“It doesn't matter what we believe about God. It's what He knows about us.”

—  Morris West

London: Coronet Books, 1984, p. 316
The speaker is an eighty-year-old Mother Superior explaining why she allowed the burial in the convent cemetery of a foreign woman, a collaborator in a charitable enterprise, who was an unbeliever.
The World Is Made of Glass (1983)

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Morris West 36
Australian writer 1916–1999

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“We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.”

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. V What is Fitness?, pp. 158-159.
Context: I have given my reasons for thinking that we can probably explain evolution in terms of the capacity for variation of individual organisms, and the selection exercised on them by their environment....
The most obvious alternative to this view is to hold that evolution has throughout been guided by divine power. There are two objections to this hypothesis. Most lines of descent end in extinction, and commonly the end is reached by a number of different lines evolving in parallel. This does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an all mighty one. But the moral objection is perhaps more serious. A very large number of originally free-living Crustacea, worms, and so on, have evolved into parasites. In doing so they have lost, to a greater or less extent, their legs, eyes, and brains, and have become in many cases the course of considerable and prolonged pain to other animals and to man. If we are going to take an ethical point of view at all (and we must do so when discussing theological questions), we are, I think, bound to place this loss of faculties coupled with increased infliction of suffering in the same class as moral breakdown in a human being, which can often be traced to genetical causes. To put the matter in a more concrete way, Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.

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“The first thing that we know about ourselves is our imperfection.
This is what Descartes meant when he said: 'I know God before I know myself.'
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“The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?””

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If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself.
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