Consider all. Test All. Hold on to the good.

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Dallas Willard on the Cosmological Argument

Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus (HarperOne: 2015).
Go Take each piece out of the segments of the argument that present themselves and then move on to further reasoning. But you must understand that just this part of the argument alone is very important in the modern context, where the driving attitude of atheistic thought is always to reduce reality to the natural world. To have an argument that shows that this is impossible and there must have been some form of self-subsistent being beforehand is a great step forward and, for all practical purposes, undermines atheism in its modern form.

Richard Lewontin on Presumptive Scientific Naturalism

"Billions and Billions of Demons", New York Review of Books, (January 9, 1997), p. 28.

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Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.