Nancy Pearcey Quotes

#1. Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.

Nancy Pearcey

#2. When the only form of cultural commentary Christians offer is moral condemnation, no wonder we come across to non-believers as angry and scolding.

Nancy Pearcey

#3. Homeschoolers are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers. They are self-motivated and self-directed, independent-minded and creative. They are not content to turn their education of their children over to the government.

Nancy Pearcey

#4. a mind capable of forming an argument against God's existence constitutes evidence for his existence. That is, a conscious being with the ability to reason, weigh evidence, and argue logically must come from a source that has at least the same level of cognitive ability.

Nancy Pearcey

#5. Most of the early modern scientists were Christians; they believed that matter was *not* preexisting, but had come from the hand of God. Thus, it had no power to resist His will but would obey he rules He had laid down- with mathematical precision.

Nancy Pearcey

#6. Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

Nancy Pearcey

#7. ironically the term tolerance is used to justify intolerance toward Christianity.

Nancy Pearcey

#8. No one is a consistent moral relativist.

Nancy Pearcey

#9. The defense of marriage is the defense of freedom. Neither of which is obsolete.

Nancy Pearcey

#10. America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power.

Nancy Pearcey

#11. Materialists thereby deny the reality of mind (while they use their minds to advance materialism), determinists deny the reality of human choice (while they choose determinism), and relativists deny the fact of right and wrong (while they judge you if you disagree).

Nancy Pearcey

#12. For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion.

Nancy Pearcey

#13. The danger is that is Christians do not consciously develop a biblical approach to a subject, then we will unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approach.

Nancy Pearcey

#14. Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

Nancy Pearcey

#15. If there is no God, and life is a chance product of blind material forces, what purpose does human life have? Is it just a chemical accident on a rock flying through the cold, empty reaches of space?

Nancy Pearcey

#16. At the heart of the human condition, we might say, is an epistemological sin - the refusal to acknowledge what can be known about God and then to respond appropriately: "Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him" (Rom. 1:21). They engage in willful blindness.

Nancy Pearcey

#17. In many cases students are never exposed to competing ideas within their families, churches, or Christian schools, and as a result they go out into the world unprepared for the intellectual battles they are about to encounter, especially on secular college campuses.

Nancy Pearcey

#18. But things that are intrinsically good can also become idols-if we allow them to take over any of God's functions in our lives.

Nancy Pearcey

#19. Only by demonstrating genuine compassion will Christians earn the right to offer a biblical alternative.

Nancy Pearcey

#20. When we encounter the world of ideas for the first time, we easily get overwhelmed. Scripture is telling us, 'Don't be distracted by the details. Cut to the core by asking, What is its idol?' Whatever functions as its God substitute will shape everything else.

Nancy Pearcey

#21. Many journalists are influenced by a myopic multiculturalism that is suspicious of anything Western, while giving the benefit of the doubt to non-Western societies.

Nancy Pearcey

#22. According to Romans 1, those who reject the Creator will create an idol.

Nancy Pearcey

#23. As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.

Nancy Pearcey

#24. The human mind inherently seeks intelligible order. Thus the conviction that such an order exists to be found is a crucial assumption.

Nancy Pearcey

#25. Mitchell claimed that her materialist view leads to "humbleness." But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots.

Nancy Pearcey

#26. Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.

Nancy Pearcey

#27. Our vocation and professional work is not a second class activity, something we do just to put food on the table. It is the high calling for which we were originally created. The way we serve a Creator God is by being creative with the talents and gifts He has given us.

Nancy Pearcey

#28. Schools ought to teach students to challenge secular ideologies masquerading as science in the classroom.

Nancy Pearcey

#29. During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.

Nancy Pearcey

#30. All of science is largely formalized common sense.

Nancy Pearcey

#31. No one lives like a robot. We all make choices from the moment we wake up in the morning.

Nancy Pearcey

#32. I discovered that Christianity does have the resources to meet the challenges posed by competing worldviews after all.

Nancy Pearcey

#33. Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.

