Philip Yancey Quotes

I believe any question that man can ask has a reasonable answer-at least an answer that is as consistent with God's existence as it is in opposition to God's existence.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?

The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist.

It is true that you can't prove a negative. However, the existence of God is provable in the same way a building is positive proof that there was a builder.

I took two or three months and I came up with a reason that I thought was enough and I went with it: if there is a God he's definitely not benevolent. We should mean less to him than ants. And if there is a God or there are gods they would value, more than anything, free will.

If 'everything happens for a reason,' then every act of evil is ultimately God's doing.

From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

Next to the acknowledgement of the existence of a Deity, there is no one principle of greater importance in religion, than a realizing belief of the divine government and superintending the affairs of the universe, providence, and intimately concerned in whatever happens to mankind, both as nations and kingdoms, and as individuals.

God's not unjust, he doesn't actually exist. We've been deceived. If God existed, he'd have made the world more just...

Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

Order is manifestly maintained in the universe... governed by the sovereign will of God.

God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.

If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful yet tolerate the world as it is.

In the exercise of God's efficiency, the decree of God comes first. This manner of working is the most perfect of all and notably agrees with the divine nature.