature individuals when they were first formed.  The whole universe had an 'appearance of age' right from the start.  It could not have been otherwise for true creation to have taken place. 'Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them' (Genesis 2:1)."

Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, (General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 210.

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"Some of the state's witnesses suggested that the scientific community was 'closed-minded' on the subject of creationism and that explained the lack of acceptance of the creation-science arguments.  Yet no witness produced an article for which publication had been refused."

Judge William R. Overton, "Decision of the Court" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),

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"Although the ICR often emphasizes that it is the scientific nature of creationist theory which brings scientists to a belief in a supreme being, it is curious that they include a requirement for membership (the inerrancy of the Christian Bible) which effectively excludes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the majority of Christian sects (who do not accept a literal reading of all parts of the Bible) from membership. It is clear that the ICR, which is the most respected of creationist groups in its attempts to appear scientifically legitimate, is essentially an organization composed solely of Christian Fundamentalists."

Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 22.

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"The American creationist movement has entirely bypassed the scientific forum and has concentrated instead on political lobbying and on taking its case to a fair-minded electorate...  The reason for this strategy is overwhelmingly apparent: no scientific case can be made for the theories they advance."

Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 22.

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"The fact of the matter is that the fossil record not only documents evolution, but that it was the fossil record itself which forced natural scientists to abandon their idea of the fixity of species and look instead for a plausible mechanism of change, a mechanism of evolution.

The fossil record not only demonstrates evolution in extravagant detail, but it dashes all claims of the scientific creationists concerning the origin of living organisms."

Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 22.

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"The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11 is the actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronologic problems thereby entailed."

Henry M. Morris, Remarkable Birth, p. 82.  Quoted in Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 56. (italics added)

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"We do not know how the Creator created, [or] what processes He used, for he used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe.  This is why we refer to creation as special creation.  We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by the Creator."

Duane Gish, Evolution? The Fossils Say No!, (1985), p. 42.

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"Well, evolution is a theory.  It is also a fact.  And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty.  Facts are the world's data.  Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts.  Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them.  Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome.  And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."

Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" Science and Creationism,(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 118.

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"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms.  The punctuations occur at the level of species;  directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups."

Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"  Science and Creationism,

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 124.

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"In candid moments, leading creationists will admit that the miraculous character of origin and destruction precludes a scientific understanding.  Morris writes (and Judge Overton quotes): 'God was there when it happened.  We were not there . . . . Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this information is in His written Word.'"

Stephen Jay Gould, "Creationism: Genesis vs. Geology" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 130.

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"Why don't we teach astrology in the schools?  Astrology holds that the course of each human life is determined to a considerable degree by the position of the stars in the sky at the exact moment of the individual's birth.  Belief in it, in one variant or another, has probably been held by most of the people on earth.  Even today, some universities in India offer degrees in the subject.  Yet American believers do not pressure boards of education to add their subject to the curriculum.  If belivers in astrology became as well organized as the creationists, it is hard to

see how their demands could be withstood."

Garrett Hardin, "Marketing Deception as Truth" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 162.

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"The probabilistic teleological argument exploits the idea that it is extremely improbable that the laws of the universe should be so balanced as to permit the development of life unless we adop the hypothesis that these laws were fixed by a creator who desired the development of life.

The argument, however, faces the same kind of objection as the one we brought against the cosmological argument in the previous chapter: it takes a certain concept out of a context in which it is obviously applicable, and applies it to a context in which that concept is not

applicable.  In the case of the cosmological argument, the crucial concept is that of causation;  in the case of the teleological argument, it is statistical probability.  Neither argument carries conviction because we can plausibly deny that the concept in question can be

extended to cover extraordinary contexts."

Robin Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 57.

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"If God is the basis of moral values, then such values must be objective, and we are, therefore, faced with the following questions: (1) How do we come to be aware of these moral values, if they exist entirely independently of us?  (2) Why do moral facts supervene on natural facts?  (3) How can the existence of objective moral values be reconciled with the existence of different conceptions of what is right? These difficulties are not faced by the atheist."

Robin Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 85.

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"If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so.  Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing;  and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic.  So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition [of theism]."

Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 22.

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"However far back we may be able to trace the -- so to speak -- internal history of the Universe, there can be no question of arguing that this or that external origin is either probable or improbable.  We do not have, and we necessarily could not have, experience of other Universes to tell us that Universes, or Universes with these particular features, are the work of Gods, or of Gods of this or that particular sort."

Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 51.

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"Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever."

Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 64.

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"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?"

Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 74.

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"If you look up 'atheism' in a dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God.  Certainly many people understand atheism in this way.  Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one consider it from the point of view of its

Greek roots.  In Greek 'a' means 'without' or 'not' and 'theos' means 'god.'  From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist.  According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God."

Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 463.

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"Could it not be said that it is improbable that we would have a universe in which life arose anywhere?  One answer that might be given is that we do not know whether it is improbable or not.  Judgments about a priori probabilities in such cases are arbitrary, and we have no evidence in this case of any relevant empirical probabilities."

Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 132.

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"Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story,and there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them."

Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.

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"Religious experiences in one culture often conflict with those in another.  One cannot accept all of them as veridical, yet there does not seem to be any way to separate the veridical experiences from the rest."

Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.

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"Since experiences of God are good grounds for the existence of God, are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the nonexistence of God?  After all, many people have tried to experience God and have failed.  Cannot these experiences of the absence of God be used by atheists to counter the theistic argument based on experience of the presence of God?"

Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.

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C.S. "Lewis is certainly right to suppose that in considering the question of whether miracles exist there is a danger that one will appear to a priori arguments and assumptions.  But the solution to this problem is not to decide on naturalism or supernaturalism beforehand.  Rather, one must attempt to reject the a priori arguments and instead base one's position on inductive considerations. Lewis has not shown that this is impossible.  Thus he has not shown that one must choose between naturalism and supernaturalism before investigating the possibility of miracles." Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 193.

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"God does not exist if Big Bang cosmology, or some relevantly similar theory, is true.  If this  cosmology is true, our universe exists without cause and without explanation.  There are numerous possible universes, and there is possibly no universe at all, and there is no reason why this one is actual rather than some other one or none at all.  Now the theistically alleged human need for a reason for existence, and other alleged needs, are unsatisfied.  But I suggest that humans do or can possess a deeper level of experience than such anthropocentric despairs. We can forget about ourselves for a moment and open ourselves up to the startling impingement of reality itself.  We can let ourselves become profoundly astonished by the fact that this universe exists at all."

Quentin Smith in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) ,p. 216.

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"I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.'  Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them.  The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent." Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 63.

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"What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts?  First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion."

Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 75.

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"The very admission of the need to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the narratives, not on those who doubt them.  What harmonizing shows is that despite appearances, the texts still might be true."

Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 75.

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"A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible!  There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did."

Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 116.

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"If, when we compare two versions of a story, the second known to be a retelling of the first, and find that the second has more of a miraculous element, we may reasonably conclude we have legendary (or midrashic or whatever) embellishment.  The tale has grown in the telling.  This sort of comparison is common in extrabiblical research and no one holds that it cannot properly indicate legend formation there.  When biblical scholars apply the same method to the Bible it in

no way implies a wholesale rejection of miracles."

Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 118.

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"I suspect that, though Craig indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, playing taps for various critical approaches still quite far from death's door, he may well be correct that New Testament scholarship is more conservative than it once was. This has more than he admits to do with which denominations can afford to train the most students, hire more faculty, and send more members to the SBL."

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"It should surprise no one that the great mainstream of biblical scholars hold views friendly to traditional Christianity, for the simple reason that most biblical scholars are and always have been believing Christians, even if not fundamentalists. It is only the pious arrogance of Craig's evangelicalism (which denies the name "Christian" to anyone without a personal tete-a-tete with Jesus) that allows him to implicitly depict New Testament scholars as a bunch of newly-chastened

skeptics with their tails between their legs. Even Bultmann, a devout Lutheran, was much less skeptical than Baur and Strauss."

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal."

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened."

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"Nor is 'naturalism' the issue when the historian employs the principle of analogy. As F.H. Bradley showed in The Presuppositions of Critical History, no historical inference is possible unless the historian assumes a basic analogy of past experience with present. If we do not grant this, nothing will seem amiss in believing reports that A turned into a werewolf or that B changed lead into gold. 'Hey, just because we don't see it happening today doesn't prove it never did!' One could as easily accept the historicity of Jack and the Beanstalk on the same basis, as long as one's sole criterion of historical probability is 'anything goes!'"

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"Many New Testament scholars have observed that the conception of the resurrection body implied in 1 Corinthians 15 clashes so violently with that presupposed in the gospels that the latter must be dismissed as secondary embellishments, especially as 1 Corinthians predates the gospels."

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them 'See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21.'"

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"It is telling that Craig wants to justify his use of the appeal to consensus. And in doing so, he appeals to a false analogy. In a court of Law, or in the certtification of doctors, lawyers, etc., we may have to go with the verdict of the majority since we have not the leisure to master the subject ourselves. This, in turn, is because we do not have all the time in the world before we must return a verdict, choose a surgeon, etc. We have to make a choice, and the voice of the consensus tips the balance. But it only seems to us that we must take the word of the mass in biblical discussions if we think that here, too, the  decision is a matter of practical, even life-or-death choice, and this is not the case in an intellectual consideration of complex issues."

Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

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"But the argument is still unsound, because the first premise is false: there are other unmentioned alternatives, for example, that Jesus as described in the gospels is a legendary figure, so that the trilemma is false as it stands."

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 39.

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"What, then, should be our approach in apologetics?  It should besomething like this: 'My friend, I know Christianity is true because God's Spirit lives in me and assures me that it is true.  And you can know it is true, too, because God is knocking at the door of your heart, telling you the same thing. If you are sincerely seeking God, then God will give you assurance that the gospel is true. Now, to try to show you it's true, I'll share with you some arguments and evidence that I really find convincing. But should my arguments seem weak and unconvincing to you, that's my fault, not God's. It only shows that I'm a poor apologist, not that the gospel is untrue. Whatever you think of my arguments, God still loves you and holds you accountable. I'll do my best to present good arguments to you. But ultimately you have to deal, not with arguments, but with God himself.'"

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 48.

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"Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart.  No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments;  he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God."

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), pp. 35-36.

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"Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa."

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 36.

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"The Bible says all men are without excuse.  Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit."

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 37.

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"[T]heology made no provision for evolution.  The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of  all!  Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?"

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1998), p. 6.

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"By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.  Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1998), p. 45.

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"Your article on the wiles of the creationists states that in Alabama all biology texts must now carry stickers advising the reader that evolution is an 'unproven belief' and 'should (only) be considered a theory.' One assumes, in the interests of fair play, that the creationists similarly insist that these stickers be affixed to Bibles."

John R. Harris, Letter to the Editor, L.A. Times

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"[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1998), p. 46.

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"[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1998), p. 54.

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"The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1998), p. 99.

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"[E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1998), p. 144.

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"No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would

pray continuously."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1998), p. 245.

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"[W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?"

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  

1998), p. 245.

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"[O]ld beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  

1998), p. 256.

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"[I]f history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms.  The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  

1998), p. 262.

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"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?"

"No, unfortunately, there is not. Furthermore, a choice between them is unlikely to remain arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying the two world views are being tested with increasing severity by cumulative verifiable knowledge about how the universe works"

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  

1998), p. 264.

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"Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition"

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  

1998), p. 6.

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"If we trust the author, either of the Gospel or of the early tradition, then even a non-saying may be historically illuminating about the primary Jesus: this was what a primary source, perhaps even a close one, thought that he meant.  But how do we distinguish between what Jesus did mean, what an early close acquaintance thought that he meant and what later Christians claimed that he had said?"

Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 203.

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"The same standards apply to heathen evidence as to biblica.  Is it based on a primary source?  Is it biased, ambiguous or simply wrong? Relevant evidence is extremely scarce;  what, if anything, does silence imply?  In the early parts of the Bible's story, biblical persons have

yet to be identified correctly in any external sources.  There have been many attempts, and some confident claims, but as yet there is no good reason to identify Moses or Joseph with any known person or period in ancient Egyptian records."

Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 252.

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"A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people.  This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices.  It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger.  The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life.  When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, (San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 5.

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"What the mind cannot cannot believe the heart can finally never adore."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, (San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 24.

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"Today Christianity has been so important for so long that one is apt to assume that it must have appeared important to educated pagans who lived AD 50-150;  and that if they fail to discuss Jesus' historicity or the pretensions of his worshippers, their silence must be attributed to their consciousness that they were unable to deny the truth of the Christian case.  In fact, however, there is no reason why the pagan writers of this period should have thought Christianity any more important than other enthusiastic religions of the Empire."

G.A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist? (Revised edition, London: Pemberton, 1986), p. 15.

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"Whether the 'Christ' they worshipped had been on earth as a man will have been of no interest either to him [Pliny] or to Trajan.  What worried them was that Christians were holding meetings which, because of Christian unwillingness to make due obeisance to the emperor, might have been seditious, they were not concerned about whether there was any historical basis to Christian doctrinal niceties."

G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 41.

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"I would ask whose historicity was questioned in antiquity, when both pagan historians and Christian Fathers accepted pagan saviour gods as historical personages?  (Herodotus says Attis was the son of a king of Lydia and that Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, was a ruler of Egypt. Clement of Alexandria regarded pagan saviour gods as 'mere men' and Firmicus Maternus called Osiris and Typhon 'without doubt' kings of Egypt).  Can one expect much in the way of critical scepticism when, even in modern times, Wilhelm Till long passed as a real person?"

G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 47.

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"The eight Pauline letters I have accepted as genuine [Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon, and Colossians] are so completely silent concerning the events that were  later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not

known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred."

G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 22.

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All of the "extant post-Pauline epistles of the New Testament which are likely to have been written before the end of the first century (and probably before 90) refer to Jesus in essentially the same manner as Paul does.  They stress one or more of his supernatural aspects -- his existence before his life on earth, his resurrection and second coming - - but say nothing of the teachings or miracles ascribed to him in the gospels, and give no historical setting to the crucifixion, which remains the one episode in his incarnate life unambiguously mentioned,

at least in some of them."

G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 47.

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"The silence of the early material about so much of what Jesus (according to the later material) said and did, is widely admitted to be something of a problem.  Of course, silence does not always imply ignorance.  But a book on transport in Cologne which, though written after 1965, made no reference to an undergound railway, might reasonably be presumed to have been written in ignorance of the undergound then constructed there.  In other words, silence on a topic is significant if this silence if this silence extends to matters obviously relevant to what the writer has chosen to discuss."

G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 218.

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"Fantasy and precision go together, and fantasy stands there with the air of an eyewitness.  Fantasy fills in all of knowledge's gaps, and not with coarse strokes but with the fine touches of a miniaturist. Witnesses often know more about an episode twenty years later than they did immediately afterward.  So whenever we find precise details, a certain amount of caution is always called for.  It might be mere fantasy.  The exactitude of the eyewitness and that of fantasy are hard to tell apart."

Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things (San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 92.

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"When Christianity gained control of the Roman Empire it suppressed the writings of its critics and even cast them into flames."

Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984), p. xii.

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"The question of the mythological and legendary character of the Gospels did not first arise in modern times.  The historical reliability of the accounts of Jesus' life was already an issue for Christian thinkers in the second century."

Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984), p. 112.

