I hate to say this about a Christian apologist like Paul Copan, who has put out some very good apologetic material, but this book was horrendous. I mean it was absolutely terrible. I can't even begin to describe how many poor conclusions were reached and how many poor answers were given to problems raised with Christianity. He had EXTREMELY simplistic and EXAGGERATED explanations of what other faiths held (especially Eastern Pantheism, which he completely misrepresented).
On pages 98-99 Copan discusses the problem of natural disasters. Copan’s explanations in the previous parts of this chapter seem to deal only with moral evils which result from human choices, so here he attempts to address the issue of evil which seems not to stem from human choices. He argues that natural disasters are actually necessary to keep life on this planet alive (98). For example, earthquakes are needed to recycle essential nutrients back into the continents (98). I personally do not find his argument very convincing. I think that any Christian would need to tie natural evils into the Fall as Schaffer does in Genesis in Space and Time, where he presents natural evils as stemming from a rift which developed between man and nature as a result of sin. If we do not do this, it does not make much sense for God to curse the ground as a result of Adam’s sin, for it would already have been cursed if nothing in nature changed as a result of the Fall. Further, as a philosophical objection, surely God could have created a world where natural disasters were not necessary to sustain the earth. Copan responds to this by saying that we cannot know that a world with this condition is possible (98-99), but does he really believe that there will be natural disasters on the new earth? I sincerely hope that he has better expectations than that.
Copan also claims that all three members of the Trinity got together before Jesus became incarnate and decided what Jesus self-limitations should be (135). He makes it sound like God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit had this little business meeting and voted on what Jesus should have to give up in becoming human. I cannot imagine what Copan could possibly use to support this view, as we hardly have access to the logs from the Trinity’s meetings, nor do I see why this was a necessary point to be thrown in with the rest.
Copan had some absolutely horrible theological implications spread all over the book. For example, he had a chapter discussing how it could be that Jesus was tempted, since the Bible says that God cannot be tempted. Copan’s idea that Jesus mistakenly thought that he could sin when he in reality could not is not a view that seems particularly attractive to me. Copan seems to be stretching things a bit too far when he claims that Jesus simply thought that he could sin, therefore the temptation was real to him (141). Copan decided beforehand that Jesus could not sin because God cannot sin (though he fails to address the problem which he opens the chapter with in saying “if God cannot sin, then it seems he is not really free or all-powerful” [138]), and is forced to reduce himself to pulling some strange stunts to make his ends meet. Unfortunately for Copan, I do not think that concluding that Jesus must have been mistaken in his beliefs is an adequate way of making his ends meet. If Jesus was mistaken about his ability to sin, why should he not be mistaken about other things as well? Copan’s solution seems to simply open up an even larger can of worms than the one he is attempting to close with his answer.
Some of his answers to problems raised with Christianity are simply rediculous. For example, in the chapter discussing the Cananite genoicide, Copan says that the Israelite soldiers did not go around raping and brutalizing the Canaanites, as the Crusaders did to the Muslims (165-166). They were not fighting (in theory) out of love for bloodshed, but in obedience to God, and they fought under God’s morality even in battle (165-166). While this is helpful information, I am not sure that it really alleviates the problem addressed in this chapter: “how could a loving God command genocide?” I am not sure that a skeptic interested in the Christian faith would be comforted if we told him “well, God may have commanded genocide and killed every man, woman, and child of Canaanite blood, but He had the Israelites do it kindly and they weren’t even cruel to the Canaanites when they killed them.” It just seems to me the objection raised is that God commanded genocide, not that God had them killed cruelly. The killing of the Canaanites is the main issue, not how they died.
I could go on and on. It was simply a poor book, and if one accepted all the answers and explanations that he gave, one would end up as a open theist who believes in contradictory ideas and is ill prepared to actually give an answer for his faith when challenged by a skeptic. I cannot imagine many skeptics stupid enough to accept most of the answers that Copan gives in this book. There are good answers to the questions he addresses, he just does not give them.
Overall grade: D-
