The churches had left me cold, but I thought there's got to be a God. I remember going out, this is in Charleston, South Carolina, and my desire then was to be a playwright, and I was studying theater, and I went out one night, late at night, and I asked, "What can God be if there is a God?" I wasn't sure there was a God, but if there is a God, what must he be? Well, he can't be a judge, who's up there just waiting for us to make a mistake so he can clap us into hell. There's got to be something more than that.
If there is a God, there is a map. If God has a map, his map is the true map.
I figure if there is a God, he or she isn’t paying attention to what we build or if we follow some elaborate rules, but copping a ride on our shoulders, watching what we do ever day. Seeing if we took this great big adventure called life and did something interesting with it.
The prayer of the agnostic: "O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul. "
If there is a God, I want to see Him, not only His energy or His light, but Him.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.
i cannot be called upon to know a negative or to prove a negative. if there is a god and you prove it, that's fine. but you don't tell me you can't know that there isn't. i would say yes i know there isn't because i have been given no evidence.
Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.
If there is a God, I want to see him. I don't want to just hear some holy roller shouting about him.
Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. . . Religion is all bunk.
If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant.
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
I'm glad some people have that faith. I don't have that faith. If there is a God, a caring God, then we have to figure he's done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.
Look, I don't know whether God exists. I don't know that. And I tell you one thing, I am not frightened of my beliefs. If there is a God who is threatening me with damnation because I don't believe in Him, so be it. I've lived my life in conscience, and I will suffer damnation willingly in conscience against a tyrannical God who would damn me because, on the basis of the intelligence He gave me, I have come to a conclusion doubting His existence, and I will continue to be a skeptic all of my life.
A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.
