Commentary

Interview with one of my favorite Christian scholars, Paul Copan

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I found the interview here, thanks to Brian Auten’s weekly Apologetics 315 round-up, which is a must-read every week.

Excerpt:

Dayton: Outside of my apologetic endeavors, I work with middle school and high school students. As a rule, I keep copies of your book “True For You But Not For Me” on hand to give away to either students interested in learning more about apologetics or to unbelievers looking to explore Christianity. What other books have written that you could recommend be used in this manner?

Paul Copan: I appreciate your keeping copies of “True for You” handy!  I’ve written several books at a more popular level that either deal with a wide range of common criticisms or slogans leveled against Christianity, and I try to make more accessible topics like Christian philosophy of religion or dealing with Old Testament ethical problems.  So here are the other books to check out:

“That’s Just Your Interpretation” (Baker)
“How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong?” (Baker)
“When God Goes to Starbucks: An Introduction to Everyday Apologetics” (Baker)
“Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion” (Chalice Press)
“Is God a Moral Monster? Understanding the Old Testament God” (Baker, January 2011)

Dayton: Speaking of books you have written, is there anything new in the works? Do you have any forthcoming books you could tell us about?

Paul Copan: For a fuller picture of what I’m working on, people can check out my website: www.paulcopan.com.  I’m on Twitter (I tweet weekly); so people can keep up with my writings and speaking engagements that way.  I’m very excited about my book, Is God a Moral Monster? (forthcoming with Baker in January 2011).  The noted Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham (University of Gloucestershire) has given this endorsement:  “Lucid, lively, and very well informed, this book is the best defence of Old Testament ethics that I have read.  A must-read for all preachers and Bible study leaders.”  Christopher J.H. Wright, a noted Old Testament scholar (specializing in Old Testament ethics) and author of Old Testament Ethics for the People of God and The God I Don’t Understand, has this blurb: “This is the book I wish I had written myself. It is simply the best book I have read that tackles the many difficulties that the Old Testament presents to thinking and sensitive Christians and that give such ammunition to the opponents of all religious faith…. I strongly recommend this book. We have wanted and needed it for a long time.”

I am coediting another book with William Lane Craig: Come Let Us Reason.  This is the third apologetics book we’ve edited for B&H Academic (the other two are Passionate Conviction and Contending with Christianity’s Critics); it is filled with cutting-edge essays on important topics such as issues surrounding the Qur’an’s authority, Jesus’ resurrection as a pagan myth, postmodernism, problems with naturalism, and so on.

I’m coauthoring a book on the moral argument with Mark Linville (Continuum), and another book on biblical ethics with Robertson McQuilkin called Living Wisdom (InterVarsity Press).  I’m also contributing several chapters to various books: on the Protestant view on human dignity (Routledge); on why ethics needs God (Oxford University Press); on theism’s contribution to bioethics (Routledge); two on the problem of the Canaanites (B&H Academic and another to be determined); on the moral argument (a short article) in The Dictionary of Christian Theology (Cambridge).  I’ve also contributed a series of articles on Old Testament ethics to Enrichment Journal.

I recently contributed a chapter “A Time for Truth” in The Complete Christian Guidebook to Understanding Homosexuality, edited by Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche (Harvest House) and a chapter on the moral argument to Mike Licona’s and Bill Dembski’s The Evidence for God (Baker).

Paul Copan is not only one the nicest guys, but he is also quite tough and combative about his faith. A real fire-breathing evangelical who writes about things that are relevant to rank and file. Whenever I send out beginner apologetics packages, I always include lots of Paul Copan books because his books are the most practical. For evangelicals who like to defend their faith to their co-workers and friends, Paul Copan is a must-read.

The other guys who write good books for beginners are Lee Strobel and Sean McDowell. All practical evangelicals used to fielding questions.

News

Ontario government gives IKEA $685,000 per year in solar power subsidies

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Political Map of Canada

Story from the National Post. (H/T Small Dead Animals via ECM)

Excerpt:

The Swedish retail giant IKEA announced yesterday it will invest $4.6-million to install 3,790 solar panels on three Toronto area stores, giving IKEA the electric-power-producing capacity of 960,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. According to IKEA, that’s enough electricity to power 100 homes. Amazing development. Even more amazing is the economics of this project. Under the Ontario government’s feed-in-tariff solar power scheme, IKEA will receive 71.3¢ for each kilowatt of power produced, which works out to about $6,800 a year for each of the 100 hypothetical homes. Since the average Toronto home currently pays about $1,200 for the same quantity of electricity, that implies that IKEA is being overpaid by $5,400 per home equivalent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of green economics and the magical business of carbon emission reduction. Each year, IKEA will receive $684,408 under Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green energy monster — for power that today retails for about $115,000. At that rate, IKEA will recoup $4.6-million in less than seven years — not bad for an investment that can be amortized over 20.

