Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

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

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.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

God's only excuse is that he does not exist.

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?

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don't know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

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

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

Almost every time I am in a lectureship on a college campus, young people will say, If there is a God and if he is a loving and merciful God, how do you explain the problems of suffering and death and all the tragedies that happen to people?

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.

God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways.

To justify God's ways to man.

Why do people hate God?... One, they hate the moral standard. Two, they hate the way he's transforming the world even in the midst of suffering and tragedy.

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

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.

Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.

You can't lie to God - it's ridiculous.

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.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.