Nancy Pearcey

#34. America has always welcomed anyone willing to assimilate to its national character. But radical Islam rejects assimilation and is bent on the conquest of our national character.

Nancy Pearcey

#35. Liberalism denies that there is any fixed or universal human nature.

Nancy Pearcey

#36. When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

Nancy Pearcey

#37. In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter - which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking 'enlightenment' meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.

Nancy Pearcey

#38. Romantics deified the imagination;

Nancy Pearcey

#39. Biblical worldview'. The term means literally a 'view of the world', a biblically informed perspective on all of reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells you how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God's objective truth on our inner life.

Nancy Pearcey

#40. The sword of the Spirit has been muffled up and decked out with flowers and ribbons, author writes, conveying the sentiments of a Congregationist minister on men's ceding of moral and religious instruction and correction as women's work.

Nancy Pearcey

#41. In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.

Nancy Pearcey

#42. An idol is not necessarily something concrete, like a golden calf. It can also be something abstract, like matter. Is matter part of the created order? Sure it is. So the philosophy of materialism qualifies as an idol in the biblical sense.

Nancy Pearcey

#43. You don't have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience - what we all know about ourselves.

Nancy Pearcey

#44. Christianity is saving truth and it's sanctifying truth, but we believe that it's Total Truth. It is the truth about every aspect of life from economics to masculinity to marriage. God has the right view on all of these things.

Nancy Pearcey

#45. Yet church youth groups rarely teach apologetics, majoring instead on games and goodies.

Nancy Pearcey

#46. The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

Nancy Pearcey

#47. To be intellectual does not require one to be alienated and oppositional.

Nancy Pearcey

#48. Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.

Nancy Pearcey

#49. The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.

Nancy Pearcey

#50. Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

Nancy Pearcey

#51. Knowing the truth has meaning only as a first step to living the truth day by day.

Nancy Pearcey

#52. The best organizations regard the nurturing of their employees as a spiritual mandate.

Nancy Pearcey

#53. You can be utterly confident that any non-biblical worldview will be too "small" to account for all of reality.

Nancy Pearcey

#54. The White House should always be a friend to American freedom.

Nancy Pearcey

#55. I began asking, 'How can we know Christianity is true?' Sadly, none of the adults in my life offered an answer. Eventually I decided Christianity must not have any answers, and I became an agnostic.

Nancy Pearcey

#56. Redemption is as comprehensive as Creation and Fall. God does not save our souls while leaving our minds to function on their own. He redeems the whole person. Conversion is meant to give new direction to our thoughts, emotions, wills and habits.

Nancy Pearcey

#57. We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.

Nancy Pearcey

#58. children tend to hold a concept of God even if their parents are atheists.

Nancy Pearcey

#59. Materialists try to live in the lower story NON-MATERIAL WORLD Subjective, Superstitious, Mental Constructs MATERIAL WORLD Objective, Scientific, Knowable Facts

Nancy Pearcey

#60. Put bluntly, abortion supporters have lost the argument on the scientific level.

Nancy Pearcey

#61. A biblically based worldview is capable of affirming the best insights of secular philosophies without ever falling into reductionism.

Nancy Pearcey

#62. The costs of marriage breakdown are borne by the entire society, and therefore it is reasonable for the entire society to demand support for marriage - to insist that it is privileged both culturally and legally.

Nancy Pearcey

#63. To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.

Nancy Pearcey

#64. A part is always too limited to explain the whole. You might picture a worldview as trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. Invariably, something will stick out of the box. Its categories are too "small" to explain the world.

Nancy Pearcey

#65. Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.

Nancy Pearcey

#66. Author conveys contemporary respect for Methodist preachers who rode the circuit of frontier settlements to put themselves at risk for the Gospel near the Second Great Awakening. They were dubbed 'God's light artillery'.

Nancy Pearcey

#67. Christianity is the key that fits the lock of the universe.

Nancy Pearcey

#68. We do not create marriage from scratch. Instead, in the elegant language of the marriage ceremony, we 'enter into the holy estate of matrimony.'

Nancy Pearcey

#69. Atheists often denounce Christianity as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.

Nancy Pearcey

#70. If moral knowledge is impossible, then we are left with only political and legal measures to coerce people into compliance.

Nancy Pearcey

#71. Public education grants secular worldviews an exclusive monopoly in the classroom.

Nancy Pearcey

#72. America faces a fundamental choice: either the blessings of liberty or the servitude of liberalism. In the political struggle for survival, one or the other is headed for extinction.

Nancy Pearcey

#73. Reductionism is like a kid who argues that whatever does not fit into his toy box is not a toy.

Nancy Pearcey

#74. The reason we are justified in trusting our minds is that God designed them to "fit" the world he created.

Nancy Pearcey

#75. liberals have no compelling truth, no 'good news,' to proclaim.

Nancy Pearcey

#76. The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

Nancy Pearcey

#77. The Tea Party has imparted political energy to common-sense American constitutionalism.

Nancy Pearcey

#78. It is becoming clear that much of what used to be considered common sense is not common at all. Instead it is a product of the West's distinctively Christian heritage. Today it can no longer be simply assumed. It has to be intentionally articulated and defended.

Nancy Pearcey

#79. Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

Nancy Pearcey

#80. Artists are often the barometers of society.

Nancy Pearcey

#81. Pro-lifers have long been castigated for bringing private values into the public square. But actually it is the pro-abortion position that is based on merely personal views and values.

Nancy Pearcey

#82. Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

Nancy Pearcey

#83. No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.

Nancy Pearcey

#84. The Rosetta Stone of Christian social thought is the Trinity.

Nancy Pearcey

#85. The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression. Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.

Nancy Pearcey

#86. Urban areas tend to attract members of the 'knowledge class' - people who work with ideas, data, information.

Nancy Pearcey

#87. For when moral convictions are reduced to arbitrary preferences, then they can no longer be debated rationally.

Nancy Pearcey

#88. What kind of ministry is that, just talking to people? Criticism directed at Francis Schaeffer's plan to open an obscure spot in the Swiss Alps to those who came with questions.

Nancy Pearcey

#89. If movies and music are vehicles for emotionally "hooking" people into Hollywood worldviews, then the best countermeasure is to create more compelling, more beautiful forms of art that express a biblical worldview.

Nancy Pearcey

#90. Ironically, moral relativists often even pride themselves on being morally superior to others.

Nancy Pearcey

#91. The genius of the American Founders was to create an intricate system of balanced powers both within the state and between state and society - a system that has fostered unprecedented political, social, and intellectual freedom.

Nancy Pearcey

#92. The biological structure of our bodies is not some evolutionary accident.

Nancy Pearcey

#93. To use biblical language, those who exchange the glory of God for something in creation will also exchange the image of God for something in creation - and because it is something less than God, it always leads to a lower view of humanity.

Nancy Pearcey

#94. Beginning with sin instead of creation is like trying to read a book by opening it in the middle: You don't know the characters and can't make sense of the plot.

Nancy Pearcey

#95. If pro-abortionists want to commit intellectual suicide and deny scientific facts, that's their problem. But there's no reason a civilized society should fund their anti-scientific outlook - or accept its inhumane consequences.

Nancy Pearcey

#96. Stories and images can be powerful means for conveying ideas. Every time we read a book or watch a movie, we enter into an imaginative

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#97. Many Christians with Ph.D.'s have simply absorbed a two-track approach to their subject, treating science or sociology or history as though it consisted of religiously neutral knowledge, where biblical truth has nothing important to say.

Nancy Pearcey

#98. Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity.

Nancy Pearcey

#99. Americans have grown impatient with the relentless politicizing of every area of life.

Nancy Pearcey

#100. Christian adults need to think about talking to our own children as a form of cross-cultural missions. Cultural change happens so quickly that teens are exposed to ideas and worldviews very different from those of previous generations.

Nancy Pearcey