Lee Strobel Quotes

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

I don't guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.

I think people have common sense and can tell what's real, what's right or what's wrong and work it out.

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.

I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.

We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.

Unless one can think wisely it is better to remain a dummy.

All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason

People confuse the word cynicism with the word skepticism. One is “you’re not gonna pay attention to anything, think everything’s screwed up, nothing’s ever gonna work out right”, that’s cynicism. But skepticism is, “you’re presented with evidence and you do your best to draw conclusions based on that”. So, as the saying goes, Bill Nye, do you believe in ghosts? No. However, I would love to see one. Bring it on. I’m open minded to the idea, but the more I look into it in a skeptical frame of thinking, the less likely it seems.

I'm not superstitious. I don't really believe in star signs, sorry, or superstitions.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

We must contemplate what the meaning of being "educated" is. Some people think a person with plenty of degrees is an educated one. But I believe a person who can judge a situation correctly and make timely decisions is more important.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

Research – and using what you learn from it to analyze every situation – is what separates being unreasonable from being irrational.