Atheist Arguments Quotes & Sayings

There are three ways in which we are honest. And those three ways will make up the bulk of this book. The three ways are 1) living based on our values (lifestyle); 2) becoming comfortable with our intentions (boldness); and 3) by expressing our sexuality freely (communication). — Mark Manson

Judging from the tendency and effect of his arguments, an atheist does not appear positively to refuse that a God may be ... His verdict on the doctrine of God is only that it is not proven. It is not that it is disproven. He is but an atheist. He is not an anti-theist. — Thomas Chalmers

Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god. — William Lane Craig

Love is just like God. Some believe in it, some don't. You can only feel love and that too if you are open to its existence. Likewise, an atheist cannot feel the presence of the divine because his mind is shut to the possibility of there being one. — Anurag Shourie

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. — C.S. Lewis

Attention to the present moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love. — Pema Chodron

But the lack of faith could just as well be a crutch for non-believers, allowing them to live their lives without any concept of accountability and giving them some sort of false confidence. The different is that while Catholicism has an abundance of intellectual underpinnings to support its arguments, anti-Catholicism and atheist have few if any. — Michael Coren

I have the gift of laughter. I can make people laugh at will. In good times and in bad. And that I don't question. It was a gift from God. — Buddy Hackett

In order for a god to be all-knowing, he must know even the fact of his own omniscience. But can he do this? He may know the totality of facts constituting the world; call this Y. But in order to know that he has mastered Y, he must also know that 'There are no facts unknown to me' - and this is beyond Y.
It seems impossible that a god (or anyone) could ever be sure that nothing exists beyond his ken. It makes no sense to imagine [a god] arriving at this limit, peering beyond it (at what?), and satisfying himself no further facts exist. But without this certainty he cannot be sure of his own omniscience, and so does not know everything.
A theist might argue that his god has created all the facts in existence. But an omniscient god would have to be sure of even this - that he is the sole creator, and that there are no facts unknown to him. And how could he come to this knowledge? — Roland Puccetti

Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind. God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism. — Albion Woodbury Small

I think traveling the world has helped to keep Public Enemy alive. We've never solely depended on the United States. — Chuck D

The more I read arguments for atheism, the more I am convinced it takes a very strong faith to be an atheist. And atheism seems to me the least reasonable of all faiths. — Corrado Ghinamo

I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.
However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.
For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future. — Phillip Adams

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics ...
Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence - some supernatural realm - you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, "To Hell with argument, I have faith." That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.
Objectivism advocates reason as man's sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that's all. — Leonard Peikoff

Properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be, and not infrequently is, an agnostic. — Robert Flint

Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God - especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side - is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact. — David Bentley Hart

In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, an agnostic or an atheist may be heard to strenuously argue, 'But the Bible is just a book.' Similar arguments may be raised against other holy books. But they all are too ironic, by half. A book is the Bible. — Gerald Weaver

And that destination for which we should strive is one of a successful life not necessarily a life of success. — Andy Andrews

The few cures we have recorded could be multiplied many times over, many of them experienced by people who had failed to find relief through conventional medical treatment. If a story from Scotland is to be believed, the success of one holy well, St. Drostan's at Newdosk (Angus), was so distasteful to the local doctors that they decided to poison the well. When the people heard of their intention, they banded together to attack and kill the doctors! — Colin Bord

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche).

Major philosophers of Flew's generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs.

In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God's existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew's innovative publications did. — Antony Flew

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say "God." This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time. — Carl Sagan

Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain. — A.C. Grayling

He ... breathed in
heavy gulps of air to prove to himself that he was three-dimensional. — Irving Stone

Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain. — Alister E. McGrath