C. S. Lewis Quotes

Through Plato, Aristotle came to believe in God; but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him; but Aristotle thought God through logically, and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.

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

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.

Back when the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were one great intellectual hodgepodge, proving the existence of God was a relatively commonplace exercise. To the modern mind, however, science and religion talk past each other.

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

Does God exist? Well, I would say, 'not yet'.

We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.

Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.

During our religious instruction in school, we always asked: How can one prove the existence of God? And I have learned that the Catholic Church, which is never at a loss for an answer when it comes to existential questions, responds as follows: This question simply does not arise.

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.

The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.

God is that, the greater than which cannot be conceived.

I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.

If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God.

There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself, as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.

As a philosopher, I have a right to ask for a rational explanation of religious faith.

God in His wisdom made the fly And then forgot to tell us why.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.