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"Why were these texts buried -- and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years?  Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century.  We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them."

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xviii.

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"Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed.  But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction -- in the jar where they

remained buried for almost 1,600 years."

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xviii-xix.

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"Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries.  For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises.  First, they accept the canon of the New Testament;  second, they confess the apostolic creed;  and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution.  But every one of these -- the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure -- emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century."

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxii-xxiii.

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"The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical 'blasphemy' proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them."

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxiv.

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"Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine?  . . . these religious debates -- questions of the nature of God, or of Christ -- simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion.  In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.'"

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxxvi.

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"If the New Testament accounts could support a range of interpretations, why did orthodox Christians in the second century insist on a literal view of resurrection and reject all others as heretical? . . . [W]hen we examine its practical effect on the Christian movement, we can see,

paradoxically, that the doctrine of bodily resurrection also serves an essential political function: it legitimizes the authority of certain men who claim to exercise leadership over the churches as the successors of the apostle Peter.  From the second century, the doctrine has served to validate the apostolic succession of bishops, the basis of papal authority to this day.  Gnostic Christians who interpret resurrection in other ways have a lesser claim to authority: when they claim priority over the orthodox, they are denounced as heretics."

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 7.

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"The historian, who can take no cognizance of his miraculous birth to the Virgin Mary, has to conclude that his father was Joseph, the son of Jacob (or Heli)."

Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Collier, 1977), p. 171.

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"But before we consider the Gospels individually, two further special difficulties have to be mentioned.  First they cannot be checked effectively from other sources.  The assistance provided by pagan literature, in particular, is meagre indeed.  References to the Christians in Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the younger are a good deal later, and in any case they throw little or no light on the life of Jesus himself.  The Jewish evidence, too, notably in the Talmud, comes

from a subsequent period, and some of the Talmud passages are based on Christian sources, so that they carry no independent weight."

Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Collier, 1977), p. 183.

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"Roman sources that mention him [Jesus] are all dependent on Christian reports.  Jesus' trial did not make headlines in Rome, and the archives there had no record of it.  If archives were kept in Jerusalem, they were destroyed when revolt broke out in 66 CE or during the subsequent war.  That war also devastated Galilee.  Whatever records there may have been did not survive.  When he was executed, Jesus was no more important to the outside world than the two brigands or insurgents executed with him -- whose name we do not know."

E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 49.

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"But knowledge of Jesus was limited to knowledge of Christianity;  that is, had Jesus' adherents not started a movement that spread to Rome, Jesus would not have made it into Roman histories at all.  The consequence is that we do not have what we would very much like, a comment in Tacitus or another Gentile writer that offers independent evidence about Jesus, his life and his death."

E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 50.

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"It is true, of course, that the phrase 'separation of church and state' does not appear in the Constitution.  But it was inevitable that some convenient term should come into existence to verbalize a principle so clearly and widely held by the American people.... [T]he right to a fair

trial is generally accepted to be a constitutional principle;  yet the term "fair trial" is not found in the Constitution.  To bring the point even closer home, who would deny that "religious liberty" is a constitutional principle?  Yet that phrase too is not in the Constitution.  The universal acceptance which all these terms, including "separation of church and state," have received in America would seem to confirm rather than disparage their reality as basic American democratic principles."

Leo Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom (Beacon Press: Boston, 1967).

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"Jefferson's Danbury letter has been cited favorably by the Supreme Court many times.  In its 1879 Reynolds vs. U.S. decision the high court said Jefferson's observations 'may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment.'  In the court's 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote, 'In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state.'  It is only in recent times that separation has come under attack by judges in the federal court system who oppose separation of church and state."

Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 221

The statement that Thomas Jefferson meant his "wall of separation" to be "one-directional," only to protect the church from incursions by the state "is an example of one of the Religious Right's more blatant lies. It is impossible to determine where this myth originated, but we do know

that it began appearing with increasing frequency in the early 1990s. The phrase 'one-directional' often appears in quotation marks to make it appear as if it were lifted from a letter or personal writing of Jefferson's. "Of course, Jefferson said no such thing about his 'wall,' as any of his biographers or church-state historians will readily testify. Jefferson's writings indicate beyond a doubt that he believed separation would protect both church and state."

Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 222.

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"Since Jefferson coined the phrase 'wall of separation between church and state' in 1802, a full 145 years before the Soviet provision was written, it is obviously incorrect to suggest that the Soviets pioneered the separation principle.  If anything, the Soviets stole the concept from the United States.  In any case, what the Soviet constitution said about religious freedom has no bearing on U.S. constitutional provisions.  The Soviet document also guaranteed free speech (at least on paper), but no one has labeled freedom of expression a Communist idea."

Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), pp. 222-23.

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"The Framers wrote the Constitution as a secular documet not because they were hostile to Christianity but because they did not want to imply that the new federal government would have any authority to meddle in religion."

Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), pp. 223-24.

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"Although Murray O-Hair did play an important role in this controversy [government-led prayer in public schools], she did not 'single-handedly' remove state-sponsored religious exercises from public schools.  Other people were involved.  Today the controversial Texas atheist serves as a

convenient villain for Religious Right propagandists who hate religious liberty and church-state separation."

Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 227.

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"In a footnote to the Supreme Court's 1961 Torcaso v. Watkins decisions, Justice Hugo Black wrote, 'Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God is Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.'  The Torcaso case dealt with religious tests for public office;  it has nothing to do with public schools.  The justice's comment is far from a finding that humanism is being taught in the schools."

Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), pp. 229-30.

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"The Christian religion cannot be believed without a miracle by any reasonable person."

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 12.

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Theism's "continuing hold on the minds of many reasonable people is surprising enough to count as a miracle in at least the original sense."

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 12.

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Craig's kalam cosmological argument "is vaguely explanatory, apparently satisfying;  but these appearances fade away when we try to formulate the suggestion precisely."

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 95.

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"The theistic hypothesis does not differentially explain specific phenomena in the way that successful scientific theories do: it does not explain why we have these phenomena rather than others."

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 138.

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"As Darwin so convincingly argued, there are many details which his hypothesis explains while that of special creation does not."

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 140.

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"From a neutral point of view all that is true is that conditions have been right for life far less often than they have been wrong, so their being right once can well be ascribed to chance, and not seen as calling for any further explanation."

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 141.

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"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."

Dan Barker

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"Freethought is respectable.  Freethought is crucial.  Freethought needs to be publicized."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 70.

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"I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 87.

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"Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge.  Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all.  A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety.  It is nothing less than surrender."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 103.

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"The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 106.

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"If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?"

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 108.

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"What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer? Does the total  number of people praying for or against something matter? How about the righteousness of the supplicants? Are positive prayers answered more frequently than negative ones? Does God take the positive ones and Satan the negative? Does the intensity of the praying have any effect on the outcome? Does the length of time one devotes to praying have any effect on the frequency with which one's prayers are answered? Do the words and phrases used in the prayer -- either positive or negative -- have any bearing on the success rate? Does the nature of the thing or things prayed for have any bearing on the prayer's success rate -- either positive or negative prayers? Why or why not??"

Robert A. Baker, "Prayer Wars" Skeptical Briefs (http://www.csicop.org/sb/9709/baker.html, Septmber 1997).

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"To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance.  That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special,

above it all."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.

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"Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect.  But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.

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"I have an Easter challenge for Christians.  My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter.  I am not asking for proof.  My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 178.

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"Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence?  After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?"

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.

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"The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.'  The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin.  If they are

still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural, ranscendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic,

Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible."

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.

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"There is no religious experience which guarantees that our experience is an experience of God.  This can be asserted without for a moment doubting that some people have religious experiences.  The psychological reality of such experience is one thing, that these experiences are actually experiences of God is another."

Kai Nielsen, Philosophy and Atheism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1985) p. 46.

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"If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith?  And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence?"

Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 50.

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"Such an act can be neither verified (nor falsified) on the basis of empirical data, by facts established by historical investigation.  His death as redepmtive event was not an act visible to the disinterested observer.  All such mythological acts lie outside the purview of the

empirical sciences and hence of the historian."

Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 51.

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"As historians we are not obliged to take anybody's word for anything;  we must attempt to verify every scrap of information we decide to use in our reconstructions.  That an involves an assessment of the proclivities of our sources along with an evaluation of the sources from which they got their information."

Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 58.

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"Particulars are established by attempting to verify each item, either by the confirmation of independent sources or by comparative evidence."

Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 60.

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"To the amateur, however, to grant that something is possible is immediately taken as verification of a canonical report.  For the skeptic, on the other hand, walking on the water is impossible; therefore Jesus did not do it.  The historian accedes to neither generalization.  Possibilities (and impossibilities) do not and cannot establish facts.  Historians insist on looking every report in the face and judging its reliability independently of theoretical possibilities."

Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), pp. 60-61.

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"We now know that where Matthew and Luke overlap with Mark, their reports do not constitute independent sources for those events."

Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 61.

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"Ralph Reed likes to quote Alexis de Tocqueville on religion's central place in American democratic society.  The quotations are not always accurate, but he is right about one important thing.  Tocqueville, like Benjamin Franklin, believed that religion is essential to the health of republican liberty.  However, Reed apparently closed the pages of Democracy in America too soon.  Had he read further, he would not have missed Tocqueville's point that it is dangerous for religion to tie itself to political institutions and to topical political controversy."

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 21.

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"The principal framers of the American political system wanted no religious parties in national politics.  They crafted a constitutional order that intended to make a person's religious convictions, or his lack of religious convictions, irrelevant in judging the value of his

political opinion or in assessing his qualifications to hold political office."

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 23.

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"So succesful were the drafters of the Constitution in defining government in secular terms that one of the most powerful criticisms of the Constitution when ratified and for succeeding decades was that it was indifferent to Christianity and God.  It was denounced by many as a godless document, which is precisely what it is."

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 23.

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"The people with the best reason to attack Pat Robertson are devout Christians who care about the credibility of their faith.  They object to the partisan uses he has sought to make of the passion of Christ. But not one of them worthy of respect, and especially not the Pentecostal faith where Robertson began, would trivialize the agony and suffering of its redemptive God into campaign slogans for politicians. Faith, to be blunt, is irrelevant to many of the political causes that Robertson has forcefully championed.  Not to all of them, and we shall come to those issues.  What needs emphasis now is the fact that Robertson's self-declared war to save the soul of America is not with secular humanists, as he says.  It is with other Christians."

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 155.  (italics added)

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"Yet Robertson fails to follow up the implications of what he has written about moral decline.  If Americans are Christian -- in fact, if they are by dint of church membership more Christian than they were a hundred years ago, and vastly more Christian than they were in the eighteenth century -- then how do we explain the decline of religiously based morality?"

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), pp. 155-56.

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"If anything is unconstitutional, it is government encouragement to pray in the public schools.  Moreover, the proposed constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer is offensive on two counts.  First, it violates explicitly the intended secular base of the Constitution.  And far worse, it encourages the political use of religion in a way that allows elected officials to evade their real responsibilities and to claim for themselves a moral high ground that they too often have done nothing to earn."

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 165.

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"It is important to distinguish between the moral witness of religious people who speak out strongly about an issue that offends their moral conscience, and the use of religion as a strategic means to advance  the fortunes of a particular party or candidate."

Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, "Is God a Republican?" The American Prospect September-October 1996.

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Biblical higher criticism "is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer.  So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand.  In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 12.

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"At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs.  It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days.  It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 12.

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"Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry.  Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power.  Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 99.

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"I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created.  If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 237.

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"If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed.  For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable."

Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 238.

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"Yes God has spoken, and He has not stuttered. The God of truth has given us the Word of Truth, and it does not contain any untruth in it. The Bible is the unerring Word of God.

"Inspiration includes not only all that the Bible explicitly teaches, but also everything the Bible touches. This is true whether the Bible is touching upon history, science, or mathematics. Whatever the Bible declares, is true -- whether it is a major point or a minor point."

Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, When Critics Ask,  pp.12-13.

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"The Bible is the inerrant...word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc."

Jerry Falwell, Finding Inner Peace and Strength, p. 26.

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"We may have faith in something, about something, even faith in spite of evidence for something, but if there is nothing existing in the first place to have faith about then the act of faith is not only ungrounded but completely misplaced and without content.  Faith of itself does not provide supporting evidence for anything.  It does provide such things as pyschological reassurances and attitudes to be taken towards things.  It may provide perspectives from which to relate to events and people.  But faith that Creation Ex Nihilo does take place cannot be had.  There is nothing there in the first place to have faith in.  If the attitude of faith is a supporting ground for the validity of an idea, then by the same token one can by faith give supporting ground to any notion whatever.  By an act of faith God could be said not to Create Ex Nihilo, but He is Co-Eternal with the Universe.  By an act of faith it could be said that God does not exist, or that many Gods exist, or that God isn't here yet, or that God passed out of existence many years ago.  Unguarded, both the appeal to mystery and the appeal to faith tend to become arguments from ignorance or arguments to ease the burden of something unknown or unacceptable."

Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 66.

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"What was God doing (in His Time) for an eternity into His past before He Created the Universe Ex Nihilo?  God existed by Himself through an Eternity before the Creation without needing a Universe.  Why did He suddenly desire to create the Universe?"

Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 67.

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"To say that this Timeless God began Time along with the Universe at a time when there was no Time implies that at that moment when He initiated this Unique Event He was engaged in a Time, or at a time in order to bring this Event about.  He did something.  What brought that Event about?"

Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 67.

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"If we ask, 'Where did the Universe come from?', our answer can only be: 'It doesn't come from anywhere."  [...]  There isn't any 'where' from which it could come."

Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 67.

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"The phrase 'the child should cheat' means that genes that tend to make children cheat have an advantage in the gene pool.  If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 139.

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"What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment?  The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.  It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence.  It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next.  The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary.  These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains.  God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 193.

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"Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.

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"But what, after all, is faith?  It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something -- it doesn't matter what -- in the total absence of supporting evidence.  If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.  It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly.  People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.

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"Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it).  But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.  It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.

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"Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings.  It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.  What a weapon!  Religious faith deserves a

chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 330-331.

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"Whatever the motive, the consequence is that if a reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of some detail of current Darwinian theory, the fact is eagerly seized on and blown up out of all proportion.  So strong is this eagerness, it is as though there were a powerful amplifier, with a finely tuned microphone selectively listening out for anything that sounds the tiniest bit like opposition tp Darwinism.  This is most unfortunate, for serious argument and  criticism is a vitally important part of any science, and it would  be tragic if scholars felt the need to muzzle themselves because of the microphones.  Needless to say the amplifier, though powerful, is not hi-fi: there is plenty of distortion!  A scientist who cautiously  whispers some slight misgiving about a current nuance of Darwinism  is liable to hear his distorted and barely recognizable words booming and echoing through the eagerly waiting loudspeakers."

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 251.

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"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the  Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders.  It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.  All these myths  have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being."

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 316.

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"We cannot disprove beliefs like these, especially if it is assumed that God took care that his interventions always closely mimicked what would be expected from evolution by natural selection.  All that we can say about such beliefs is, firstly, that they are superfluous and, secondly, that they assume the existence of the main thing we want to explain, namely organized complexity.  The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how  organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity."

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 316.

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"If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must already have been vastly complex in the first place.  The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity.  If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!"

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 316.

