Steven B. Cowan > Quotes

“Socrates repeatedly emphasized the point that moral knowledge is not mere acquisition of information but personal change. To know the good is to do it, Socrates declared. That is, if you really know the right thing to do in a situation, then your behavior will prove it. To act immorally is to prove your ignorance.”
― Steven B. Cowan, The Love of Wisdom: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy

“The goal of apologetics is to evoke or strengthen faith, not merely to bring intellectual persuasion. Directed toward unbelievers, it is an aspect of evangelism; toward believers, it is training in godliness. It”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“and nothing is more detrimental to our witness than when our life betrays our message by our failing to show the gentleness and love of Jesus.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“Certainly it is not obvious that the biblical God doesn’t exist. How could anybody establish the nonexistence of God? Negatives are notoriously hard to prove. You would need omniscience to know that there is no God anywhere in the universe. And, of course, if you were omniscient, then you would be God, and the contrary would be proven.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“Those who deny God do so, not because they lack evidence, but because their hearts are rebellious. In”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the low entropy conditions present in the Big Bang having come about as a result of chance are around one chance in 1010(123).9 The number 1010(123) is so huge a number that even if a zero were inscribed on every subatomic particle in the entire universe, one could not even approach writing down this number.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“the paradigm of irrationality is Satan himself. Satan knows more about God than any of us. He is not stupid: certainly he knows that rebels against God are doomed. Yet he persists in his rebellion anyway. So, intelligent as he may be, he is the very paradigm of foolishness.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“One cannot argue for an ultimate standard by appealing to a different standard. That would be inconsistent.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“hallucinations”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“The point again is this: One may talk and even act like a relativist until someone treats him in terms of his own principles—then watch the relativist’s reaction!”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“Continuing, hallucinations are rooted in the preconditions of one’s hopeful expectations, but the disciples despaired at the death of Jesus and did not expect him to rise.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“So the unbeliever’s problem is first ethical, and only secondarily intellectual. His intellectual problems stem from his ethical unwillingness to acknowledge the evidence. Unbelief distorts human thought.”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics

“This is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us… We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit” (1 John 3:24; 4:13).”
― Steven B. Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics