Peter Kreeft Quotes

For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism.

I've been an atheist since I was nine years old. And my mom is really religious, so we have a strange relationship. But if my mother was right, what would be the reason that the gods could let anything bad happen in the world?

Some people turn from God because they cannot understand how a good God can permit evil in the world.

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.

I believe for God not to allow pain to happen in the world is for Him to extract free will from the world.

Comfort, or revelation: God owes us one of these, but surely not both.

God Almighty would in no way permit evil in His works were He not so omnipotent and good that even out of evil He could work good.

Unfortunately, some Christians are guilty of throwing out an equivalent sentiment when they play the "God is sovereign" card as a way to trump every evil that comes your way.

If there's a God in heaven, what's he waiting for? If He can't hear the children, then he must see the war.

Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.

I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.

Catholic theology accounts for the fact that there's evil in the world. People say, well, how could God let this happen. Well, what God did was set the mechanism in motion and then allow people to do the best they can under the circumstances that they're dealt in order to gain grace and get into heaven.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.

You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children

Really, doesn´t everything make sense? There are, of course, things from which we more or less recover, although some of them are too harsh even for saints. But that is no reason to accuse God. Even if there are reasons to doubt him, the fact that he did not arrange the world like a well-ordered parlor is not one of them. It speaks rather in his favor. This used to be much better understood.

Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

If the gods have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not all-powerful. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither all-powerful or benevolent. If they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?

God who sends the wound sends the medicine.

Prayer is God's answer to our poverty, not a power we exercise to obtain an answer.

Heaven is God's answer to any suffering you may face.

The Biblical world-view is the only one that accepts the reality of evil and suffering while giving both the cause and the purpose, while offering God-given strength and sustenance in the midst of it.