Every craving that we experience finds a suitable object that satisfies and fulfills that longing.  Our body hungers; and there is food. We thirst; and there is water.  We are born brimming with curiosity; and there is a world to explore an the sensory equipment with which to do so.  Other ennobling passions both encompass and transcend bodily longing.  We crave intimacy and companionship; and there is human love, as essential to happiness and thriving as any nutrient.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 12-13

If it really is true that [the human] is merely the inevitable culmination of an improbably chemical reaction...involv[ing]'merely material' atoms, then the fact that he has been able to formulate the idea of 'an improbable chemical reaction' and to trace himself back to it is remarkable indeed.  That chemicals which are 'merely material' should come to understand their own nature is a staggering supposition.

Joseph Wood Crutch, The Great Chain of Life

Quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 11

Astrophysics may give a credible account of the origin of the stars, and Darwin might explain the development of the human eye, but neither can tell us why the night sky strikes us with soul-peircing quietude, or why our mind aches to understand what is so remote from bodily need.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 11

Neither the new believer nor the new doubter has necessarily progressed or reached enlightenment.  Nor has either one necessarily forced the evidence to fit a preconceived model of belief or doubt.  Rather, every time we turn our hearts and minds in the direction of giving meaning to our experiences, we are merely--and yet profoundly--arranging the evidence into a pattern--the pattern that makes the most sense to us at a given point on our journey.  Evidence does not construct itself into meaningful patterns.  That is our work to perform.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 9

Clearly, to aspire to be God is a sin; to desire to be like God is filial love and devotion.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 7

Life is not a lottery in which only the fortunate few born at the right time and place receive a winning ticket.  God's plan is wise enough, His love generous enough, that none will be left out.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 7

The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true.  There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.  An overwhelming preponderance of evidence on either side would make our choice as meaningless as would a loaded gun pointed at our heads.  The option to believe must appear on one's personal horizon like the fruit of paradise, perched precariously between sets of demands held in dynamic tension.

Fortunately, in this world, one is always provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion a life of credible conviction or dismissive denial.  We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals to our personal values, our yearnings, our fears, our appetites, and our egos.  What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.  That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.

...Only in the case of us mortals, there is something to tip the scale.  There is something to predispose us to a life of faith or a life of disbelief.  There is a heart that, in these conditions of equilibrium and balance, equally "enticed by the one or the other," is truly free to choose belief of skepticism, faith or faithlessness.

...Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts...The greatest act of self revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 4

The more we know empirically about the world, the more faith has become necessary. This is true on the level of both microbiology and physics as well as on the intergalactic level of astronomy. Empirical knowledge of the workings and character of physical life only keeps providing more evidence of our inability to find the rock-bottom reality of our material existence. So while our senses tell us that we live in a world that renders us meaningless and insignificant and that seems to defy our best efforts to make it intelligible, as if it were being perpetually made by a God too busy spinning off his many life forms to pay attention to our puny human lives, ...and have the audacity, bordering on insanity, to believe that our actions matter, that we can and should act on the world’s behalf.

George Handley, "Biocentrism at Sea"