Arthur Peacocke Quotes

If God be an infinite being, there cannot be, either in the present or future world, any relative proportion between man and his God. Thus, the idea of God can never enter the human mind.

Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it.

Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.

This subsistence, or manner of being of God is his one essence so far as it has personal properties.

Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.

It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.

Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures does it say that God is omnipotent.

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.

If God is so powerful, can he create a rock which he cannot lift?

It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is.

Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: 'Why does God allow us to sin?' 'Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war?'

If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.

A comprehended god is no god.

God was alive when this universe exploded into existence. He was alive when Socrates drank his poison. He was the living God when William Bradford governed Plymouth Colony. He was the living God in 1966 when Thomas Altizer proclaimed him dead and Time magazine absolutely absurdly put it on the front cover.

Having refuted, then, as well as we could, every notion which might suggest that we were to think of God as in any degree corporeal, we go on to say that, according to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.

In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That's been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites.

We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man.

If God had sufficient wisdom and power to construct such a beautiful world as this, then we must admit that his wisdom and power are immeasurably greater than that of man, and hence he is qualified to reign as king.

If a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.

If we grant freedom to man, there is an end to the omniscience of God.

The doctrine of free will is always in danger of robbing God of his honor

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

If we take away any of the attributes of God, we do not weaken God but we weaken our concept of God.

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause