Top 89 Quotes About Theism
#1. Many people are not conforming with theism, but they are comfortable with spiritualism.
Debasish Mridha
#2. Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, and compels Theism to reason for its existence.
George Holyoake
#3. Classical philosophical theism maintained the ontological distinction between God and creative world that is necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.
Arthur Peacocke
#4. It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism.
Dan Barker
#5. Modernist discourse [ ... ] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.
Phillip E. Johnson
#6. I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.
Thomas Nagel
#7. When somebody says to me, "I don't believe in God," my first response is, "Tell me about the God you don't believe in." Almost always, it's the God of supernatural theism.
Marcus J. Borg
#9. We can call the attempt to refute theism by displaying the continuity of belief in God with primitive delusions the method of Anthropological intimidation.
Edwyn Bevan
#10. Mr. Dawkins' assertions are self-refuting- ie. Actual infinity vs. potential infinity easily makes the most reasonable argument for theism and a Deity. Now, the argument for the Creator God of Christianity requires much more time, energy, and logical effort."
~R. Alan Woods [2007]
R. Alan Woods
#11. Secular Humanism is opposed to other religions; it actively rejects, excludes, and attempts to eliminate traditional theism from meaningful participation in the American culture.
Harvey Cox
#12. The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.
Walter Kaufmann
#13. Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.
Thomas Nagel
#15. Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.
Anne Waldman
#16. If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words.
Thomm Quackenbush
#17. [Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)
Stephen Batchelor
#18. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications.8
James Carroll
#19. Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside
Thomas Nagel
#20. I am not here to merely argue about the perplexities regarding theism or philosophy, but to be a light to the world and to reach out to those who long to be a part of that light.
Criss Jami
#21. It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.
Walter Kaufmann
#22. Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#23. The struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism.
Karl Rahner
#24. Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history ... You spoil both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#26. Theism, however, teaches that not only is there a moral universe but there is an absolute standard by which all moral judgments are measured. God himself-his character of goodness (holiness and love)-is the standard.
James W. Sire
#27. Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .
Nanamoli Thera
#28. Perhaps even atheism versus theism is an example of this principle that an apparent either/or can really be a both/and. For I suspect that the God you insist does not exist is probably a God I also insist does not exist; and perhaps the God I maintain does exist is a God you have never denied.
Peter Kreeft
#29. Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
A.J. Ayer
#31. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Emma Goldman
#33. Atheism is not synonymous with anti-theism and not all atheists are 'active.' There are many non-believers who aren't activists, who don't oppose religion at all, or who are simply not all are interested in discussing belief or lack thereof.
David G. McAfee
#34. Nothing in our politics is any longer driven or designed by individual humans who have a name and a face; we have sunk from theism into impersonal and depersonalizing deism, a scheme of rule by alien and implacable abstract metaphysical forces.
Kenny Smith
#35. The theist can only find meaning by leaving this life for a transcendental world beyond the grave. The human world as he finds it is empty of 'ultimate purpose' and hence meaningless. Theism thus is an attempt to escape from the human condition; it is a pathetic deceit.
Paul Kurtz
#36. Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.
John Shelby Spong
#37. If one believes in a god, one is a Theist. If one does not believe in a god, then one is an A-theist - he is without that belief. The distinction between atheism and theism is entirely, exclusively, that of whether one has or has not a belief in God.
Chapman Cohen
#38. The opposite of theism is not atheism, it's idolatry.
Kyle Idleman
#39. When I hear that a friend has fallen into matrimony, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing into theism.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#40. It was tremendously exciting to discover that science was not destroying religion, as people popularly believe, but that it could cast light on theism and Christianity.
Susan Howatch
#41. The language of theism which was familiar to the people, gave Gandhi the advantage of easy communication with the people, but it is atheistic in principle. It could have been the starting point for the atheistic movement in the modern age.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
#42. When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism IS a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature.
Isaac Asimov
#43. In any modern society encouraging your child to cut himself is an unthinkable act, but only with religious belief becomes part of the culture, and demands respect.
Sean S. Kamali
#44. The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.
Criss Jami
#45. What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
Stephen Batchelor
#46. Sure, some of us humans might be angry at a sovereign God about Hell, but know that that is about as meaningful as a few germs being angry at humans about bleach.
Criss Jami
#47. Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
Robert A. Heinlein
#48. No mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew's fifty years of antitheological writings.
Antony Flew
#49. I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.
Dan Simmons
#50. We're on the bleeding edge of theistic virology here.
Peter Watts
#51. Religion is a non-alcoholic man's alcohol. Alcohol is a non-religious man's religion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#52. For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.
Sean S. Kamali
#53. There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?
Joseph Campbell
#54. It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.
Robert J. Sawyer
#55. Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.
Criss Jami
#56. Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.
Bertrand Russell
#57. Materialism sets us free from sin-by proving that there is no such thing as sin. There's just antisocial behavior, which we can control with measures like laws and educational programs.
Phillip E. Johnson
#58. It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another.
Mikhail Bakunin
#59. The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.
David Bentley Hart
#60. Christianity is not a mere religion but an experimentally testable science.
Frank J. Tipler
#61. I'm always talking to God about whether or not he exists - that's how I know I'm a theist.
Criss Jami
#62. [I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.
Max Planck
#63. Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy ('love of wisdom') is simply a tool depending on how one uses it, and in some cases, logically understanding the nature of God and existence.
Criss Jami
#64. The acute experience of great beauty readily evokes a nameless yearning for something more than earth can offer. Elegant splendor reawakens our spirit's aching need for the infinite, a hunger for more than matter can provide.
Thomas Dubay
#65. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James
#66. [T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
#67. If there's a god, it knows exactly what it would take to convince me and has refused to provide it. In fact, it has gone to great lengths to hide any evidence of its existence. That doesn't seem like a deity that wants to be worshiped to me.
David G. McAfee
#68. I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.
Diego Rivera
#69. God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#70. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.
Criss Jami
#71. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
Isaac Newton
#72. If Christians always seemed to be the most intelligent and the most righteous of men, I'd be a skeptic.
Criss Jami
#73. In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#74. You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do ... and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.
Criss Jami
#75. Every religion has its own gods. The One God has only one religion.
Raheel Farooq
#76. Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Alexander Pope
#77. Intellect, at its best, can make you agnostic. Being theist or atheist is still a matter of choice.
Raheel Farooq
#78. Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.
Melanie Phillips
#79. I do not regard the limits of the past and present as the limits of humanity of the future
Ludwig Feuerbach
#80. There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion.
Criss Jami
#81. There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#82. No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?
Robert J. Sawyer
#83. If heaven really exists: then, technically, living is an activity that believers keep themselves busy with - while they wait for their death.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#84. There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?
Robert J. Sawyer
#85. It is not that men become too intelligent for God,' says the Apologist, 'but rather they become too arrogant for intelligence.
Criss Jami
#86. Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.
Peter Kreeft
#87. Even the devils are theists. I am of all people one of the least qualified to judge, but I do believe that some atheists are closer to God than are some theists. With Him, it is better to be distant in the mind but near in the heart than it is to be distant in the heart but near in the mind.
Criss Jami
#88. Not one of you reflects, that you ought know your Gods before you worship them.
Charles Southwell
#89. No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it has
become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.
Matthew Henry
