Quotes by J. Budziszewski

Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies dont. We dont eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occams Razor but Occams Beard: Multiply entities unnecessarily.

Atheist: I hear the voice of conscience, but I deny the reality of God. St. Thomas: That is like listening to someone speak, but denying that anyone is there. Atheist: Thats right; nobody is. St. Thomas: Then you deny not only God but conscience, because you consider it a hallucination. Atheist: I misspoke. What I meant to say is that when I am listening to conscience, I am really listening to myself. St. Thomas: Then you still deny conscience, because you deny its authority to judge you. Instead you claim to judge yourself, but no one can be judge in his own case.

That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.

in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as blind and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was reason alone. One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove.Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.

A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.

How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we dont know it just from being told, we dont know it from the five senses, and we dont know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is underived.

Or perhaps the syndrome we are witnessing is preemptive capitulation: If we reduce our conscience to rubble before the bad men get here, they will have nothing to destroy.

If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against Gods inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused.

If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.