QUOTATION: Satan

Satan is equally pleased by our overestimating him and our underestimating him.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Liturgical Music

All social change is preceded by musical revolution. The same goes for liturgy. We are what and how we sing.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Society Cannot Exist Without God

If God exists, and deserves the name, He is to every human good what electricity is to an appliance, and religion is the plug. The decline in happiness, in morality, and in longevity is inevitable: religious death, or supernatural death, or spiritual death always leads to some kind of natural or cultural death. No nonreligious, anti-religious society has ever existed. One reason is that religion has always been the strongest ground for morality and no society can survive without morality, in fact without some kind of natural law morality, since the prevailing morality of our experts is not morality at all, only psychology.

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in "What I shall do with atheism is to refute it” California Catholic Daily, August 4, 2016

QUOTATION: Conception and Transubstantiation

Biological conception and spiritual consecration, or what Catholics call transubstantiation—are the holiest moments in time because God continually creates miracles at those two moments; and those two places—a woman’s body and a Catholic altar—are the two holiest places in the world because that’s where he does it.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: Hell

A third misunderstanding is that hell does not mean that God tortures people there. He does not want their torture. The Bible says that “God is not willing that any should perish.” But that which He essentially is and cannot change—truth and unselfish love—may torture them there, because they have made themselves into the kind of persons that do not love these things but hate them. But God can’t help that: He can’t turn off his love any more than the sun can turn off its light. Thus, paradoxically, God’s essential, eternal character—truth and love—is both the supreme heavenly foundation for moral goodness and its joyful reward and  the thing that tortures the damned in hell, which is the supreme evil and misery.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: The Limits of Science

Though unscientific thought may be inferior by scientific standards, science itself can’t prove whether or not there are other standards by which other kinds of thought might be superior.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist,  2014

QUOTATION: Science Does Not Disprove the Supernatural

How could science, which validly explores the physical universe and only the physical universe, possibly prove either that there is or that there is not something else real besides the physical universe? It has no data beyond scientific data. It can’t, by its very nature. Saying there are no souls “science sees no souls” is like saying there can be no souls because souls do not leave fossils or emit radiation. It’s a really simple point: How could a fish whose experience is confined to its fishbowl know  whether there’s world outside the fishbowl?

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: Scientism

Scientism seems to me to suffer from two fatal flaws. One is logical self-contradiction. For scientism is not a scientific claim about the universe but a philosophical claim, a claim in epistemology, about human knowledge, about the relation between human knowledge and science (or the scientific method). The claim is that only scientific knowledge, knowledge by the scientific method is reliable. But that claim cannot be verified or falsified by the scientific method. There is no empirical data, no mathematical measurement, and no logical reduction of the opposite claim (that knowledge extends beyond science) to a self-contradiction.  If all knowledge claims that cannot in principle be verified or falsified by the scientific method are unreliable and should be rejected, then that very statement is unreliable and should be rejected.

My other objection is even simpler. How can the reliability of one kind of knowledge (science) disprove the reliability other kinds of knowledge? That’s like the ear telling the eye that it is unreliable just because it can’t hear anything, or like the mystic telling the scientist that he cannot have any valid knowledge of reality because he has never had a mystical experience.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: Materialism

Another argument against epiphenomenalism is that if thought is merely a by-product of matter, a kind of fart of the brain, then you can’t account for the validity of thought—of any thought, and therefore of that thought, too. If we can’t help how our tongues happen to wag because some blind and dumb molecules are pushing it one way rather than another, then why should you pay attention to my words any more than to tea leaves in the fortune-teller’s cup? It seems to me that materialism is akin not to science but to primitive superstition.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: Consciousness

Consciousness, after all, (1) cannot be denied without self-contradiction (that’s Descartes’ point in“I think therefore I am”), but (2) it has none of the properties that characterize that is material (shape, size, mass, etc.), and (3) it has properties that are not material (e.g., “truth”). The existence of consciousness seems to immediately refute materialism.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: The Argument from Consciousness

How does a materialist account for the stubborn fact of consciousness? If it’s nothing but physical brain activity, then what is my consciousness of my physical brain activity? Remember, the knowledge of a thing one of the parts of the thing known. This can be proved by formal logic alone. For the alternative would make accurate knowledge (knowledge that matches the thing known) impossible. For in the very act of knowing all the facts about a thing you create a new fact about that thing: that it was known. And that fact can be only known still by another act of knowing, et cetera ad infinitum.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: Nothing Can Fill Us But God

The big, blazing, terrible truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles.

--Peter Kreeft, “Dr. Kreeft Responds to the Culture’s Objections to Heaven”, IntegratedCatholicLife.Org, July 28, 2015

QUOTATION: The Unforgivable Sin

If God is totally good, he is not Scrooge. He does not forgive some things; he forgives all things. The only possible sin that cannot be forgiven is not accepting forgiveness, which is why in traditional Christian theology, pride is the worst of sins: “I am too good to be forgiven; there is nothing to forgive.”

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in Socrates in the City, ed. Eric Metaxas, 2003

QUOTATION: Judging

The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Modern Americans make the same mistake but judge neither.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Deists

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

--Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

QUOTATION: There Are Only 3 Reasons One is Pro-Choice

There are only three reasons for being pro-choice:

scientific ignorance—appalling ignorance of a scientific fact so basic that nearly everyone in the world knows it;

moral ignorance—appalling ignorance of the most basic of all moral rules;

or legal ignorance—appalling ignorance of one of the most basic of all the functions of law.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Evil

If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is the Creator of evil and He is to be blamed for its existence. No, evil is not a thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more a positive thing than blindness is, but it is just as real.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Mercy

It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.

--Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings

QUOTATION: Theists

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

--Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

QUOTATION: Prayer

I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.

--Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners