"The Case For Faith" by Lee Strobel

• Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.
• The classic defense of God against the problem of evil is that it’s not logically possible to have free will and no possibility of moral evil.
• The source of evil is not God’s power but mankind’s freedom.
• The point to remember is that creating a world where there's free will and no possibility of sin is a self-contradiction--and that open the door to people choosing evil over God, with suffering being the result.
• Ironically, it’s the best people who most readily recognize and admit their own shortcomings and sin.
• In the proper sense a miracle is an event which is not producible by the natural causes that are operative at the time and place that the event occurs.
• The problem with Mormonism is basically one of credibility because of the unreliability of Joseph Smith and a blatant lack of corroboration.
• Ultimately the way a Christian really knows that Christianity is true is through the self-authenticating witness of God’s Spirit. Other evidence, though still valid, is basically confirmatory.
• If Darwinists are to keep the Creator out of the picture, they have to provide a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life.
• There’s one sure way to determine whether a prophet is truly a spokesman for God or a charlatan trying to deceive the masses: can he produce clear-cut miracles?
• It’s not for a lack of evidence that people turn from God; it’s from their pride or their will.
• If truth does not exclude, then no assertion of a truth claim is being made; it’s just an opinion that is being stated. Any time you make a truth claim, you mean something contrary to it is false. Truth excludes its opposite.
• If truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.
• The four fundamental questions that every religion seeks to answer: origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.
• We tend to do the kind of comparisons by which we always emerge better than someone else, and so we think we’re good.
• One of the most staggering truths of the Scriptures is to understand that we do not earn our way to heaven.
• Basically, people around the globe tend to adopt the religion of their parents.
• Make no mistake: hell is punishment--but it’s not a punishing. It’s not torture. The punishment of hell is separation from God, bringing shame, anguish, and regret. But the pain that’s suffered will be due to the sorrow from the final, ultimate, unending banishment from God, his kingdom, and the good life for which we were created in the first place.
• Hell is something God was forced to make because people chose to rebel against him and turn against what was best for them and the purpose for which they were created.
• My point is that the degree of someone's just punishment is not a function of how long it took to commit the deed; rather, it’s a function of how severe the dead itself was.
• Something has intrinsic value if it’s valuable and good in and of itself; something has instrumental value if it’s valuable as a means to an end.
• Believe it or not, everlasting separation from God is morally superior to annihilation
• Whenever you’re trying to understand what an author is teaching, you begin with clear passages that were intended by the author to speak on the question, and then move to unclear passages that may not be intended to teach on the subject.
• God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he’s there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.