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"If such a God did exist, he could not be a beneficient God, such as the Christians posit.  What effrontery is it that talks about the mercy and goodness of a nature in which all animals devour animals, in which every mouth is a slaughter-house and every stomach a tomb!"

E.M. McDonald, "Design Argument Fallacies" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 90.

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"If, when we perceive results similar to those that might be due to a wise man, we conclude that they have been produced by a being similar to a wise man, then, when we see results similar to those that might be due an idiot, shall we not conclude that they have been produced by an idiot?"

E.M. McDonald, "Design Argument Fallacies" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 91.

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"If Christ rose at all, he rose on the very day on which he was buried.  According to Matthew, a guard of Roman soldiers was placed at the entrance of the sepulchre to watch that no dead person came out, and that no living person went in.  But Matthew admits that one night had passed before the guard was placed at the door of Roman militarism, with its unbending and inexorable discipline, does not need to be assured that the smartest corpse that was ever laid in a tomb would not be able to pass a Roman guard without being reduced to the kind of corpse that does not require a sealed stone and a squadron of soldiers to keep it from rising.  If Christ rose at all, he rose before the soldiers walked sentry in front of his tomb;  in other words, he rose on the very night of the very day he was placed in the tomb."

W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 210.

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"The story of the Roman soldiers falling alseep is too feeble and clumsy to merit serious refutation;  and that the soldiers were bribed to say they slept is, if possible, more preposterous still.  The penalty while doing sentry work would be death, and it requires a rather liberal bribe to induce a man to offer himself for instant execution.  If there be any such bravo on record, I have not heard of him, and I cannot quite see what use the bribe for which he gave his life would be to him, even if he took it with him into his coffin."

W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 210.

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"The most extraordinary Roman soldiers that Rome ever heard of were those soldiers that were set to watch the tomb of Jesus.  They managed to fall asleep simultaneously in order to allow Jesus to pass unseen, and when they awoke, for a bribe they deliberately committed suicide by admitting that they had slept -- an admission that meant instant execution.  Was ever invention so stupidly desparate and medacity so reckleslly absurd as that invention and that mendacity upon which rests the story of the Resurrection, upon which the whole fabric of the Christian faith has elected to stand or fall?  The basis is too puerile to support a story told by an idiot for the purpose of imposing upon a fool."

W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 211.

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"It would require higher authority than that of Christ and his biographers to convince any classical scholar that he escaped from the tomb after the Roman guard had been set.  That every soldier on the vigil slept at his post is one of the most incredible of the incredible statements we are expected to believe in order to be 'saved.'"

W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 211.

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"If it were desirable upon the part of God to send his son to save the world from eternal perdition, why was it that, when he did arrive, so many nations were kept in ignorance of his mission?  Even the Jews, God's chosen people, had no knowledge than an incarnate deity was to expire on the Cross.  If the regeneration of the world had been the object of Christ, would it not have been better, instead of ascending to heaven, for him to have remained on earth, teaching practical truths, and showing by his own personal example how the world could be rescued from that moral and intellectual darkness and despair to which it had  been reduced by the influence of a degrading theology?"

Charles Watts, "The Death of Christ" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 217.

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"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 282.

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"Worm 6:9 Our father who are'nt in heaven, Hollow be thy name. Thy kingdom dead, thy will be read. On earth as if there were a heaven. Give us this day our daily dream and deliver us from reality. for thine is the falsehood, the corruption and the Horror forever. Hy-men"

Christian D. Seaver, "The Book of Worm"

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"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe.  This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe?  Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe."

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8

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"Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down.  If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time.  Their existence can be ignored because it would have no onservational consequences.  One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined.  It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously.  In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe;  there is no physical necessity for a beginning.  One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past.  On the other hand, if the

universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning.  One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!"

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 8-9.

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"Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican.  The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth.  Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology.  At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope.  He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God.  I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation.  I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!"

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 115-16.

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"The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence.  It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty."

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 124.

"The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary.  There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time.  One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.'  The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself.  It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 136.

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"The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe.  With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws.  However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off.  So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.  But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?"

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 140-41.

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"Scientific hypotheses are always tentative;  they are designed to be held only so long as they conform to the evidence.  Proponents of the theistic hypothesis, on the other hand, are already sure that their hypothesis is correct;  the only seek evidence to buttress a foregone conclusion."

Keith Parsons, "Is There a Case for Christian Theism?" Does God Exist? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991), p. 190.

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Concerning the argument from design, "You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have adapted to their environment.  It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation.  There is no evidence of design about it."

Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 62.

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"Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti. and Mr. Winston Churchill?  Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe."  I am not very impressed by the splendor of those people.  Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed.  Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system.  You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless."

Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 62.

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"The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth."

Bertrand Russell, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (1948) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 136.

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"Then you have to say one or other of two things.  Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages."

Bertrand Russell, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (1948) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 136.

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"In recent times, the bulk of eminent phyicists and a nymber of  eminent biologists have made pronouncements stating that recent advances in science have disproved the older materialism, and have tended to reestablish the truths of religion.  The statements of the scientists have as a rule been somewhat tentative and indefinite, but the theologians have seized upon them and extended them, while the newspapers in turn have reported the more sensational accounts of the theologians, so that the general public has derived the impression that physics confirms practically the whole of the Book of Genesis.  I do not myself think that the moral to be drawn from modern science is at all what the general public has thus been led to suppose.  In the first place, the men of science have not said nearly as much as they are thought to have said, and in the second place what they have said in the way of support for traditional religious beliefs has been said by them not in their cautious, scientific capacity, but rather in their capacity of good citizens, anxious to defend virtue and property."

Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 167.

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"Are we to infer from this that the world was made by a Creator? Certainly not, if we are to adhere to the cannons of valid scientific inference.  There is no reason whatever why the universe should not have begun spontaneously, except that it seems odd that it should do so;  but there is no law of nature to the effect that things which seem odd to us must not happen.  To infer a Creator is to infer a cause, and causal inferences are only admissable in science when they proceed from observed causal laws.  Creation out of nothing is an occurrence which has not been observed.  There is, therefore, no better reason to suppose that the world was caused by a Creator than to suppose that it was uncaused;  either equally contradicts the  causal laws that we can observe."

Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 177-78.

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"It is curious that not only the physicists, but even the theologians, seem to find something new in the arguments from modern physics. Physicists, perhaps can scarcely be expected to know the history of theology, but the theologians ought to be aware that the modern arguments have all had their counterparts at earlier times."

Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 178.

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"The Ages of Faith, which are praised by our neo-scholastics, were the time when the clergy had things all their own way.  Daily life was full of miracles wrought by saints and wizardry perpetrated by devils and necromancers.  Many thousands of witches were burnt at the stake.  Men's sins were punished by pestilence and famine, by earthquake, flood, and fire.  And yet, strange to say, they were even more sinful than they are now-a-days."

Bertrand Russell, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (1948) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 208.

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"Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science had gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology.  Ousted from one position, they have taken up another.  After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology;  they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and education.  At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is."

Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1943) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 209.

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"The expression 'free thought' is often used as if it meant merely opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.  But this is only a symptom of free thought, frequent, but invariable.  'Free thought' means thinking freely -- as freely, at least, as is possible for a human being.  The person who is free in any respect is free from something;  what is the free thinker free from?  To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things: the force of tradition, and the tyrant of his own passions.  No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker."

Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 239.

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"What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them.  If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free;  but if he holds them because, after careful though, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem."

Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker  and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), pp. 239-40.

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"It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion. Nobody feels any passion about the multiplication table or about the existence of Cape Horn, because these matters are not doubtful. But in matters of theology or political theory, where a rational man will hold that at best there is a slight balance of probability on one side or the other, people argue with passion and support their opinions by physical slavery imposed by armies and mental slavery imposed by schools."

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler,  Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 106.

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"The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences."

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 118.

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"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."

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 138.

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"Roughly, science is what we know and philosophy is what we don't know."

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 219.

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"We must therefore ask ourselves: What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof?

I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic -- including the inductive logic employed in science."

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 253.

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"If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you.

But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'"

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 261.

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"When one admits that nothing is certain, one must, I think, also add that some things are much more nearly certain than others."

Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 294.

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"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves;  because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good."

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1988), p. 161.

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"Theology still tries to interfere in medicine where moral issues are supposed to be specially involved, yet over most of the field the battle for the scientific independence of medicine has been won.  No one now thinks it impious to avoid pestilences and epidemics by sanitation and hygiene; and though some still maintain that diseases are sent by God, they do not argue that it is therefore impious to try to avoid them.  The consequent improvement in health and increase of longevity is one of the most remarkable and admirable characteristics of our age. Even if science had done nothing else for human happiness, it would deserve our gratitude on this account.  Those who believe in the utility of theological creeds would have difficulty in pointing to any comparable advantage that they have conferred upon the human race."

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 108-09.

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"But in the present state of psychology and physiology, belief in immortality can, at any rate, claim no support from science, and such arguments as are possible on the subject point to the probable extinction of personality at death.  We may regret the thought that we shall not survive, but is a comfort to think that all the persecutors and Jew-baiters and humbugs will not continue to exist for all eternity. We may be told that they would improve in time, but I doubt it."

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 108-09.

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"From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.  Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions.  Normal perceptions, since they have to be useful in the struggle for life, must have some correspondence with fact;  but in abnormal perceptions there is no reason to expect such correspondence, and their testimony, therefore, cannot outweigh that of normal perception."

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 188.

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"Man, as a curious accident in a backwater, is intelligible: his mixture of virtues and vices is such as might be expected to result from a fortuitous origin.  But only abysmal self-complacency can see in Man a reason which Omniscience could consider adequate as a motive for the Creator.  The Copernican revolution will not have done its work until it has taught men more modesty than is to be found among those who think Man sufficient evidence of Cosmic Purpose."

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 222.

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"In any case, the argument against the persecution of opinion does not depend upon what the excuse for persecution may be.  The argument is that we none of us know all truth, that the discovery of new truth is promoted by free discussion and rendered very difficult by suppression, and that, in the long run, human welfare is increased by the discovery of truth and hindered by action based on error."

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 250.

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"Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in  the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and fle sh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another.

A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist. If I held a certain epistemological theory about "basic beliefs", I might conclude from this experience that my intuition that there is no God co-existing with this horror was a "basic belief" and thus that I am epistemically entitled to be an atheist without needing to justify this intuition."

Quentin Smith, "An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws"

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"The existence of God is inconsistent with the classical big bang theory."

Quentin Smith, "Atheism, Theism and Big Bang Cosmology"

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"[This world] exists nonnecessarily, improbably, and causelessly. It exists for absolutely no reason at all. It is inexplicably and stunningly actual . . . The impact of this captivated realisation upon me is overwhelming. I am completely stunned. I take a few dazed steps in the dark meadow, and fall among the flowers. I lie stupefied, whirling without comprehension in this world through numberless worlds other than this one."

Quentin Smith, "Atheism, Theism and Big Bang Cosmology"

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"Atheism does not entail the theory of evolution, and evolution does not entail atheism. Many theists are evolutionists. They believe that god has guided evolution. So of what use is an attack on evolution when the target is atheism? Zacharias seems to think that if he can show that belief in evolution is unwarranted that this shows that the "atheistic" worldview is untenable as a whole. Perhaps this is the "existential" hurdle mentioned earlier. But that approach is doomed. Even if the theory of evolution could be shown to be false, this would not affect atheism. True, one who rejects supernatural explanations would want a naturalistic explanation of human origins, but there could be any number of other naturalistic explanations of human origins besides evolution."

Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"

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"Even if there were undesirable consequences if atheism were true, this would not make atheism false. To think otherwise is to simply engage in wishful thinking. 'If death if final, that would be a bad thing. I dont want to believe anything which results in bad things. Therefore, death is not final.' Compare that with the following, which is no doubt on the minds of millions every week: 'If this is not the winning lottery ticket, then I will be terribly disappointed. I do not want to believe anything which results in my being terribly disappointed. Therefore, this is the winning lottery ticket.' By similar reasoning, no one's house would burn down, no one would go bankrupt, no one would be killed in automobile accidents. All that would be required to avert such disasters is to realize that terrible consequences would follow if those things happened and then realize that one does not want to believe it. Then it wouldn't happen. But clearly that is absurd."

Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"

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"Remember, atheism is not a worldview itself. Atheism is defined by the view it does not have-- theism."

Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"

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"If you are either already saved or damned, and this is determined even before you are born, and there is nothing you can do to change that, wouldn't that weigh heavily on one's attempt to live a meaningfullife? Would it not preclude a meaningful life? And what of salvation by grace? If there is a god, and we cannot be saved by anything we do, and, since we would deserve damnation, we could not deserve any worse than we do already, what would be the point of performing any one action as opposed to any other? How do these xians get meaning in their lives? These are well-known theological problems which have never been satisfactorily resolved."

Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"

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"The god of the Bible measures up to the level of a petty and vicious tyrant. The god of the bible punishes babies for the sins of their parents (Exodus 20:5, 34:7; Numbers 14:18; 2 Samuel 12:13-19); punishes people by causing them to become cannibals and eat their children (2 Kings 6:24-33, Lamentations 4:10-11); gives people bad laws, even requiring the sacrifice of their firstborn babies, so that they can be filled with horror and know that god is their lord (Ezekiel 20:25-26); causes people to believe lies so that he can send them to hell (2 Thessalonians 2:11), and many other atrocities, far too many to list here. It would not be hard to measure up to, and exceed, that level of moral purity. Atheists surpass it every day."

Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"

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"There are actually two ways to prove the non-existence of something. One way is to prove that it cannot exist because it leads to contradictions (e.g., square circles, married bachelors, etc.). The other way is, in the words of Keith Parsons, "by carefully looking and seeing." This is how we can know that such things as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abimonable Snowman, etc. do not exist."

Jeffery Jay Lowder, "Is a Proof of the Non-Existence of a God Even Possible?"

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"The most decisive refutation of Adler's claim that 'negative existential propositions cannot be proven' is the fact that the claim that 'negative existential propositions cannot be proven' is itself a negative existential proposition. If negative existential propositions cannot be proven, then that implies there are no proofs for negative existential propositions. But the claim that 'there are no proofs for negative existential propositions' is itself a negative existential

proposition."

Jeffery Jay Lowder, "Is a Proof of the Non-Existence of a God Even Possible?"

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"If the atheist is 'dogmatic' for claiming that a god does not exist, is the theist also dogmatic for claiming that a god does exist? Of course not. Even in Rhodes' scenario, all that is necessary is that a particular god's existence logically imply something that we know is false within the .1% of knowledge that Rhodes says we have. It then logically follows -- we have a deductive proof -- that that particular god does not exist."

Jeffery Jay Lowder, "Is a Proof of the Non-Existence of a God Even Possible?"

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"Why is it that almost every human culture yet discovered has found it necessary to believe in an afterlife of some sort, but not a 'before-life?' Why are there so many versions of Heaven, Paradise and The Great Beyond, but almost none about The Great Before ..."

Judith Hayes, "Where Were You Before You Were You?"

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"The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend.  Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?"

Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"A Roman Catholic worships a god who speaks through the Pope, while a Baptist worships a god who does not.  They cannot be worshipping the same god."

Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction."

Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"If a plane crashes and 99 people die while 1 survives, it is called a miracle.  Should the families of the 99 think so?"

Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 154.

