Francis Schaeffer Quotes

There comes a point in your life when you become stark raving insane, commit suicide or become a mystic.

Satre found atheism 'cruel', Camus 'dreadful', and Nietzsche 'maddening'. Atheists who consistently try to live without God tend to commit suicide or go insane. Those who are inconsistent live on the ethical or aesthetic shadow of Christian truth while they deny the reality that made the shadow.

Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.

Why does merely attempting to understand Reality so often seem to lead to going insane?

If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.

Atheists don't hate fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns because they don't exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn't exist. Atheists - like the painting experts hated the painter - hate God because He does exist.

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him.

The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.

I don't know whether God exists or not. ... Some forms of atheism are arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected, but agnosticism—to admit that we don't know and to search—is all right. ... When I look at what I call the gift of life, I feel a gratitude which is in tune with some religious ideas of God. However, the moment I even speak of it, I am embarrassed that I may do something wrong to God in talking about God.

I don't know if God exists and I don't care. God's will and design for this temporal and spatial vastness, if any, is so patently, deliberately impenetrable that I doubt any mortal has a grasp on it. The very inexplicability of sad events like the tsunami, like the AIDS crisis or even like the cancer death of the father of one of my daughter's 2nd-grade classmates last week are, to me, reminders to focus on our obligations to one another, not to the infinite; to honor the creator, if any, by honoring creation itself and hoping that's good enough.

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

...My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was. I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you?

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist. ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

I cannot believe in God when there is no scientific evidence for the existence of a supreme being and creator.

If there is a God, why did he make me an atheist?

Hobbes: Do you think there's a God? Calvin: Well, somebody's out to get me!

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.

I cannot accept any concept of God based on the fear of life or the fear of death, or blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him I would be a liar.

God does not believe in our God.

And you know what? If there is a God, and it's that same God who's so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can't get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.

The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.

Question boldly even the existence of God.

Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it's just barely possible that God exists.