No wonder solar power is such a hot industry. No wonder, too, that the province of Ontario is in a headlong rush into a likely economic crisis brought on by skyrocketing electricity prices. To make up the money paid to IKEA to promote itself as a carbon-free zone, Ontario consumers and industries are on their way to experiencing the highest electricity rates in North America, if not most of the world.
The government’s regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, has prepared secret forecasts of how much Ontario consumers are going to have to pay for electricity over the next five years. The government won’t allow the report to be released. The next best estimate comes from Aegent Energy Advisors Inc., in a study it did for the Canadian Manufactures and Exporters group. Residential rates are expected to jump by 60% between 2010 and 2015. Industrial customers will be looking at a 55% increase.

Going back to 2003, based on numbers dug up by consultant Tom Adams, the price of residential electricity in Ontario hovered around 8.5¢ a kWh in 2003 — the first year of the McGuinty Liberal regime. By 2015, Aegent Energy estimates the price will be up to 21¢, an increase of 135%. Doubling the price of electricity in a decade is no way to spur growth and investment. In this age of global economic competition IKEA may end up with fewer sales of its Billy bookshelves in Toronto because its customers will be bogged down with soaring power bills and a sliding economy.

I wonder how the taxpayers of Ontario, who have just been whacked with the HST, feel about this government waste. By the way, the Ontario Liberal Party is basically analogous the Democrat Party. So this is is going to happen to us, too, if they get their way.

News

New survey finds women more sexually active than men in high school

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Story here in the Sydney Morning Herald. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Year 12 girls are more likely to have had sex than boys, and teenagers are likely to have had sex with more partners than a decade ago, a national survey has shown.

More than 61 per cent of year 12 girls said they had had sex, compared to 44 per cent of boys of that year, the study by LaTrobe University’s faculty of health sciences researchers found.

In a trend the report links to heavier drinking by adolescents, the proportion of sexually active year 12 girls who reported having had sex with three or more partners in the previous year more than doubled to 27 per cent in the decade to 2008. Among boys, 38 per cent said they had had three or more sexual partners in the year.

The survey of 8800 year 10 and year 12 students in 300 schools around Australia was taken in three snapshots between 1997 and 2008.

The proportion of year 10 boys who had had sex rose slightly from 23 per cent to 27 per cent between 1997 and 2008, while for year 10 girls the rise was more significant, up from 16 per cent to 27 per cent.

In year 12, the number of boys who reported having had sex dipped slightly from 47 per cent in 1997 to 44 per cent in 2008, while the rate for girls rose from 48 per cent to 61 per cent.

The report, published in the latest Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, said the increased numbers of students having multiple sexual partners was significantly higher than that found in a large survey in the US and may be linked to heavier drinking among Australian teenagers.

”In Australia, rates of alcohol consumption among secondary students have increased markedly, as has the proportion of young people engaging in sex while under the influence of alcohol or drugs – these factors may be associated with the increases observed in sexual activity here,” the report says.

“Year 12” is what Australians call their final year of high school. Well, given what we now know about virginity and marital stability, this is the end of marriage in Australia, and that means that children will not be growing up in stable environments. Remember, feminism is the cause of female promiscuity – it was feminists who wanted to destroy marriage by forcing women to “have sex like men” in order to obliterate gender differences, and the “unequal gender roles” inherent in the institution of marriage. Feminists spearheaded sex-education, contraception and abortion. Feminist academics, feminist lawmakers and feminist policies pushed women into pre-marital sex. And this undermines chivalry, chastity and marriage.

I recently read a news story about a Duke University woman who engaged in hook-up sex with a variety of athletes. (I cannot write about it or link to it, it is so graphic). And the thing that stood out about the story for me was the woman’s criteria for men. It was all about physical appearance, entertainment and amusement, and sexual performance. (She also gave points for performance at sports activities and popularity on campus). These are the new criteria that women are using for men. They do not want to be led, they want to be entertained. They do not want marriage, they want fun.

This is the point where we have gotten to, where some women in the finest universities regularly take drugs and alcohol and have anonymous sex with men who mean nothing to them and who have nothing to do with them afterward. There is nothing that a man is supposed to do with a woman that is related to marriage or family. The man’s normal tasks of protection, providing and moral/spiritual leadership are now the role of the state, the courts and the public school system. A man’s role is sperm donor and tax payer.

The part that scares me the most is how a woman can choose to have sex with men like this, and maybe eventually co-habitate with one of them just by the force of inertia, and somehow get to the point where men are to blame for this. Aren’t women responsible for their own poor choices with men and sex? It’s very disconcerting to men who are marriage-minded to see the MAJORITY of women freely choosing to make themselves unsuitable for marriage. How can the destruction of marriage ever stop if women keep blaming everyone except themselves for their own bad decisions about men and sex? What will happen to the children who have to grow up in the world that feminism has made?

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