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"As Christians try to force prayer into public schools, they often settle for a 'moment of silence.'  But that supposedly innocuous 'moment of silence' is a deafening roar to a nonbeliever."

Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 163.

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"Life can be beautiful, profound, and awe-inspiring, even without an irate god threatening us with eternal torment."

Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"So how do theists respond to arguments like this? [The Argument from Evil] They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil."

Quentin Smith, "Two Ways to Defend Atheism"

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"On most interpretations of the theistic God, He desires His creatures to love Him. However, the mystery of evil conflicts with this desire. It is difficult for rational humans to love God when they do not understand why there is so much evil. If the reasons for evil are beyond humans ken, God could at least make THIS abundantly clear. Why does He not do so? Moreover, why does not an all-powerful God have the power to raise human intelligence so humans can understand why there is so much evil? If there is reason for not doing this, then why is THIS  not made clear? There is mystery on top of mystery here which seems to conflict explicitly with God's desire to be loved."

Michael Martin, "Third Statement" The Fernandes-Martin Debate

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"The thesis that the universe has an originating divine cause is logically inconsistent with all extant definitions of causality and with a logical requirement upon these and all possible valid  definitions or theories of causality."

Quentin Smith, "Causation and the Logical Impossibility of a Divine Cause"

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"If any spirit created the universe, it is malevolent, not benevolent."

Quentin Smith, "The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism"

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"According to theism, if a universe is to have any probability of existing, this probability is dependent upon God's beliefs, desires and creative acts. But the Hartle-Hawking probability is not dependent on any supernatural considerations; Hartle and Hawking do not sum over anything supernatural in their path integral derivation of the probability amplitude."

Quentin Smith, "Quantum Cosmology's Implication of Atheism" (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/quentin_smith/quantum.html, 1997).

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"Where Galileo was charged with heresy for championing a scientific theory, Newton really was a heretic. He denied the Christian Trinity, and though he believed that Christ had been more than a man, Newton believed him to be subordinate to God the Father. Naturally, he kept these beliefs secret."

Morris, Richard. 1997. Achilles in the Quantum World. New York: Henry Holt & Co., p. 61.

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"And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd.  And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible."

Tertullian

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"'God's' message in my dream was very different.  It confirmed what I have come to believe -- that we are here on earth to live life fully. It helped me respect myself, and stop feeling wrong for doing what felt right.  When I consider some kind of life-force, I now believe  that she/he/it supports me in being who I am.  There are no easy answers and life can get tough at times.  Yet despite the ambiguity we all need to plunge ahead and do it anyway.  We can find the  courage and discover great joy."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), pp. ix-x.

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"In conservative Christianity you are told you are unacceptable.  You are judged with regard to your relationship to God.  Thus you can only be loved positionally, not essentially.  And, contrary to any assumed ideal of Christian love, you cannot love others for their essence either.  This is the horrible cost of the doctrine of original sin."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 1.

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"Intellectual ambiguity can be very uncomfortable.  It is always easier to be sure of something.  A religion that neatly provides all the answers saves you the frustration and anxiety that inevitably accompany a stuggle with difficult questions.  Fundamentalism is especially dogmatic and detailed in describing a grand scheme.  The Bible is offered as the inerrant word of God, revealing the path of history, a plan of salvation, and predictions about the future. Reasons and justifications are given.  And for questions that still remain, there is the ultimate comfort that comes with trusting that a benign father God had everything under control."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 54.

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"How many times have you heard that Christ died for you for your sins?  This is a heavy responsibility, especially for children.  The guilty induction can vary in intensity, depending how the message is presented, but the bottom line is that the Son of God had to come to Earth and die a horrible death because of our failings."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 69.

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"The notion of personal responsibility in fundamentalism is a curious one.  You are responsible for your sins, but you cannot take credit for the good things that you do.  Any good that you do must be attributed to God working through you.  Yet you must try to be Christlike.  When you fail, it is your fault for not 'letting the power of God work in you.'  This is an effective double bind of responsibility without ability."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), pp. 70-71.

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"The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement.  First the believer is to suspend familiar notions of justice, such as punishment for the guilty as opposed to an innocent party.  You are then expected to accept the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin;  that wrongdoing must be paid for, and not necessarily in proportion to the crime.  A father's sacrifice of his innocent son is supposed to be not only just but generous and wonderful.  Then the temporary three-day feath of this one person is supposed to wipe out all the wrongdoing and ineptitude of a species. And finally, you should believe that all you need do to erase responsibility for your actions and enter a haven of eternal reward is to believe.  It's no wonder that once a convert has wrapped his or her mind around this story, anything can be accepted as truth.  The rest of fundamentalist doctrine can be easily swallowed, including Jonah."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 75.

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"In the fundamentalist view, unbelievers have only two relevant attributes: They are potential converts and sources of temptation. As objects of evangelism, they are called 'crops to be harvested,' 'sheep to be found,' and 'fish to be netted.'  Because of the danger of worldly influence (much like a contagious disease), relationships with 'them' must be handled gingerly.  Contacts must be superficial, geared toward evangelism only, and cut short if there is not a positive response.  Since Christians are already full of truth, there is no need for them to listen, nothing for them to learn, and much for them to lose by admitting alternative views into their consciousness."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), pp. 76-77.

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"Fundamentalist Christianity rests on circular reasoning and pat answers.  The belief system is brilliantly constructed to provide its own support -- if you don't look too closely at the logic.  It is a closed system, satisfied with its own internal evidence of truth.  It is closed in that any information or argument from outside is rejected a priori because, as discussed above, it

is a 'lie,' not of the 'truth.'"

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 83.

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"The fundamentalist belief system is one that purports to have all the answers.  It also claims to be the only way -- all deviations lead to hell.  It follows then that parents who believe this would be very concerned about what their children believe.  Any alternative ways of thinking about major life questions would be highly threatening.  Consequently, the fundamentalist household rarely encourages children to explore their own thoughts, to be open-minded about ideas, or to come to their own conclusions.  In fact, fundamentalist parents are typically vocal in their opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills or values clarification in schools."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 120.

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"In his book, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, Philip Greven (1992), a professor of history at Rutgers University, says that the roots of America's unusally angry, violent, and crime-ridden society lie in the  country's Judeo-Christian heritage.  Greven examines cases of childhood punishment and the rationales for physical punishment among those with strong Protestant conviction.  The latter usually boil down to the belief that it is necessary for parents to break the will of their children to gain their respect and obedience.  In reality, he says physical assault only breeds rage and hostility, with negative outcomes."

Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 126.

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"One of the reasons why people like me who deal with the creation/evolution issue all the time get very frustrated with, say, Institute for Creation Research people and so forth, is because they

are constantly saying X didn't happen.  And then it takes a great deal longer to explain why X did happen, gaps in the fossil record or whatever."

Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 19.

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"The major argument going on among paleontologists dealing with the reptile/mammal transition is, where the hell do you draw the line?  These things grade in sensibly into each other."

Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 20.

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"I can't tell you how much I enjoyed Dr. Berlinski's statement, because he focused in on one of the major deficiencies of the four people on the other side of the table who argue against evolution.  That major theoretical deficiency is they have no explanation for natural history."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 22.

"Now we know the other side advocates intelligent design as a primary characteristic of intelligent design when it is squared with the fossil record.  The fossil record -- and I can give you specific examples -- is characertized best by sequences of appearances and disappearances.  Now think what that means.  What that means is that the characteristic that best describes the intelligent designer who would have designed this fossil record is incompetent because everything the intelligent designer designed, with about one percent exceptions, has immediately become extinct.  Intelligent design has no explanation for the successive character in the fossil record, evolution has a perfect explanation, and that is the appearance of new forms and the extinction of others."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 22.

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"I can give you several examples of new species that have emerged within human observation.  The best example that I can give you is the butterfly, the genus of butterfly known as Hedylypta.  Hedylypta is a genus of butterfly that feeds on various plants.  It's endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, which means it's only found there.  And there turn out to be two species of Hedylypta with mouthparts that only allow them -- only allow them to feed on bananas.  Now why is that significant?  It is significant because bananas are not native to the Hawaiian Islands.  They were introduced about 1,000 years ago by the Polynesians -- we know this from the written records of the Hawaiian Kingdom -- and what that means is that by mutation and natural selection, these two species have emerged on the Hawaiian Islands within the last 1,000 years.  And I think that's a very good case in point."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 24.

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"In the November7th or November 14th issue of Science magazine, a number of investigators wanted to test the Darwinian hypothesis that you folks say is never tested, and the way in which they did this was to take the receptor protein for the human growth hormone -- it's a receptor to which the human growth hormone fits in precisely -- and they did a terrible genetic disservice.  They mutated -- they cut out an essential amino acid right in the middle of the receptor, called tryptophan.  With that gone, just like that mousetrap, it wouldn't have been expected to work.  They then allowed a natural selection process to take place to see whether the cells under their own observation could mutate the receptor gene sufficiently to bind the receptor, and after seven generations, lo and behold, there it was.  It illustrates beautifully the ability of natural selection to respond to mutations in proteins to co-evolve."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 25.

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"When you say you don't find it [the two observed instances of speciation listed above] impressive, that's what Richard Dawkins calls the argument from personal incredulity.  My evidence against evolution is that I don't believe it."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 25.

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"You [Behe] read a quote and you pretended it meant something else.  The quote you that you read was: 'Mutations in the early stage are less likely to survive.'  Not impossible.  And then you pretended to say that it meant that they couldn't survive.  ... The fact that something is less likely does not rule it out.  I agree with that, Alberts would agree with that, and I think everyone in the audience would agree with it."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 26.

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"Is it necessary to invoke the hand of the Almighty in something like understanding cell division or understanding an internal combustion engine?  ... If not, why is it necessary in understanding the history of life?"

Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 27.

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"What about complex parasites?  Did this designer design complex parasites or is that evolution?  I mean, you get all the good things and evolutionists get all the bad things."

Michael Ruse in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 35.

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"You have picked a few squabbles with evolution, but you haven't even suggested for a moment what the mechanism is with which you would replace it."

Barry Lynn in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 35.

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"To reject the idea that chance is something that could be used by the divine is to limit the power of the divine considerably."

Barry Lynn in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 36.

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"Do you know the mind of God so well that you could rule out the possibility that God conceived evolution as the process to bring His design to fruition? [...] The truth is that if you are saying that you cannot imagine that a God could be that creative, that imaginative, then aren't you limiting in a very severe fashion your construct of God?"

Barry Lynn in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, pp. 36-37.

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[In reference to a creationist book which has a picture of a man and a dinosaur together and states, "Adam wasn't scared to watch dinosaurs eat because all the creatures ate plants and not meat"]: "The kind of thing you're characterizing certainly is silly, just almost as silly as the work of Richard Dawkins, and as damaging."

Philip Johnson in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 39.

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"Fred Hoyle is a distinguished astronomer, as you pointed out.  When he speaks about biological phenomena, I would not say that he speaks ex cathedra.  As a matter of fact, one of the statements that Fred Hoyle made with Chandra Wickramasinghe is that actually insects are smarter than we think they are, but they're just not letting us know."

Eugene Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 42.

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"The other end of the room is very far away and it should not surprise you that I get there with one step at a time, and that's what we are talking about."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 46.

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"I neither affirmed nor denied descent with modification.  I said I have no opinion."

David Berlinski in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation"  _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 48.

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"To someone who advocates intelligent design, does the sequence of these organisms in the fossil record simply mean that the intelligent designer was incompetent, he kept making things and they went extinct, extinct, or that he was restless -- 'I'll try this, I'll try that, I'll try the other thing,' -- or does it mean that in fact these organisms are related by descent with modification?"

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 50.

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"Mr. Behe has of course compared, like it or not, compared the extraordinary complexity of the human cell to the mousetrap.  He said if we look at that mousetrap, it was created by a human.  In fact, Mr. Miller improved on it, as you saw earlier tonight.  Therefore, if that's complicated, then indeed the cell must also have been designed by an intelligence.  And as I thought about it tonight, it's a little bit -- we were all talking about nature analogies -- it's a little bit like looking at a mole build a molehill.  You say, That's very interesting.  Then we walk out in the woods the next day and we notice a big mountain off in the distance.  And we say, Good grief, that's enormously large.  A really big mole must have built that.  The truth of the matter is, it's not logical.  We should be looking for different forces that result in different things.  Your mousetrap was built by human hands because its components are inanimate objects.  Cellular life is living, vibrant, breathing, changing matter.  You're not just comparing apples to oranges, you are comparing plastic apples to organic oranges, and I think therefore this analogy fails."

Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" _Firing Line_, 4 December 1997, p. 50.

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"If the view that the past universe is temporally infinite is necessarily a priori false, how can there be evidence which differentially supports the claim that the past universe is temporally finite? Won't anything count equally in favour of the claim, and nothing against it? There seems to be a general strategic problem in mixing necessary a priori argument and contingent a posteriori evidence when supporting a particular claim, at least ignoring secondary sources of evidence such as testimony. Craig appears to think that his arguments mutually support the premise that the universe began to exist (57); but on current theories of evidential support with which I am acquainted--e.g. Bayesian theories--that would not be the case. Perhaps there is a fix involving some kind of relevant entailment, but the matter is clearly not straightforward."

Graham Oppy, "Book Review: THEISM, ATHEISM, AND BIG BANG COSMOLOGY" Faith and Philosophy (1996)

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"It should be noted that it could be argued that there is something repugnant about the idea that one might make use of Rescher's version of Pascal's Wager argument in the service of apologetics. The reason for this claim is that, in order to use the argument as a tool of apologetics, we do not need to suppose that it is a good argument in the second of the two senses distinguished earlier in this paper. If the point is just to get people to believe in God, then it doesn't matter whether it is overall most reasonable for there people to believe in God--and so we could, quite cynically, make full use of the Wager argument against not terribly bright people in full knowledge of the fact that the argument is defective (i.e. in full knowledge of the fact that it is not reasonable to accept all of the premises of the argument). However, if we care about what it is most rational for people to believe (in the light of the evidence which they currently possess, and in light of the cognitive abilities which they enjoy), then it would be irresponsible (and indeed immoral) for us to use the Wager argument on the sorts of people in whom it could reasonably be expected to bring about belief. (If we think that there are independent means of showing that God exists, then we should appeal to those means. If we think there are no such independent arguments, then perhaps we should question our own belief that God exists.)"

Graham Oppy, "On Rescher On Pascal's Wager" (1990)

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"At several points in his critiques, Craig makes things easy for himself by supposing that Davies, Hawking and Grünbaum must demonstrate that he--Craig--ought to give up his belief in the soundness of the argument; when, in fact, all that Davies, Hawking and Grünbaum need to show is that there is no good, non-question-begging, reason for them to be persuaded that the arguments which Craig offers are sound. What is at issue is a choice between two quite different kinds of models of the origins of the universe; if it turns out that there are no suitably independent reasons for preferring Craig's favoured theistic model, then there is sufficient justification for those who wish to pursue alternatives."

Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)

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"Craig (1992:238) claims that it is 'philosophically unobjectionable' to conceive of God as causally prior to the Big Bang, since 'God's act of creation may be regarded as simultaneous with the origin of the universe'. However--as Grünbaum observes on several occasions--many of us find it hard to make any sense of this suggestion. It is true that there are contexts in which it clearly makes sense to speak of 'simultaneous causation'--e.g. as Craig notes, there is no impropriety in the claim that the downward pressure exerted by the otherwise unsupported head causes the indentation in the pillow--but this is compatible with the claim that, strictly speaking, causation must be local and mediated by finite signals. On this view, given a sufficient margin of error, causation can appear simultaneous--but there is no reason to think that there is any genuinely simultaneous causation."

Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)

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"It should be noted that many non-theists would object to the idea that their position can be encapsulated in the slogan that 'being arises out of absolute non-being'".

Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)

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"Craig simply confesses that he does not have a good argument against those who claim that there are things other than God which do not have a cause of their existence. But if one can be reasonable in holding this opinion, then Craig is wrong: his argument is not entirely successful unless he provides compelling support for the causal premise. [...] there are people--myself included--who think that it might well be the case that there are non-abstract things other than God whose existence is uncaused, and who are not obviously irrational in this belief. No useful purpose is served by the insistence that such people are obviously mistaken: mere rhetoric is no substitute for argument."

Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)

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"It seems to me that it could simply be denied that it is appropriate to describe the universe as an entity which 'pops into existence' or which 'begins to exist' even if it is true that the universe is temporally finite. Suppose we think of the universe as a distribution of properties over an at-least-four-dimensional finite manifold. (So we shall be B-series theorists and substantivalists.) Among the questions we need to answer, there are the following: (i) does the manifold in question have any boundaries?; (ii) if the manifold does have boundaries, are these boundaries open or closed?; (iii) if the universe does have boundaries, does time extend all the way to these boundaries (or is it a local phenomenon, restricted to some sub-portion of the manifold)? Suppose--to consider just one epistemically possible option--that the universe is bounded and closed, but that time is a local phenomenon. Then it could surely turn out to be the case that there is nothing which begins to exist which does not have a cause, and yet that the universe--which is not itself an entity in time--does not begin to exist (and hence does not need a cause to explain how it 'pops into existence'). Even in a temporally finite universe, there needn't be any uncaused events--for the time-series might be appropriately modelled by an open interval on the real number line."

Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)

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"If Craig's view is to be consistent, he must accept the conclusion that, without creation, God is essentially non-temporal--i.e. there is no sense in which a time series can be ascribed to him."

Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)

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"We still have no adequate theory to describe conditions before the Planck time; consequently, as most physicists will admit, we really have no idea what to say about those conditions (nor, indeed, whether to admit that we should give a realistic interpretation to our models of the universe at, and before, that time). But, in these circumstances, I see no good reason to accept the extrapolation beyond the Planck time which is required in order to arrive at an initial cosmological singularity. What there is good evidence for is the claim that the universe has expanded to its present size from a much smaller early universe; but this claim is quite compatible with the further claim that there was no initial cosmological singularity. (Note, by the way, that a bouncing, or oscillating universe, is not the only possible alternative. There are various other options--e.g. those involving world ensembles and wormholes--which might avoid an

ex nihilo origination.)"

Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)

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"There is a sense in which everyone can admit that religious experiences occur: for people do report having experiences which they take to be perceptions of God. But then, won't the acceptance of some kind of principle of credulity require one to regard these reports as prima facie evidence that such people have veridical perceptions of God? No. The reported content of these experiences is compatible with ever so many hypotheses about the nature of the creators of the world, including hypotheses involving neglectful or deceptive creators, and hypotheses on which there are no creators. Hence, all that a reasonable principle of credulity could require is that one accept that such people do have experiences with the reported content; that these people take the content of these experiences to be experiences of a particular deity should not provide one with any reason to suppose that the experiences really are of that deity. Indeed, more strongly, one could not take these experiences to be of a particular deity unless one had come to believe in the existence of that deity. (It should also be noted that principles of credulity must be carefully constrained: reports of experiences of alien spacecraft landing in suburban backyards surely should not be taken to constitute even prima facie evidence that there have been alien spacecraft landing in suburban backyards.)"

Graham Oppy, "In Defense of Weak Agnosticism" (1995)

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"Why is every utterance of the Pope considered to be worthy of worldwide attention and respect? It's like the fawning reverence that was accorded every banal platitude ever uttered by the late Mother Teresa. But the Pope is not exactly on the cutting edge of world events -- or anything else, for that matter. It was only a little over a year ago, in October 1996, that John Paul II announced that the scientific theory of evolution could be said to be valid. That message was received with enthusiastic approval in many circles throughout the world. Warm congratulations were offered to John Paul, just as they had been in 1979. In that year he declared that the Roman Catholic Church had been mistaken when it sentenced a 70-year-old Galileo to house arrest (with threats of the tortures of The Inquisition) for insisting that the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa. Mistaken?! No, not mistaken. A mistake is when you slip the wrong key into your front door. The Church's treatment of Galileo, one of the world's few geniuses, was viciously cruel and betrays the unenlightened, progress-impeding attitude that has dominated the Church since its inception. And they were as wrong as it is possible to be."

Judith Hayes, "The Papacy Comes of Age!" The Happy Heretic February 1998

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"Even assuming that God was willing to wait a long time and to confine his interest to just a small bit of space, there is the question why he didn't do a better job with evolution. He is supposed to be all-loving. Why, then, didn't he set up evolution in a way which would cause less suffering to the organisms involved in it? One thing he could have done would have been to increase the proportion of beneficial mutations within the total set of mutations. Instead of having only about one out of a thousand mutations turn out beneficial to the organism and the species, why not have it, say, one out of five? That would certainly have speeded up the evolutionary process and eliminated much unnecessary suffering along the way. It is an additional bit of "fine-tuning" that one would expect from the sort of being described in G."

Theodore Drange, "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998)

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"One point that should be made is that although we may be able to show that life as we know it could not possibly exist in any of the alternate universes, there is no proof that other forms of life with mind or intelligence could not exist. In fact, theists themselves believe that since God existed prior to our universe, it is thus possible for a life form with mind or intelligence to exist apart from the physical constants of our particular universe. Therefore, they should concede the possibility that some other combination of physical constants could, over time, produce a universe that contains mind or intelligence, even if it is in a form quite different from any life that exists on our planet. Schlesinger's claim that only the particular combination of physical constants in our universe is of a special kind is totally unsupported. There is no reason whatever to believe it."

Theodore Drange, "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998)

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"Consider, for example, Hugh Ross's use of the sharpshooter analogy near the end of his essay "Astronomical Evidences for the God of the Bible" (which appears on the web site mentioned previously). In the example, a prisoner is to be executed by a firing squad consisting of 100 sharpshooters, but although they all fire their guns he fails to get shot. Two hypotheses are put forward to explain the remarkable event. One of them, which is supposed to be like B, above, is that all 100 sharpshooters missed by sheer accident. The other hypothesis, which is supposed to be like G, is that there was a plot to prevent the execution. Naturally, the plot hypothesis is more reasonable than the accidental-miss hypothesis, which is supposed to show that G is more reasonable than B. I find this to be a very bad analogy to the case of the universe's physical constants. There is nothing in the case of the universe that corresponds to a scheduled execution by firing squad. We know perfectly well how firing squads operate, based on how they have operated in the past. We know that if they are intent on doing their job, then they simply do NOT all miss! But there is no corresponding information about the process by which universes might acquire their physical constants. We would need to be aware of some connection between the process of physical-constant formation and the presence or absence of life forms in the universe. But we simply do not have any such information, and that in turn destroys the analogy. Those who put forward such bad analogies are simply showing their confusion about the issue at hand."

Theodore Drange, "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998)

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"Most often atheists advance the idea that morality is subjective, whilst theists cling to its being objective. These positions are contingent, in that it is logically possible for atheists to think ethics objective (indeed, the EK claims to demonstrate precisely this without invoking theism, although theism is said to be compatible with the argument) and in that it is logically possible for theists to believe that the deity or deities in question did not devise a moral law."

Niclas Berggren, "On the Nature of Morality" (1998)

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"Although it does not logically follow, I would claim that there is a strong case for the subjectivity of morality if there is such widespread disagreement. This is so especially if, as is the case, proponents of subjective morality can provide plausible accounts of such disagreement (social and biological evolution, psychological influences from individuals and cultures) whilst the proponents of objective morality can provide no account of such disagreement, except the rather unsatisfactory statement that we may, in the future, detect the reasons why there is such disagreement. Indeed, we may, but until we have done so, it seems as if the subjectivists have a much more convincing story to tell."

Niclas Berggren, "On the Nature of Morality" (1998)

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"It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called for in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills, even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily see how much their gratitude to Heaven appeares to be stimulated by the contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so merciful as he has to themselves."

John Stuart Mill. 1869. _The Subjection of Women_. pp. 150-151. (Stefan Collini, ed.)

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Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"  

Priest: "No, not if you did not know."

Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

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Door-to-door Mormon: "Would you like a copy of the Bible / Koran / Book of Mormon?"

Freethinker: "No, thanks, I'm waiting for the sequel."

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"The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

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Christian: I'll pray for you.

Atheist: Then I'll think for both of us.

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"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"William James used to preach the 'will to believe.'  For  my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt.' ...  What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the  will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

[Bertrand Russell, _Skeptical_Essays_, 1928]

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"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion,  as organized in its churches, has been and still is  the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

{Bertrand Russell]

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"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there  is no reason whatsoever for supposing it to be true."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"There is something feeble and a little contemptable about a man who cannot  face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.  Almost  inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes  them only because they are comforting.  But he dare not face this thought!  Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not real,  he becomes furious when they are disputed."

[Bertrand Russell, "Human Society in Ethics and Politics"]

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"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,  it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth.  It comes in one  verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there  is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of  teeth, or else it would not occur so often."

[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"]

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"So far as I can remember, there is not one  word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."      [Bertrand Russell]

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"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry  combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether  inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"There has been a rumor in recent years to the effect that I have  become less opposed to religious orthodoxy than I formerly was.  This rumor is totally without foundation.  I think all the great  religions of the world- Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam,  and Communism- both untrue and harmful."

[Bertrand Russell, 1957]

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"I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one  doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world  may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an  agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist.  I do  not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than  the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla.  To take another  illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and  Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody  thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in  practice.  I think the Christian God just as unlikely."

{Bertrand Russell]

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"We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there  is no evidence.  Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith."  We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth  is round.  We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion  for evidence.  The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead  to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"The conquering of fear is the beginning of wisdom"

[Bertrand Russell]

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"The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"People are zealous for a cause when they are  not quite positive that it is true."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly  the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a  kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and  disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing - fear of the mysterious,  fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore  it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand"

[Bertrand Russell, 6/3/27]

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"... when people begin to philosophize they seem to think  it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid."

[Bertrand Russell in "Theory of Knowledge"]

"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason,  and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true."

[Bertrand Russell, "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization"]

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"Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little  and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive  of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other  hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in  fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of  impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the  presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured  if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"I was told that the Chinese said that they would would bury me by the  Western lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret  that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have  been very _chic_ for an atheist."

[Bertrand Russell, Autobiography]

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"The question of the truth of a religion is one thing, but the question of  its usefullness is another. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm  as I am that they are untrue."

[Bertrand Russell, _Why I Am Not A Christian_, 1957]

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"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence  of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"At the age of eighteen ... I read Mill's Autobiography, where I found  a sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question  'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the  further question 'Who made God?'.  This led me to abandon the 'First  Cause' argument, and to become an atheist.  Throughout the long period  of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual  loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my  surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject."

[Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, chap. 2]

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"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine  which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.  The doctrine  in question is this:  that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when  there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit  that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our  social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless,  this must weigh against it."

[Bertrand Russell, _Sceptical Essays_]

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"The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests  that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were  achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and  beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no  fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an  individual life beyond the grave."

[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"]

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"I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.  Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end,  nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting."

[Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)]

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"Few people can be happy unless they hate  some other person, nation or creed."

[Bertrand Russell]

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"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 fact that an opinion has been widely held  is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the  silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often  likely to be foolish than sensible."

[Bertrand Russell, _A History of Western Philosophy_, 1945]

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"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square  at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties,  and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid  of it.  Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by  being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it."

[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"]

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"Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no  longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent  allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below  to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of  place that the churches in all these centuries have made it."

[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"]

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"The most savage controversies are those about matters  as to which there is no good evidence either way.  Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic."

[Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"]

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"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty."

Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"

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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

[Carl Sagan]

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"Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief.  One who does not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. "Atheism is sometimes defined as 'the belief that there is no God of any kind,' or the claim that a god cannot exist.  While these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of atheism--and are somewhat misleading with respect to the basic nature of atheism.  Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief.  An atheist is not primarily a person who *believes* that a god does not exist, rather he does not believe in the existence of a god."

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 7.

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"Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded- which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument."

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 110.

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"Few theologians would care to pursue their research to its logical conclusion and finally assert, as did Thomas Paine, that the biblical account of Jesus 'has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it.'"

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), pp. 203-204.

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"... why have those countries with a strong Church-State alliance displayed such an eagerness to enforce religious dogmas and eliminate dissent through the power of the state. Why has Christianity refused, whenever possible, to allow its beliefs to compete in a free marketplace of ideas? The answer is obvious -- and revealing. Christianity is peddling an inferior product, one that cannot withstand critical investigation.  Unable to compete favorably with other theories, it has sought to gain a monopoly through a state franchise, which means: through the use of force."

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 114.

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"I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of aquiring  knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of  faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason."

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 120.

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"The third major characteristic of God -- "infinitude" -- is the catchall,  the universal modifier of Christian theology.  God is not merely a being;  he is infinite being.  God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness.  God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom.  And so on down the list.  God is exaggeration run amuck"

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 68.

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"I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue."

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. vi.

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"The word [Christian] does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning how as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.  In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant.  You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions. Nowadays it is not quite that.  We have to be a little more vague in

our meaning of Christianity."

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 4.

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"If everything must have a cause then God must have a cause.  If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument."

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), pp. 6-7.

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"Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not conerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one."

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 16.

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"My own view on religion is that of Lucretius.  I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.  I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization.  It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them.  These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others."

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 24.

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"Justifying the claim that something does not exist is not quite the same as proving or having arguments that it doesn't, but it is what we are talking about.  That is, we need not have a proof that God does not exist in order to justify atheism.  Atheism is obligatory in the absence of any evidence for God's existence."

Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 105.

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"It could be argued that the greatest confidence trick in the history of philosophy is the attempt to make the various arguments for the existence of God support each other by using the same term for the entity who existence each is supposed to establish.  In fact, almost all of them bear on entities of apparently quite different kinds, ranging from a Creator to a moral Lawgiver.  The proofs must, therefore, be  supplemented with a further proof or set of proofs that shows these apparently different entities to be the same if the combination trick is to work.  Otherwise the arguments must be taken separately, in which case they either establish or fail to establish the existence of a number of remarkable but unrelated entities."

Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 112.

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"Negative existential hypotheses in natural language can be supported by the failure of proofs of their contradictories, but positive existential hypotheses are not made plausible by the failure of disproofs of their denials."

Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 113.

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"If theology were a part of reasonably inquiry, there would be no objection to an atheist's being a professor of theology.  That a man's being an atheist is an absolute bar to his occupying a chair of theology proves that theology is not an open-minded and reasonable inquiry. Someone may object that a professor should be interested in his subject and an atheist cannot be interested in theology.  But a man who maintains that there is no god must think it a sensible and interesting question to ask whether there is a god;  and in fact we find that many atheists are interested in theology."

