Quotes from Paul Copan

Atheist's denial of God's existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist's claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God's existence.

These days, though, tolerance means that you accept the other person's views as being true or legitimate. If you claim that someone is wrong, you can get accused of being intolerant--even though, ironically, the person making the charge of intolerance isn't being accepting of your beliefs.

Atheist's denial of God's existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist's claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God's existence.

Serious circumstances remind us that the difficulty of finding the truth is no excuse for not looking.

The atheist philosopher of science Michael Ruse says that Dawkins's arguments are so bad that he's embarrassed to call himself an atheist.10

Notice how atheists who believe in real right and wrong make a massive intellectual leap of faith. They believe that somehow moral facts were eternally part of the "furniture" of reality but that from impersonal and valueless slime, human persons possessing rights, dignity, worth, and duties were eventually produced.

On closer inspection, the hero status accorded to Abraham, Moses and David in the Old Testament (and echoed in the New Testament) is rooted not in their moral perfection but in their uncompromising dedication to the cause of Yahweh and their rugged trust in the promises of God rather than lapsing into the idolatry of many of their contemporaries.

As New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann once said, "In scholarship as in life, no one can possess the truth except by constantly learning it afresh; and no one can learn it afresh without listening to the people who are his companions on the search for that truth. Community does not necessarily mean agreement."13

It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.

In the words of human rights scholar Max Stackhouse, "Intellectual honesty demands recognition of the fact that what passes as 'secular,' 'Western' principles of basic human rights developed nowhere else than out of key strands of the biblically-rooted religion."9

Passing on the good news of Jesus is not equivalent to saying "I'm better than you." Rather, as the famous saying goes, it's like one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.

We cannot have an authentic witness to the world without having an authentic apologetic of Christianity. Hence, the use of reasonable apologetics and biblical distinctives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of political correctness and cultural contextualization.

On the cross Jesus paid our debt in full. There is no karma to face—Christ's work is sufficient. Christians have this message of joy and hope for our Hindu friends, who would agree: there's absolutely nothing funny about karma.

Today, many American Christians seem to mix up church and state. They believe the community of genuine believers in America is the people of God— both in heaven and on earth. But the nation of America isn't the people of God; we don't live in a theocracy. The sooner Christians realize this, the sooner the church can make a deeper impact as salt and light in society.

Pride, we know, is an inflated view of ourselves—a false advertising campaign promoting ourselves because we suspect that others won't accept who we really are.2 Pride is actually a lie about our own identity or achievements. To be proud is to live in a world propped up with falsehoods about ourselves, taking credit where credit isn't due.

Rodney Stark puts it this way: "To expect to learn anything about important theological problems from Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett is like expecting to learn about medieval history from someone who had only read Robin Hood.

He considers them to be both out of their depth and misrepresenters of the Christian faith: "they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

William Lane Craig, he wrote an essay titled "Dawkins's Delusion," which responds to Dawkins's book The God Delusion. Craig does his best to piece together Dawkins's argument against God's existence, which is really "embarrassingly weak.

Virtually every predominantly Muslim country is either "not free" or "partly free"—with exceptions being Mali and Senegal. Despite the frequently cited Qur'anic passage that says there is "no compulsion in religion

Tackling Old Testament ethics is a challenge. Besides a lot of territory to cover, the ancient Near East seems so strange and even otherworldly! We need a good bit of background discussion to help make better sense of this world and of certain Old Testament texts.

philosophy is "the love of wisdom.

Everyone is a philosopher." Everyone takes a philosophical view of things—a worldview, some call it—even if their philosophical assumptions are subconscious and unexplored.

True humility doesn't deny abilities but rather acknowledges God as the source of these gifts, for which we can't take credit.

Many Christians have put their trust in changing laws rather than, with God's help, changing hearts of fellow sinners for whom Christ died (1 John 2:2). The church in America often depends on legislation to do the work that God calls his people to do. The Spirit's transformation of ourselves and of those around us comes when we love God and neighbor—the very core of our Christian commitment.