Nancy Pearcey famous quotes

All of science is largely formalized common sense.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Common Sense #Common

The first step in conforming our intellect to God's truth is to die to our vanity, pride, and craving for respect from colleagues and the public. We must let go of the worldly motivations that drive us, praying to be motivated solely by a genuine desire to submit our minds to God's Word - and then to use that knowledge in service to others.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Letting Go #Motivation #Pride

The human mind inherently seeks intelligible order. Thus the conviction that such an order exists to be found is a crucial assumption.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Order #Mind #Assumption

Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#People #Competition #Mediocrity

In many churches, the message of justification- how to get right with God- is preached over and over again. But much less is said about sanctification- how to live after you're converted.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Church #Messages #Said

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Philosophy #Data #Tests

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Enlightenment #Substitutes #Thinker

Mitchell claimed that her materialist view leads to “humbleness.” But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Views #Robots #Humbleness

Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God. As theologian Robert Letham writes, “Only a God who is triune can be personal.... A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person.” Therefore it “has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Writing #Love Is #Way

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Feelings #Mind #World

Yet church youth groups rarely teach apologetics, majoring instead on games and goodies.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Games #Church #Groups

Materialists try to live in the lower story NON-MATERIAL WORLD Subjective, Superstitious, Mental Constructs MATERIAL WORLD Objective, Scientific, Knowable Facts
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Trying #World #Facts

To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Idols #Phrases #Consequence

Atheists often denounce Christianity as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Atheist #Reality #Views

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Reality #Giving #People

But things that are intrinsically good can also become idols-if we allow them to take over any of God's functions in our lives.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Idols #Function

Public education grants secular worldviews an exclusive monopoly in the classroom.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Classroom #Monopoly #Worldview

Schools ought to teach students to challenge secular ideologies masquerading as science in the classroom.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#School #Challenges #Students

The defense of marriage is the defense of freedom. Neither of which is obsolete.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Defense #Obsolete

The best organizations regard the nurturing of their employees as a spiritual mandate.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Spiritual #Organization #Employee

If pro-abortionists want to commit intellectual suicide and deny scientific facts, that's their problem. But there's no reason a civilized society should fund their anti-scientific outlook - or accept its inhumane consequences.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Suicide #Intellectual #Want

As with every aspect of our sanctification, the renewal of the mind may be painful and difficult. It requires hard work and discipline, inspired by a sacrificial love for Christ and a burning desire to build up His body, the Church. Developing a Christian worldview means submitting our entire self to God, in an act of devotion and service to Him.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Mean #Hard Work

A merely symbolic religion does not threaten the ruling regime of materialistic science.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Doe #Materialistic #Ruling

No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Teacher #School #Government

Redemption is as comprehensive as Creation and Fall. God does not save our souls while leaving our minds to function on their own. He redeems the whole person. Conversion is meant to give new direction to our thoughts, emotions, wills and habits.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Fall #Giving #Soul

Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Religious #Culture #Evolution

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Religious #Reality #Spurgeon

Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Real #Mean

In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Religious #Odds #Historical

My aim in homeschooling is to give my children the ability to be an adult learner, a skill set that will last the rest of their lives.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Children #Skills #Giving

Developing a Christian worldview means submitting our entire self to God, in an act of devotion and service to Him.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Mean #Self

Knowing the truth has meaning only as a first step to living the truth day by day.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Knowing #Firsts #Steps

Urban areas tend to attract members of the 'knowledge class' - people who work with ideas, data, information
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Data #Class #Ideas

The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Culture #Way

America faces a fundamental choice: either the blessings of liberty or the servitude of liberalism. In the political struggle for survival, one or the other is headed for extinction.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Struggle #Blessing #America

Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Degradation #Way

The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Views #World

Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#People #Christianity #Idiom

Americans have grown impatient with the relentless politicizing of every area of life.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Impatient #Relentless

During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Easter #Jesus

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Derivatives #Morality #Stem

Artists are often the barometers of society.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Artist #Barometer

We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Block #Intellectual #Needs

When the only form of cultural commentary Christians offer is moral condemnation, no wonder we come across to non-believers as angry and scolding.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Moral #Wonder

The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Mean #Tolerance #Arena

The costs of marriage breakdown are borne by the entire society, and therefore it is reasonable for the entire society to demand support for marriage - to insist that it is privileged both culturally and legally.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Support #Cost #Demand

Many journalists are influenced by a myopic multiculturalism that is suspicious of anything Western, while giving the benefit of the doubt to non-Western societies.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Giving #Doubt #Myopic

The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Pieces #Blind #Theory

The Tea Party has imparted political energy to common-sense American constitutionalism.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Party #Common Sense #Political

The White House should always be a friend to American freedom.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#White #House #Should

To be intellectual does not require one to be alienated and oppositional.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Intellectual #Doe

America has always welcomed anyone willing to assimilate to its national character. But radical Islam rejects assimilation and is bent on the conquest of our national character.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Character #America #Islam

America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#America #Political #Information

Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Oxford #Paris #Intellectual

Homeschoolers are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers. They are self-motivated and self-directed, independent-minded and creative. They are not content to turn their education of their children over to the government.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Children #Independent #Government

We do not create marriage from scratch. Instead, in the elegant language of the marriage ceremony, we 'enter into the holy estate of matrimony.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Scratches #Language #Holy

In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter - which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking 'enlightenment' meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Attitude #Suffering #Enlightenment

The Rosetta Stone of Christian social thought is the Trinity.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Christian #Stones #Social

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
-- Nancy Pearcey

#Literature #Jargon #Sake