Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees — Alvin Plantinga

"At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we dont know that there is such a person as God, we dont know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence. We dont know what our happiness consists in, and we dont know how to achieve it. We dont know that we have been created in the image of God, and we dont grasp the significance of such characteristically human phenomena as love, humor, adventure, science, art, music, philosophy, history, and so on."

"Like I say, you gotta have a PhD in engineering just to use your thermostat. And that seems over the top to me. [...] It’s not real nice, you know. If you live in Arizona, you get used to it, but we don’t. And it’s right after a really cold, kind of wet, spring. So we weren’t really up for that at all. [...] You know, there are worse things. I mean, if it were like, say, ten below zero, that would be worse."

"I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term fundamentalist. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like son of a bitch, more exactly sonovabitch, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) sumbitch. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of fundamentalist (in this widely current use): it isnt simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like stupid sumbitch (or maybe fascist sumbitch?) than sumbitch simpliciter. It isnt exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends. The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine."

"To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him."

"Now God can create free creatures, but He cant cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they arent significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He cant give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against Gods omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good."

"Alvin Plantinga is arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century."