Quotes from Paul Copan

Canaanite "genocide" • the binding of Isaac • a jealous, egocentric deity • ethnocentrism/racism • chattel slavery • bride-price • women as inferior to men • harsh laws in Israel • the Mosaic law as perfect and permanently binding for all nations • the irrelevance of God for morality

Every philosophy of life will have an anthropology—a stance on what a human is. Do we interpret the human being through the grid of economics and class struggle (Marxism), biology and the struggle to survive (naturalistic Darwinism), or suffering produced by attachment to transitory things (Buddhism)? Are we bundles of experiences, streams of consciousness?

Moral relativism and rights don't mix. Relativism undermines any appeal to rights: If rights exist, relativism is false; if rights exist, where do they come from? Again, we're pointed in the direction of a good God in whose image humans have been made—and thus who sets the parameters regarding our sexuality.

The Christian takes strength and comfort in the fact that God suffers with us and even enters into our suffering—particularly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth on the shameful, humiliating cross. Indeed, a God who doesn't suffer "would make God a demon." An indifferent God would condemn human beings to indifference as well.

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.

I greatly appreciate the work of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. He has observed that many academicians have a disdain for the term popularizer. However, he urges Christian philosophers not to leave their work "buried away in professional journals" but to make it available to the broader Christian community. If they don't connect their work to the life of the church, then they "neglect a crucial and central part of their task as believing philosophers.

While few would actually put it in these terms, faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a sort of decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that makes up for the paltry lack of evidence for what one is trying to believe. By contrast, biblical faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in and commitment to what we have reason to believe is true.

Great harm comes when we keep our young people in a bubble in an effort to shield them from hard questions, or when we dismiss their struggles and exhort them to "pray harder," "read the Bible" or "just believe.

Contrary to popular definitions, true tolerance means 'putting up with error' - not 'accepting all views'. We don't tolerate what we enjoy or endorse - say, chocolate, or roses, or Mozart's music. By definition, we tolerate what we don't approve of or what we believe to be false.

To blithely say "it could have happened" that a life-permitting, life-producing, and life-sustaining universe is the product of chance is naive. It fails to take seriously all that is required to get from "zero" to a single-celled organism to Homo sapiens.

Lewis, C. S. "The Weight of Glory." In The Weight of Glory and Other

The never-angered person is morally deficient.

Some are convinced that the universe has no point. The cosmos is indifferent, deaf to our cries and oblivious to our tears. Human beings are nothing more than molecules in motion—biological organisms trying to survive and reproduce but destined to eventual extinction along with all else in the universe. Is that the story we should believe?

arguments are a collage of rhetorical barbs that don't really form a coherent argument.

a quick check of Dawkins's documentation reveals a lot more time spent on Google than at Oxford University's Bodleian Library.