Richard Robinson, "Religion and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) pp. 117-18.

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"The pragmatic suggestion, that we had better teach the Christian religion whether it is true or not, because people will be much less criminal if they believe it, is disgusting and degrading;  but it is being made to us all the time, and it is a natural consequence of the fundamental religious attitude that comfort and security must always prevail over rational inquiry."

Richard Robinson, "Religion and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 117.

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"Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one's answer to the question whether there is a god.  Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be."

Richard Robinson, "Religion and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 121.

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"There is virtually nothing which the Christian will accept as evidence of God's evil.  If disasters that are admittedly 'unmerited, pointless, and incapable of being morally rationalized' [quoting Hick] are compatible with the 'goodness' of God, what could possibly qualify as contrary evidence?  The 'goodness' of God, it seems, is compatible with any state of affairs.  While we evaluate a man with reference to his actions, we are not similarly permitted to judge God.  God is immune from the judgment of evil as a matter of principle."

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 86

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"...  This brings us to our familiar resting place.  The 'goodness' of God is different in kind from goodness as we comprehend it.  To say that God's 'goodness' is compatible with the worst disasters imaginable, is to empty this concept of its meaning.  By human standards, the Christian God cannot by good.  By divine standards, God may be 'good' in some unspecified, unknowable way - but this term no longer makes any sense.  And so, for the last time, we fail to comprehend the Christian God."

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 87.

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"It seems quite unlikely that all the instances of intense suffering occurring daily in our world are intimately related to the occurrence of a greater good or the prevention of evils at least as bad; and even more unlikely, should they somehow all be so related, that an omnipotent, omniscient being could not have achieved at least some of those goods (or prevented some of those evils) without permitting the instances of intense suffering that are supposedly related to them.  In the light of our experience and knowledge of the variety and scale of human and animal suffering in our world, the idea that none of this suffering could have been prevented by an omnipotent being without thereby losing a greater good or permitting an evil at least as bad seems an extraordinarily absurd idea, quite beyond our belief."

William L. Rowe, "The Problem of Evil & Some Varieties of Atheism" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 5.

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"What troubles me most about the position of skeptical theists like Alston is not ST1, but rather the inference from ST1 to the conclusion that all probabilistic arguments from evil fail.  One is reminded of those philosophers who attack one teleological or cosmological or ontological argument for theism and then conclude that the teleological or the cosmological or the ontological argument fails."

Paul Draper, "The Skeptical Theist" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder,  indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 176.

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"Both the view that God created the universe 100 years ago and, for reasons beyond our ken, deceived us in doing that and the  view that there are reasons beyond our ken that would justify God, if he exists, in allowing all the suffering we see are like the view that there are blue crows beyond our powers of observation. Once we have conducted the relevant search for crows (looking all over the world in different seasons and at crows at different stages of maturity), we are justified in virtue of that search in believing there are no crows beyond our powers of observation which are relevantly different from the crows we've seen.  If after the relevant search we weren't justified in believing that, then we would have to remain skeptical about all generalizations about crows. ... Similarly, once we have conducted the relevant search search for moral reasons to justify allowing the relevant suffering (thinking hard about how allowing the suffering would be needed to realize sufficiently weighty goods, reading and talking to others who have thought about the same problem), we are justified in believing that there are no morally sufficient reasons for allowing that suffering."

Bruce Russell, "Defenseless" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 197.

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"I am arguing that if we are not justified in believing that no reason would justify God in allowing the brutal rape and murder, then we are not justified in believing that no reason would justify the onlooker for allowing the same act."

Bruce Russell, "Defenseless" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 198.

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"The question at issue is whether we must be unable to judge that there are no justifying reasons for human nonintervention if we are unable to judge that there are none for Divine nonintervention. I have argued that we must.  Moral skepticism about God's omissions entails moral skepticism about our own omissions."

Bruce Russell, "Defenseless" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 198.

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Relationships of love and friendship "require significant commonality of purposes, values, sympathies, ways of thinking and acting, and the like.  The major problem faced by the moral-inscrutability-of-God version of defensive skepticism is that it seems to preclude our being able to enter into such relationships with God, thereby undercutting the very purpose for which God created us according to theism, namely to enter into a communal relation of love with God."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 210.

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"We can hardly love someone who intentionally hurts us and keeps his reasons a secret unless for the most part we know his reasons for affecting us as he does and moreover know that they are benevolent."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 211.

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"Being omnipotent means not only 'never having to say you're sorry' but also never having to say how, that is, being able to get away with being just an idea man."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 211.

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Van Inwagen "is a self-servingly selective modal skeptic who makes demands of the atheologian that he does not of the theist.  Theism makes many modal claims, for example that it is possible for an  immaterial being to create worldly things ex nihilo by the mere act of willing them, that it is possible that certain purported defenses are true, but one does not find van Inwagen extending his modal 'modesty' to them."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 212-13.

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"The response of defensive skeptics, such as Plantinga (chapter 5), is to make a distinction between the pastoral and epistemic problem of evil.  What this amounts to, though they wouldn't want to put it this bluntly, is that the working theist whose faith is strained or endangered by the evils which directly confront her is emotionally overwrought and not able to take the cool stance of the epistemologist of religion and thereby see that these evils, however extensive and seemingly gratuitous, are really no challenge to her theistic beliefs. Since she is unable to philosophize clearly at her time of emotional upset, she needs the pastor to hold her hand and say whatever might help her to make it through the night and retain her faith in God."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 214.

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"Let us have faith that van Inwagen's god does not exist, and, if it does, our duty is to resist it with all of the energy and courage we can muster."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 216.

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"Given our common knowledge of the evils and goods in our world and our reasons for believing that P is true, it is irrational to believe in theism unless we possess or discover strong evidence in its behalf. I conclude, therefore, that the evidential argument from evil is alive and well."

Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 216.

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Let's "focus on what is, I believe, the major weakness of the argument based on the analogy between God and the loving parent.  What happens when a loving parent intentionally permits her child to suffer intensely for the sake of a distant good that cannot otherwise be realized?  In such instances the parent attends directly to the child throughout its period of suffering, comforts the child to the best of her ability,  expresses her concern and love for the child in ways that are unmistakably clear to the child, why it is necessary for her to permit the suffering even though it is in her power to prevent it.  In short, during these periods of intentionally permitted intense suffering, the child is consciously aware of the direct presence, love, and concern for the parent, and receives special assurances from the parent that, if not why, the suffering (or the parent's permission of  it) is necessary for some distant good."

William L. Rowe, "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 276.

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"When God permits horrendous suffering for the sake of some good, if that good is beyond our ken, God will make every effort to be consciously present to us during our period of suffering, will do his best to explain to us why he is permitting us to suffer, and will give us special assurances of his love and concern during the period of the suffering.  Since enormous numbers of human beings undergo prolonged, horrendous suffering without being consciously aware of any such divine presence, concern, and explanations, we may conclude that if there is a God, the goods for the sake of which he permits horrendous human suffering are more often than not goods we know of."

William L. Rowe, "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 276.

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"If God's aim was to have the maximal number of people believe in God, as Craig has argued, He has not been successful. Billions of people have not come to believe in the theistic God -- through no fault of their own -- and even today God's message has not reached millions of people There are many things God could have done to increase belief in Him."

Michael Martin, "Human Suffering and the Acceptance of God"  (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/suffering.html, 1997)

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"If God's aim is to maximize acceptance of Him and intense suffering brings about acceptance, then why is there so relatively little suffering in some countries and times? Surely God could have indirectly brought about more suffering and increased acceptance. For example, in the US suffering is relatively low in comparison to many Third World countries. Surely God could have arranged things to increase suffering and increase acceptance of God in the US. For example, hurricanes, earthquakes, draughts, epidemics, and severe economic depression would cause much suffering and, if Craig is right, increase acceptance. An all powerful God surely could have brought these things about."

Michael Martin, "Human Suffering and the Acceptance of God" (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/suffering.html, 1997)

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"James Dobson and Focus on the Family represent the greatest threat to constitutional liberties in our time."

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, quoted in Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 17

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"Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America.  Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible worldviews are locked in a bitter conflict that permeates every level of society.  Bloody battles are being fought on a thousand fronts.... Open any daily newspaper and you'll find accounts of the latest Gettysburg, Waterloo, Normandy, or Stalingrad ... someday soon, I believe, a winner will emerge and the loser will fade from memory."

James Dobson, quoted in Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 17.

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"In many ways James Dobson is the ultimate stealth campaigner.  He is a person who likes power, who likes to be a king maker.  I think you could make a strong case that if you had a deadlocked Republican convention, if you were a candidate you'd be more interested in getting the support of James Dobson than the support of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson combined."

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, quoted in Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 44.

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"Everything about the economics of Dobson's business is geared to obtaining a written and financial response from the organization's millions of radio listeners, as often as possible."

Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 47.

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"Logical thinking empowers the mind in a way that no other kind of thinking can.  It frees the highly educated from the habit of presuming every claim to be true until proven false.  It enables average Americans to stand up against the forces of political correctness, see through the chicanery, and make independent decisions for themselves.  And it is the bulwark against intellectual servitude for the underprivleged."

Marilyn vos Savant, The Power of Logical Thinking, (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), p. xix.

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"By their own words, therefore, creation-scientists admit that they appeal to phenomena not covered or explicable by any laws that humans can grasp as laws.  It is not simply that the pertinent laws are not yet known. Creative processes stand outside law as humans know it (or could know it) on Earth -- at least there is no way that scientists can know Mendel's law through observation and experiment.  Even if God did use His own laws, they are necessarily veiled from us forever in this life, because Genesis says nothing of them."

Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996),  p. 359.

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"It is difficult to imagine evolutionists signing a comparable statement, that they will never deviate from the literal text of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.  The non-scientific nature of creation-science is evident for all to see, as is also its religious nature."

Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996)  p. 360.

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"Creation-science is not like physics, which exists as part of humanity's common cultural heritage and domain.  It exists solely in the imaginations and writing of a relatively small group of people.  Their publications (and stated intentions) show that, for example, there is no way they will relinquish belief in the Flood, whatever the evidence.  In this sense, their doctrines are truly unfalsifiable."

Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996), p. 360.

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"'But if oxen (and horses) and lions.... could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen.... Aethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair.'  Like many later critics of anthropomorphism, Xenophanes evidently did not question the gods themselves but only their human attributes.  Later Western writers think the Greek gods especially anthropomorphic, but gods in many other religions are equally so."

Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 178.

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"Most theologians admit that to eliminate anthropomorphism suggests that anthropomorphism is more even than its matrix.  Rather, religion looks like anthropomorphism, part and parcel."

Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 185.

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"Thus no clear criteria of evidence, logic, or certainty separate religion even from its supposed antithesis, science.  Instead, they are separated most sharply by their attitude toward anthropomorphism: science tries to avoid it, while religion takes it as foundation."

Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 196.

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"We cannot take a step towards constructing an idea of God without the ascription of human attributes."

Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870), p. 442.

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"In the purest religion ... there can be no way of avoiding anthropomorphism."

E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religions: A Definition (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 59.

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"But if oxen (and horses) and lions ... could draw with hands and create works of art like those  made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen . . . . Aethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair."

Xenophanes, quoted in Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 179.

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"We seem at least to be at a loss to understand what it is we are asserting or denying when we use ... nonanthropomorphic god-talk."

Kai Nielsen, "Empiricism, Theoretical Constructs, and God" Journal of Religion 54:199.

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"To the truly religious man, God is not being without qualities . . . the denial of determinate, positive predicates . . . is nothing else than a denial of religion, with, however, an appearance of religion in its favour, so that it is not recognized as a denial;  it is simply a subtle, disguised atheism."

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1873, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 14-15.

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"When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist;  a materialist or an idealist;  a Christian or a freethinker;  I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer;  until, at lat, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last.  The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure thay had attained a certain 'gnosis,' -- had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence;  while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.  And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion."

Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism" Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays (1889, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1992), p. 162.

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"Agnosticism is not properly described as a 'negative' creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual.  This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainity.  This is what Agnosticism asserts;  and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism.  That which Agnostics deny, and repudiate as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence."

Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism and Christianity" Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays (1889, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1992), p. 193.

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"As an active Humanist for almost fifty years, I am astonished at the wild statements of LaHaye and Wine.  Humanists have unfortunately remained a minority in the United States.  The American Humanist Association has never had more than 6,000 members, and that number at present is aproximately 3,000.  The AHA has no more than half a hundred small chapters throughout the country.  Of course, there is quite a large number of Humanists who do not belong to the AHA, and multitudes more who do not realize they are Humanists and multitudes more who do not even know the word.  Our philosophy (or religion) does wield considerable does wield considerable influence throughout the civilized world;  Humanists would indeed rejoice if it possessed the powers ascribed to it by the Moral Majority."

Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. x.

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"But LaHaye, Wine, Falwell, and their associates magnify beyond all reason the control Humanism exerts.  In my view the Moral Majority is a demagogic assembly of religious fanatics and, like demagogic politicians, needs a demonic scapegoat to rally its followers and to provide a simple, one-word solution for the serious problems disrupting America and the world.  The Moral Majority has chosen the social-minded Humanists as its target and aims to destroy them.  This malicious campaign is not unlike the wild witchhunt against Communism and alleged Communists in the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy."

Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. x-xi.

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"That paragon of humorists, Art Buchwald, in a column entitled 'Hunting Down the Secular Humanists,' writes: 'What makes them so dangerous is that secular Humanists look just like you and me.  Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists.  They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn.... No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot.  Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names."

Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. xi.

"The Moral Majority, in its ignorant attacks on the philosophy (or religion) of Humanism, makes no mention of the far-reaching moral values that Humanists uphold."

Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. xii.

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"It is contrary to the truth and completely unfounded for the Moral Majority to continue to condemn Humanism as 'amoral' and 'the most dangerous religion in the world.'  It mistakes certain moral advances approved by Humanists for the equivalent of moral breakdown.  The Moral

Majority's own morality is absolutistic in that it believes it alone possesses God's truth, and that there is no room for the discussion or dissent, which is the essence of democracy.  This self-righteous Moral Majority -- which we are happy to know is actually a minority -- greatly needs to improve its own moral values, as evident in its crude and false denunciations of organizations and individuals."

Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. xi.

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"Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!"

Frances Wright, "Life, Letters and Lectures" (1829, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 40.

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"The watchmaker not only stamped his design on the face of the watch, but he teaches how to wind it up when run down;  how to repair the machinery when out of order;  and how to put a new spring in when the old one is broken, and leave the watch as good as ever.  Does the great Watchmaker, as he is called, show the same intelligence and power in keeping, or teaching others to keep, this contemplated mechanism -- Man -- always in good order?  and when the life-spring is broken replace it with another, and leave him just the same?"

Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" (1878, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 80.

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"If the belief in god were natural, there would be no need to teach it. Children would possess it as well as adults, the layman as the priest, the heathean as much as the missionary.  We don't have to teach the general elements of human nature; -- the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling.  They are universal;  so would religion be were it natural, but it is not.  On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so. Even as it is, they are great sceptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear - - fear of the lash of public opinion here, and of jealous, vindictive God hereafter.  No;  there is no religion in human nature, nor human nature in religion.  It is purely artificial, the result of education, while Atheism is natural, and, were the human mind not perverted and bewildered by the mysteries and follies of superstition, would be universal."

Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" (1878, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 82.

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"Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good;  and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness."

Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" (1878, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 85.

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"Women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom -- the Church."

Matilda Joslyn Gage, "" (1890, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"My heart's desire is to lift women out of all these dangerous, degrading superstitions, and to this end will I labor my remaining days on earth."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "" (1896, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"No Gods -- No Masters."

Margaret Sanger, "" (1914, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"There was a time when religion ruled the world.  It is known as the Dark Ages."

Ruth Hermence Green, "" (1980, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity."

Barbara G. Walker, "" (1993, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.

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"The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct.  And what if all of you are wrong?  It's a possibility, you know.  You must care about the truth, right?  Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical.  I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about.  But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation." -- Dr. Arroway

Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 162.

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"What I'm saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job."

Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 164.

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"Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God.  God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence.  You simply turn your mind off and say God did it."

Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 166.

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"The question ["Do you believe in God?"] has a peculiar structure.  If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist?  Those are two very

different questions."

Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 168.

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"My faith is strong I don't need proofs, but every time a new fact  comes along it simply confirms my faith."

Palmer Joss in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 172.

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"You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet is an experiment.  That's what their beliefs come down to.  Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that.  Why can't the gods leave well enough alone?  All this intervention speaks of incompetence.  If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her?  Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more.  If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants?  Why's he constantly repairing and complaining?  No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer.  He's not good at design, he's not good at execution.  He'd be out of business if there was any competition."

Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 285.

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"The Earth is an object lesson for the apprentice gods.  'If you really screw up,' they get told, 'you'll make something like Earth.'"

Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 286.

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"Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the Cosmos.  What happened to me makes us all seem very small."

Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 420.

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"But 'chance' is only a word invented by humans to conceal our ignorance.  If we perfectly understood all the laws of motion, we could infallibly predict whether a coin will come down heads or tails. A Christian believes that God does perfectly understand His own laws and knows which side up the coin will land, but Epicureans and neo-Darwinists believe that nobody knows!"

Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 85.

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"When we describe something as a random process or an event as occurring by chance, there are two very different things that we may have in mind. ...[One such concept of chance applies to processes] that are apparently random, but have a deterministic basis. ... The process is apparently random because we are ignorant of at least part of the deterministic basis.  We use words like chance and random to indicate our ignorance.

We should separate apparently random processes from irreducibly random processes.  An irreducibly random process is one that has  no deterministic basis.  That is, for an irreducibly random process, there is no set of laws of nature that can be applied to a complete description of the initial state of the system to permit the deduction of a description of the outcome."

Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 86.

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"It is important to recognize that, in maintaining that irreducibly random processes exist, contemporary physics does not propose that those processes are lawless or unordered.  Instead, it is claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are probabilistic.  A probabilistic law is a statement asserting that, in a particular type of situation, a particular type of outcome will occur with a particular probability."

Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 87.

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"Creationists standardly make two mistakes.  They assimilate apparent randomness to irreducible randomness, and they overlook the fact that processes that are irreducibly complex may be governed by probabilistic laws."

Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 88.

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"There are degrees of being wrong.  The Creationists are at the bottom of the scale.  They pull every trick in the book to justify their position.  Indeed, at times, they verge right over into the downright dishonest ... Their arguments are rotten, through and through."

Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982), pp. 303, 321.

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"If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work;  how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being?  In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself.  How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?"

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 27.

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"Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers  ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered."

Victor J. Stenger

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"Still, some articles announced that scientists have viewed creation and seen 'the handwriting of God.'  I've looked at the picture of the COBE results that has been widely published and am afraid I can't make out the words 'I am, who am' spelled out in the sky."

Victor J. Stenger, "Big Bang Ripples No Message from God" (http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/huweb.txt)

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"In reality, science provides no evidence for the existence of God and probably never will.  Nothing in current cosmology demands that the universe was purposefully created.  The most economical hypothesis, consistent with all astronomical observations and the established theoretical structure of modern physics and cosmology is that the universe is absent of any pre-existing design or plan."

Victor J. Stenger, "Big Bang Ripples No Message from God" (http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/huweb.txt)

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"Those who look to science to provide evidence to bolster their faith in the fantasy of God won't find it in the ripples of the big bang."

Victor J. Stenger, "Big Bang Ripples No Message from God" (http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/huweb.txt)

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"In physics terms, creation ex nihilo appears to violate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics.  The first law of thermodynamics is equivalent to the principle of conservation of energy: the total energy of a closed system is constant; any energy change must be compensated by a corresponding inflow or outflow from the system. Einstein showed that mass and energy are equivalent, by E = mc^2. So, if the universe started from 'nothing,' energy conservation would seem to have been violated by the creation of matter. Some energy from outside is apparently required."

Victor J. Stenger

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"Of course, Jastrow's comment is exaggerated at best; theologians hardly predicted the Big Bang.  If our universe turns out to be closed, hence with an end, this does not mean apocalyptic visions of the end of the world were on target.  And even if a beginning for the universe is a successful prediction of one version of theism, this is still not that impressive.  After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  The Big Bang becomes strong support for God only with an argument showing that such a beginning requires a Creator."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space.  However, the Big Bang is the beginning of pacetime itself, not an event in time."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole.  There is no such thing."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive, physicists have never been able to come up with a comfortable picture of how it works."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time.  Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations.  In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average.  Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles.  An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"When confronted with a demand that the universe have a cause, infidels have usually pointed out that God was not much of an explanation. This is true enough, but not really a positive argument.  After mechanistic explanation became popular, infidels liked to restrict causality to the chain of causes in an eternal material universe, pointing out that no supernatural cause was then necessary. Plausible, but still rather defensive.  Today's skeptic can do better. In all likelihood, the universe is uncaused.  It is random.  _It just is._"

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists---especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as  well.  Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion.  A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"Creation out of absolute nothing is a metaphysical quagmire for theists anyway, since nothing must at least have the potentiality for becoming something.  Since theists are stuck with potentiality, it might as well be something like a quantum vacuum."

Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?

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"The idea of vouchers is a terrible idea.  Vouchers come with the tentacles of the federal government attached to them, and I just don't believe that the federal government ought to be doing it."

Oliver North quoted in "50 Years of Freedom" _Church & State_ December 1997, p. 13.

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"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

Robert Wilensky

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"Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell.  And they sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to be jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense of wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a few of the stories, to be able, really and truly, to believe--in Someone older, smarter, and wiser who is looking out for us.  Faith is clearly not enough for many people.  They crave hard evidence, scientific proof.  They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal."

Carl Sagan

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"According to a survey being published in the April 3, 1997, _Nature_, 40% of scientists in the U.S. believe in God.  This ratio has not changed in the 80 years since a similar survey was conducted in 1916.

Biologists were the biggest doubters in 1916; physicists and astronomers are now the leading disbelievers, with 77.9% denying the existence of God. Mathematicians, who create their own universes, are the most inclined to believe in God with a total of 44.6%."

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What was Carl Sagan's perspective on religion, according to his widow? "Carl did not want to believe.  He wanted to know."

Ann Druyan (Carl Sagan's widow)

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"With the deaths of two saints within six days of one another, you would think that the minds of every psychic and astrologer in the world would have been zapped by the rent in the cosmos.  But not one, even Princess Di's own personal astrologer who was consulted a few days before the accident, predicted the awesome events of the past week."

Vic Stenger, writing a week after Princess Diana's death

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"Some very cruel people, who have made life miserable for others, may deserve a lengthy period of punishment.  We may even grant, for the sake of argument, that some deserve thousands of years of intense punishment. But can anyone literally merit unending punishment?  It is natural to suppose that each sin a person commits merits some finite degree of punishment.  To take an analogy from the legal sphere, we normally suppose that a burglar deserves a few years of imprisonment, and that it would be unjust to imprison him indefinitely.  However, to put the point crudely, if each sin an unrepentant sinner commits adds a finite number of years in hell, the total number of years in hell will be finite (assuming the number of sins is finite)."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 33.

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"Some people will say, 'But God would never will something cruel like torture.  He is, after all, a perfectly good Being.'  There at least two important replies to this objection.  First, it is not (strictly speaking) relevant.  It might be that your friend Smith would never steal anything, but we can still reasonably ask, 'If Smith were to steal something, should he make amends?'  And presumably, the answer is 'Yes.'  In other words, a purely hypothetical question can still have an answer.  So, even if God would not approve of torture, it is still true, according to the divine command theory, that if He were to approve of torture, then torture would be right."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 38.

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"What can the divine command theorist mean by saying that God is good (and hence would not approve of torture)?  In general, to say that something is good is to say that it meets certain relevant standards.  A good painting meets aesthetic standards;  a good knife is one that cuts well;  a good father is one that can be expected to behave in certain specified ways.  A good Deity, then, is presumably one whose acts accord with certain standards.  This is not to say that creatures set the standards.  Of course they do not.  It is merely to say that there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content.  But on the divine command view it seems there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content.  But on the divine command view it seems that there are no such standards.  To say that God is good is apparently to say that God approves of His own acts, or that He wills whatever acts He performs.  So, how can the divine command theorist confidently assert that God would not approve of torture since He is good?  If God did approve of torture (rape, theft, etc.), He would still be good from the point of view of the divine command theory."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 39.

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"But could the divine command theorist hold, as some theologians have, that God's will is restricted by His own nature or character?  For example, it has been claimed that God's nature is unalterably loving and just, and hence that God cannot violate his nature by performing and unloving or unjust act.  Notice, however, that this view places the ultimate source of moral value outside of God's will, in his unalterable nature or character;  from this perspective, it is God's inability to will acts contrary to His loving nature which guarantees the goodness of His commands.  Thus, to place restrictions on God's will is to admit that something outside of His will determines what is right.  So, the 'unalterable nature' approach is not open to the divine command theorist."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 40.

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"If we assume that the Bible alone reveals God's will we must acknowledge that there are many ethical issues the Bible does not discuss."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 42.

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"Moreover, as regards those moral issues which are treated in the Bible, significant problems of interpretation often arise."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 42.

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"So, if the Bible is our sole source of knowledge about God's will, we have no way of knowing what to do in many moral situations."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 42.

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"One final snag in the 'Bible only' view is this: the Bible itself teaches that moral truths are revealed outside the Scriptures."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 42.

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"One can say that the appeal to [church] tradition, unless it is accompanied by an explanation of how the relevant religious bodies or ecclesiastical authorities know, is weak."

C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 43.

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"I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school.  Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel."

Thomas Henry Huxley, in a letter to Charles Kingsley dated May 5th, 1863 Quoted in The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gutenberg Encyclopedia (originally dated 1911)

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"I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomenon of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father--loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts.  So with regard to the other great Christian dogmas, immortality of soul and future state of rewards and punishments, what possible objection can I--who am compelled perforce to believe in the immortality of what we call Matter and Force, and in a very unmistakable present state of rewards and punishments for our deeds--have to these doctrines? Give me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them."

Thomas Henry Huxley, in a letter to Charles Kingsley dated May 5th, 1863 Quoted in The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gutenberg Encyclopedia (originally dated 1911)

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"I do not think it is possible to prove that belief in God is irrational.  Zealous atheists may be disappointed in this, but there is no reason they should be.  It is not the belief in God per se that is so offensive to the secular spirit.  After all, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and Tom Paine retained belief in a supreme Creator/Lawgiver. What rightly offends secular humanists is the bigotry, obscurantism, prudery, and persecuting zeal that all too often accompany theistic belief, especially in its particular institutional manifestations."

Keith M. Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof, p. 145.

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"Atheistic apathy is likely to be encouraged when it is noted that Alvin Plantinga -- the finest of theistic philosophers, in my view -- expends vast labors of logic to prove that theism, at best, can only claim to break even with atheism."

Keith M. Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof, p. 147.

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"Not only does the application to horrors of such generic and global reasons for Divine permission of evils fail to solve the second problem of evil; it makes it worse by adding generic prima facie reasons to doubt whether human life would be a great good to individual human

beings in possible worlds where such Divine motives were operative. For, taken in isolation and made to bear the weight of the whole explanation, such reasons-why draw a picture of Divine indifference or even hostility to the human plight. Would the fact that God permitted horrors because they were constitutive means to His end of global perfection, or that He tolerated them because He could obtain that global end anyway, make the participant's life more tolerable, more worth living for him/her? Given radical human vulnerability to horrendous evils, the ease with which humans participate in them, whether as victim or perpetrator, would not the thought that God visits horrors on anyone who caused them, simply because s/he deserves it, provide one more reason to expect human life to be a nightmare?"

Marilyn McCord Adams, "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God" http://www.faithquest.com/philosophers/adams/horevil.html

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"Where horrendous evils are concerned, not only do we not know God's actual reason for permitting them; we cannot even conceive of any plausible candidate sort of reason consistent with worthwhile lives for human participants in them."

Marilyn McCord Adams, "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God" http://www.faithquest.com/philosophers/adams/horevil.html

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"I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes..."

Jesus, Matthew 11:25

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"To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but to those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand..."

Jesus, Mark 4:11-12

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"For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.' ...Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe...God choose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise."

Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:18-27

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"Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of the world is folly with God."

Paul, 1 Corinthians 3:18-19

"The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned."

Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:14

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"To the Jews I became as a Jew, to win the Jews; to those under the law I became as one under the law-though not being myself under the law-that I might win those under the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel..."

Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:20-23

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"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell."

St. Augustine

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"I told [new Christian Coalition president] Don Hodel when he joined us, I said, 'My dear friend, I want to hold out to you the possibility of selecting the next president of the United States because I think that's what we have in this organization.  And I believe we can indeed."

Pat Robertson, Sept 13., 1997

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"We need to be like a united front.  I know that all these laws says that we've got to be careful, but there's nothing that says we can't have a few informal discussions amongst ourselves." [Ripples of laughter from audience]

Pat Robertson, Sept 13., 1997

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"But we need now to move into organization.  We developed and have developed this fantastic computer model where we can identify all the voters in a particular area.  We can give people maps.  They can look precisely at who people are by issues.  It's very sophisticated and it will get more so.  So we can put into your hands weapons that are incredible."

Pat Robertson, Sept 13, 1997

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"If we have that basic core and we have identified people, this was the power of every machine that has ever been in politics.  You know, the Tammany Halls and Hague and the Chicago machine and the Byrd machine in Virginia and all the rest of them.  They have identified a core of people who have bought into their values whatever they were, and they worked the election and brought out people to vote.  The other people were diffuse and fragmented and they lost and the people that had the core won."

Pat Robertson, Sept 13, 1997

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"Even if there is a very high improbability of the universe existing with observers, the properties of the universe that allow us to exist are also what allow us to observe the universe with properties compatible with the existence of observers. If the universe did not have these properties, then we would not exist to observe the incompatible properties."

Kyle Kelly, "Is the Weak Anthropic Principle Compatible With Divine Design?" 1997

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"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

Gene Roddenberry.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called "science fiction" by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of "aliens" without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God."

Jerry Falwell, "Can Our Young People Find God in the Pages of Trashy Magazines? No, Of Course Not!" Reader's Digest, Aug. 1985: 142-157. Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"I used to think it was terrible that life was so unfair. Then I thought 'wouldn't it be much worse if life really were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us occur because we actually deserve it.'"

Marcus, Babylon 5.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"You can't kill the truth...Actually you can kill the truth, but it always comes back to haunt you"

Sheridan, Babylon 5.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking."

Carl Sagan.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith.  I consider the capacity for it terrifying."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Philip K. Dick.   Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told--and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.  Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."

Michael Crichton in The Lost World.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"One man's religion is another man's belly laugh."

Robert A. Heinlein.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history."

Robert A. Heinlein.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense."

Robert A. Heinlein.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."

Arthur C. Clarke.  Contributed by Larry Reyka.

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"One might be asked "How can you prove that a god does  not exist?" One can only reply that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been proved."  

David A. Spitz

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"St. Augustine found lying among the clergy so prevalent that he  wrote two books (De Mendacio in 395 A.D. and Contra Mendacium in  420 A.D.), urging that it stop."

[Gordon Stein, _A Second Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism_,p. 65]

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"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."

[Mark Twain]

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"Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven"

[Mark Twain]

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"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian."

[Mark Twain, "Notebook"]

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"The Bible is a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology."

[Mark Twain, "Mark Twain and the Bible"]

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"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."

[Mark Twain]

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"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless,  money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in  all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a  hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious  crime- the invention of Hell.  Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as  it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion.  The fleets of the world could swim in spacious  comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."

[Mark Twain, "Reflections on Religion"]

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"There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small  budding sign of pity for the slave.  No place in all the land but one--  the pulpit.  It yielded last; it always does.  It fought a strong and  stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession--  at the tail end.  Slavery fell.  The slavery texts [in the Bible] remained;  the practice changed; that was all."

["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.109]

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"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;  help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot  dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their  wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows  with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it..."

[Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"]

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"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it - they also believed the world was flat."

[Mark Twain]

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"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand  that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

[Mark Twain]

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"It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either."

[Mark Twain]

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"It is best to read the weather forcast before praying for rain."

[Mark Twain]

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"The Christian Bible is a drug store.  It's contents have remained the same but the medical practice continues.  For 1,800 years these changes were slight--scarcely noticeable... The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store's stock... He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time."

["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.107]

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"These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible's statues.  He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all."

["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.124]

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"There are no witches.  The witch text remains; only the practice has changed.  Hell fire is gone, but the text remains.  Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains.  More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remains."

["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.110]

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"Man is a Religious Animal.  Man is the only Religious Animal.  He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight."

[_Letters from the Earth_, Mark Twain]

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"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere.  It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast"

[Mark Twain, _Reflections on Religion_, 1906]

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"I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies.  Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."

[Mark Twain, Speech to the Red Cross, New York, Dec. 31, 1899]

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"During many ages there were witches.  The Bible said so.  The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest.  She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.  Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been.  One does not know whether to laugh or to cry."

[Mark Twain, "Europe and Elsewhere"]

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"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you.  If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad."

[Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption]

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"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

[Mark Twain]

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"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles."

[James Watson, winner of the Nobel prize for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA]

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"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car."

[Frank Zindler]

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"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.  I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."

[Thomas Paine, "Age of Reason"]

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"The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed."

[The Theological Works of Thomas Paine]

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"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."

David Hume

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"With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

-------

"Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook."

Ludwig von Mises

-------

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

Bertrand Russell

-------

"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic."

H.L. Mencken

-------

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

Voltaire

-------

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

Thomas Jefferson

-------

"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter."

Thomas Jefferson

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"He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

Thomas Jefferson

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"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Thomas Jefferson

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"...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."

Thomas Jefferson

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"Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away."

Thomas Jefferson

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"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Thomas Jefferson

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"Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth."

Thomas Jefferson

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"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

Seneca the Younger (4? B.C. - 65 A.D.)

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"A cult is a religion with no political power."

Tom Wolfe

-------

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

Abraham Lincoln

-------

"Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration."

Ayn Rand

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"To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true."

Ayn Rand

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"Thinking men cannot be ruled."

Ayn Rand

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"To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer."

Ayn Rand

-------

"...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so."

Steve Allen

-------

"...in matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed."

Gore Vidal

-------

"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."

Thomas Henry Huxley

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"A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie."

Robert G. Ingersoll

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"Beware of the man of one book."

Thomas Aquinas

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"If Jesus is the answer, then what was the question?"

Jeffery Jay Lowder

-----

And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"

They replied,"You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed."

And Jesus replied, "What?

-----

"Any belief worth having must survive doubt."

-----

"I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God.  If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck."

-----

"If there were an afterlife, Isaac Asimov would have written a book about it by now."

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"Evolution is both fact and theory. Creationism is neither."

-----

"Power corrupts;

Absolute power corrupts absolutely;

God is all-powerful.

Draw your own conclusions"

-----

"Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one."

-----

"If the fundamentalists are right, then all the cool people are in Hell!"

Jeffery Jay Lowder

-----

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."

-----

"freethinker n.  A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief."

-----

"May theists be shaved with Ockham's Razor!"

-----

"If Jesus loves me, why doesn't he ever send me flowers?"

-----

"It's your god.

They're your rules.

*You* go to hell."

-----

"The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' The Wise Man Says it to the World.

-----

"Man created God in his own image."

-----

"If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you."

[As seen on a button]

-----

"If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!"

[Clark Adams]

-----

"If only God would give me some clear sign!  Like  making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank."

[Woody Allen]

-----

"Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends."

[Woody Allen]

-----

"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."

[Woody Allen]

-----

"As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on."

[Woody Allen]

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"A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. "he" becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified."

[Karen Armstrong, _A History of God_, pg. 383, speaking on Paul Tillich]

-----

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

[Isaac Asimov]

-----

"In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"

[Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"]

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"In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for *anything* until about 1926 was stupid."

[Dave Barry]

-----

"Dear God.  We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing."

[Bart Simpson saying grace]

-----

"Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically, we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom."

[Priest on "The Simpson's"]

-----

"Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary]

-----

"Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does."

[Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American author]

-----

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

[First Amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution]

-----

"No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."

Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]

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"Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa.  In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.'"

[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]

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"The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state.  That wall must be kept high and impregnable.  We could not approve the slightest breach."

[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education,  330 U.S. 1 (1947),last words]

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"The manifest object of the men who framed the institutions of this country, was to have a _State without religion_, and a _Church without politics_ -- that is to say, they meant that one should never be used as an engine for any purpose of the other, and that no man's rights in one should be tested by his opinions about the other.  As the Church takes no note of men's political differences, so the State looks with equal eye on all the modes of religious faith. ... Our fathers seem to have been perfectly sincere in their belief that the members of the Church would be more patriotic, and the citizens of the State more religious, by keeping their respective functions entirely separate."

[Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Jeremiah S. Black, from a 1856 speech on religious liberty]

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"The Boy Scouts of America maintain that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing his obligation to God."

[Boy Scouts of America, statement on membership form]

-------

"The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship..."

[Boy Scouts of America policy, 1970]

-------

"...Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of character to refuse to swear falsely."

[New York Times editorial, 12/12/93, on the Boy Scouts' refusing membership to Mark Welsh, who would not sign a religious oath]

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"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses"

[Lenny Bruce]

-------

"No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots.  This is one nation under God."

[Republican Presidential Nominee George Bush]

-----

"Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?"

[John Calvin, citing Ps. 93:1 in his Commentary on Genesis]

-----

"The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light."

[Joseph Campbell, _The Mythic Image_, Bollingen Series C, Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 33]

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"I don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose."

[Clarence Darrow, speech, Toronto, 1930]

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"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."

[Clarence Darrow]

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"The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth."

[Clarence Darrow]

-----

"Even many of those who claim to believe in immortality still tell themselves and others that neither side of the question is susceptible of proof.  Just what can these hopeful ones believe that the word "proof" involves?  The evidence against the persistence of personal consciousness is as strong as the the evidence for gravitation, and much more obvious.  It is as convincing and unassailable as the proof of the destruction of wood or coal by fire. If it is not certain that death ends personal identity and memory, then almost nothing that man accepts as true is susceptible as proof."

[Clarence Darrow, "The Myth of Immortality"]

"In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality."

[Clarence Darrow, The Sign, May 1938]

-----

"On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation..."

[Charles Darwin]

-----

"I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.  And this is a damnable doctrine."

[Charles Darwin]

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"And it's not just faith itself: it's the idea that faith is a virtue and the less evidence there is, the more virtuous it is.  You can actually quote, well, Tertullian for example: "It is certain because it is impossible."

Sir Thomas Brown, actually seeking for more difficult things to believe,  because things for which there is mere evidence are just too easy, and it's  no test of his faith.  In order to have a test of your faith, you must be  asked to believe really daft things like the transubstantiation, you know, the blood of Christ turning into wine, and stuff... That is so manifestly absurd that you've got to be a really great believer, in the class of the Electric Monk, in order to believe it..... You're actually showing off your believing credentials by the ability to believe something like that... If it were an easy thing to believe, substantiated by facts, then it wouldn't be any great achievement."

[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]

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"To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."

[Diderot]

-----

"Christian Science repudiates the evidences of the senses and rests upon the supremacy of God.  Christian healing . . . places no faith in hygiene or drugs; it reposes all faith in mind, in spiritual power divinely directed."

[Mary Baker Eddy, on Christian Science "healing"]

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"My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul.  I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it."

[Thomas Edison, "Do We Live Again?"]

-------

"All Bibles are man-made."

[Thomas Edison]

-------

"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion is all bunk."

[Thomas Edison]

------

"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."

[Thomas Alva Edison, "Columbian Magazine"]

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"I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States."

[Thomas Edison]

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"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.  Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.  I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

[Albert Einstein,_The World as I See It_]

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"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

[Albert Einstein]

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"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

[Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930]

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"I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

["Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]

-----

"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."

[Albert Einstein]

-----

"God does not play dice with the universe."

[Albert Einstein, on quantum mechanics]

-----

"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing"

[Anatole France]

-----

"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use."

[Galileo]

-------

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

[Galileo Galilei]

-------

"They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. ... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit..."

[Galileo Galilei, 1615]

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"The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith."

[Catholic Church's decision against Galileo Galilei]

-------

"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations."

[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]

-------

"To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover."

[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]

-------

"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment."

[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]

-------

"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved."

[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]

-------

"Having been admonished by this Holy Office [the Inquisition] entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it moved... I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church."

[Galileo Galilei, Recantation, 22 June 1633]

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"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion."

[Edmond and Jules de Goncourt]

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"Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.  What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?"

[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer"]

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"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents."

[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186]

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"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."

[Stephen J. Gould]

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"When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."

[Stephen Jay Gould]

-----

"Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it?"

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"The churches beg -- and if we don't give them money, why, they take it anyway, forcibly, by means of this unjust state tax exemption."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"The churches can well afford to pay fair taxation. But supposing they couldn't. Would not that be a very significant evidence that the churches were not really wanted?"

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"How can a preacher talk with a straight face about political graft? He is, himself, profiting by one of the most notorious political grafts in this country."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"Why should the residence of a preacher be untaxed? Useful citizens must pay taxes on their homes. Yet the Preacher -- actually and notoriously the least useful member of the community -- lives in a tax-free dwelling."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"Would you tax God?" asks a defender of church tax exemption. Well, if there were a God he should be able to pay his own way and support his own business. If not, then he should do like other business men and close up shop."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"Church tax exemption means that we all drop our money in the collection boxes, whether we go to church or not and whether we are interested in the church or not. It is systematic and complete robbery, from which none of us escapes."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. Church members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"There can be no perfect freedom unless the church and state are separated. But the church and state are not separated in America so long as the state grants a subsidy to the church in the form of tax exemption."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

-------

"Is a church too small and too poor to pay taxes? That means that not enough people want the church seriously enough to pay for its upkeep. Then, why should such a church exist? Why should atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers be forced to maintain such a useless, unwanted church by granting it tax exemption?"

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere. And so have fools."

[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]

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"No deity will save us, we must save ourselves. Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful."

[Humanist Manifesto II, Prometheus Books, 1973]

-------

"...but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature."

["An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", David Hume, 10:2:30]

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"There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves"

[David Hume]

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"The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one."

[David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748]

-------

"In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard.  And when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat, in order to undeceive the deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses, which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery."

[David Hume, "Of Miracles"]

-------

"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."

[David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)]

-------

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

[David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748]

-------

"Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules."

[Huxley]

-------

"...it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.  This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism.  That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions."

[Thomas Huxley]

-------

"The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes."

[Thomas Huxley]

-------

"The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable."

[Thomas Huxley, English biologist]

-------

"Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice."

[Robert Green Ingersoll]

-------

"I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'"

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"The Declaration of Independence "was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others."

[Robert G. Ingersoll, "Individuality"]

-------

"With soap, baptism is a good thing."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"...to argue with a man who has renouced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead."

[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.127]

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"It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country.  The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men.  Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity.  Ours is the first government made by the people for the people.  It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to do.  And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"I combat those only who, knowing nothing of the future, prophesy an eternity of pain- those who sow the seeds of fear in the hearts of men- those only who poison all the springs of life, and seat a skeleton at every feast."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"Orthodoxy cannot afford to put out the fires of hell."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"If we should put god in the Constitution there would be no room left for man."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam"

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

-------

"By the efforts of these infidels, the name of God was left out of the Constitution of the United States.  They knew that if an infinite being was put in, no room would be left for the people.  They knew that if any church was made the mistress of the state, that mistress, like all others, would corrupt, weaken, and destroy."

[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 3, p. 382]

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"I talk to God every day, and He's never mentioned you."

[movie, _Ladyhawke_]

-------

"It is possible to pay another man's debts on his behalf, but it is not possible to make a guilty man innocent by suffering in his place."

[Carl Lofmark, _What is the Bible?_]

-------

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."

[Delos McKown]

-------

"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof"

[Ashley Montague]

-------

"Christians say that--without exception--their God answers all of their prayers; it's just that He sometimes says "yes" and other times "no," "maybe," or "wait." Of course the same could be said of the rain-god,"Bob."

[Rev. Donald Morgan]

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"God" as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle.  The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God.  No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world.  No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one.  No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a "super-existence."

[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism"]

-------

"Ask youself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves--or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."

[Ayn Rand]

-------

"In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe."

[Ayn Rand]

"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence...Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God... Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith....The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question."

[Ayn Rand, "For the New Intellectual"]

-------

"...if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.... the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind."

[Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"]

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"I honesty believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians . . . and Christian values.  What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time."

[Ralph Reed, Executive Director of the Christian Coalition]

-------

"We've learned how to move under radar in the cover of the night with shrubbery strapped to our helmets,"

[Ralph Reed, executive director of Christian Coalition]

-------

"They call them extremists.  We have our own names.  We call them senators, congressman, governors, mayors, state legislators"

[Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition Executive Director]

-------

"I want to be invisible.  I do guerrilla warfare.  I paint my face and travel at night.  You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag.  You don't know until election night."

[Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition Exec. Director]

-------

"The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused."

[John E. Remsburg, The Christ(1910)]

-------

"No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them."

[Ernest Renan, 1863]

-------

"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."

George Wald, U.S. biochemist "The Origin of Optical Activity," in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 69 (1957)