Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft (1937-) is an American Catholic apologist, philosopher, professor, and theologian. He became Catholic after studying early Christianity. Kreeft has written over eighty books including the Handbook of Christian Apologetics.


'Chance' is nothing but an expression of human ignorance. We don't know the reasons and causes and design of all things, because we are not God.

'Thy will be done' is the essential prayer of the saint; 'my will be done' is the essential demand of the sinner.

Brilliant minds often reject Christianity because they don't want it to be true, because it is no longer fashionable[,] or because it commands obedience, repentance and humility.

But these two dramas--becoming a Christian and becoming a Catholic--are two steps in the same process and in the same direction, like being born and growing up.

Evil can be eradicated from the world at large only when it is eradicated from the hearts and lives of individual human beings. Only when there is virtue in souls can there be peace and happiness in society.

For that is what truth is: conformity of thought to reality.

If all values are only subjective, so is the value of tolerance.

If the burden of proof is always on the one who believes any idea, then that principle should also apply to the belief in the idea of skepticism.

If we never suffer, we become spiritually stupid.

If we think it is impossible to love stupid, ugly, selfish, bothersome people, we are wrong, because there is one stupid, ugly, selfish, bothersome person that we do succeed in loving all the time: the one in the mirror.

If you 'don't get anything out of church,' you don't understand the reason for going to church in the first place. We go to church to worship. Worship is not like entertainment: worship is not getting something but giving something.

If you are not a wild and crazy fanatic when it comes to giving yourself to God, you are not practicing the heart of Christianity. If you are a fanatic about anything else, you are an idolater.

If you can't translate it into words a fisherman would understand, you don't understand it yourself.

If you do not know how great marriage is, you cannot know how terrible divorce is.

In every culture in history, the saints, who most resemble Christ, give the most offense...because all cultures, like all individuals, are fallen and sinful, in many different ways.

Indiscriminate inclusion or indiscriminate exclusion are equally unthinking.

It is the difference between art and science. Art creates truth, science discovers truth. We discover giraffes but we create hobbits.

It takes reason and will to sin.

Judging God by human political categories is like judging a great symphony on which stanza of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' it most resembles.

Just as pragmatism is unpragmatic and empiricism is not empirical, rationalism is irrational. You can't prove that truth is only what can be proved.

Making saints out of sinners was even greater than making something out of nothing. For nothingness put up no resistance to him, as we did. How much resistance? Look at a crucifix to see what he had to do to conquer that resistance.

Modernists have undermined faith far more effectively than atheists. The wolves in sheep's clothing have carried away many more sheep than the honest wolves.

Names are not arbitrary labels. Names are meanings. We grow into our names, or we fail to grow into them; we live out our names, or we fail to live them out.

Objective does not mean 'known by all' or 'believed by all.' Even if everyone believes a lie, a lie is still a lie.

Of all the symptoms of decay in our decadent civilization, subjectivism is the most disastrous of all. A mistake can possibly be discovered and amended if and only if truth exists and can be known and is loved and searched for.

Once we stop believing that morality has a basis in objective reality, once we start believing that morality is nothing more than subjective feelings and wishes, once we reduce justice from a cosmic law to a private preference, we no longer see it as binding or fear to disobey it when it is inconvenient.

People are rightly punished for one and only one ultimate reason: because they are loved.

Platonists, Gnostics[,] and Hindus all believe that the soul is better without the body than with it. They are wrong. A human soul without a body is not a complete self…

Sex is for babies as well as for love. That's a 'Duh!' to every culture but our own.

That is the surest proof of Original Sin and our fallenness. We all know that love is the key to happiness, and we all want more happiness rather than less, yet we love less rather than more.

The chief effect of modern 'sex education' is ignorance: ignorance of the single most obvious and important fact about sex, so that babies are now seen as 'accidents.'

The essence of love is not a feeling but a choice, a willing.

The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Liberals make the same mistake and judge neither. But if you don't judge the sin, you don't care about the sinner. If you don't hate the cancer, you don't love the patient.

The passions are not evil but they are stupid. They need a teacher.

The rhetoric about 'progressive' and 'regressive' hardly deserves comment. Those who tell truth by the clock or the calendar are practicing chronological snobbery.

The up-to-date science of one century soon becomes the primitivism of the next.

There is an implicit but astonishing arrogance in the idea that all the apostles, all the church fathers[,] and all the millions of ordinary Christians were fundamentally mistaken about Christ for nineteen centuries, and only a few theologians, sitting at their desks, in a very different culture, nineteen centuries later, finally understood him.

There is no more contradiction between Christianity's hard-nosed doctrines and its softhearted love than there is between the hard objective truths of anatomy and the surgeon's compassion for the patient.

This makes altars and wombs the two most sacred places on earth, because there God repeatedly performs his two greatest miracles, transubstantiation and the creation of immortal souls.

We are never so inescapably ourselves as when we are alone with God.

We are not angels; that is why we should not be 'spiritualists.' We are also not animals; that is why we should not be materialists.

We are not saved by reading and trying to live the Sermon on the Mount, i.e., by imitation.... God gave us not just words but The Word; not just a philosopher but a martyr; not just His mind but His Body.

We are the only spirits that have bodies and the only animals that have spiritual souls. We are the lowest and stupidest angel and the highest and smartest animal, or rather, we are neither; we are ourselves.

We must hate sin because we love sinners. The more you love the patient, the more you hate the disease, whether 'the patient' is a body or a soul.

[The early Christians] willingly died for their 'conspiracy.' Nothing proves sincerity like martyrdom.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.