Dr. Frank Turek: Logic, Reason, and the Pagan Delusion DMW#199

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So now that we've got the shameless self-promotion out of the way. And we've said hello to all of our listeners today. We have got a special guest. We want to get right into it because I don't want to keep him too long.

He's a best-selling author, apologist, public speaker, radio host. You probably know him from he's the founder and president of crossexamine .org. It is Dr. Frank Turek. How are you, Doc? Greg, I'm great.

How are you?

Good.

I'm excited to have you on. I talk fast. I talk loud. And we get right into it. I'm so glad you could sit down with us for a few minutes. Because really quick before you get into your bio. Just so my listeners know.

Geez, probably my mid to late 20s I think I read. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. That would have been around 2006 or 2007 maybe. I'm 42 now. So I've known of you and been influenced by some of your stuff.

Your writings, your videos for almost 20 years. Now about 18 years. So I appreciate you. So this is kind of full circle for me for now having you on. And get to talk to you for a little bit. And why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself.

Give us a couple minute bio in case they don't know who you are. Let them know a little bit about yourself.

Frank Turek's Background and Ministry

Well, I grew up in New Jersey. So I was Catholic because it's the law.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, when you're from New Jersey, you're either Catholic or Jewish. Growing up there in the 1970s. But I didn't really know who Jesus was. I always believed in God. There had to be a first cause.

I went to college and it went right into the Navy after college. And when in the Navy, I met the son of a Methodist minister. And I had so many questions for him. He finally said, look, you just need to get Josh McDowell books.

Evidence demands a verdict in more than a carpenter. So I read those books and realized that Christianity was indeed true. And then when I got out of the Navy, I ran into Norman Geisler, who at the time was like the Michael Jordan of apologetics.

Which is the defense of the faith, giving evidence that Christianity is true. And he was starting a seminary here in Charlotte, North Carolina. So in 1993, my wife and I and our three sons, who were five, three, and one at the time, moved to Charlotte from the D .C. area in order to attend the seminary.

And then Dr. Geisler and I wound up writing a couple of books together. One is called Legislating Morality. The other is called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. And then in about 2006, I started a ministry called CrossExamine .org, primarily to go to college campuses, high schools, and churches to show people why Christianity is true.

And that's what we still do now.

And what kind of stuff is included with CrossExamine? I mean, obviously, speaking tours. Do you have materials and things like that?

We've got a store. We've got online courses. We have a podcast. We have a TV show. We have a YouTube channel that has about 1 ,900 videos on it. Most of them are Q &A videos from the college campus. I've been to several colleges in Michigan over the years, all over the country.

And what we do is we livestream those events, and then we take the Q &A and break them up into short videos. And so many of them you'll see right on our YouTube channel. CrossExamined, two words, CrossExamined YouTube channel.

CrossExamined YouTube channel. Awesome. Well, that kind of takes us into the first thing I wanted to talk to you about. Because if you do go to your YouTube channel, you will see quite a few, I would assume, either secularist or atheist or agnostic-type students or people coming up to you, asking you a question, and then quite a few times you giving them a response, and I can almost see on their face a physical, like,.

Uh-huh, aha moment.

Now, not always. They're going to argue back, and they dig down deep into their, you know, whatever their traditions are. But every once in a while, quite often, more than I thought, I see people have this kind of moment of, oh, wait a minute, I've never seen it that way, or that makes sense, or that seems logical, right?

And that kind of brings me to my first thought, is I'm a logic guy. I love logic. That's why I love your ministry as well, too. Obviously, it's coupled with faith. How far does that go? First of all, what is logic?

Do we use it for apologetics? And then two, do we have to couple that with anything else? Because it seems like sometimes if you just, you know, argue from a point of logic, the faith portion maybe is lost.

What do you think?

Logic, Faith, and Apologetics

Well, first of all, logic is just a set of tools grounded in the nature of God that we use to sort information we get from our senses.

Okay.

We get information from our senses, and then we use logic to try and discover what the truth that this sense data is telling us from outside of our skull. So that's what logic is. It's how to think properly.

Now, one of the problems, as you know, Greg, in our public school system, we don't teach logic. If we taught logic how to think, the public schools would be a lot better. But instead of teaching kids how to think, we're teaching them what to feel, and that's dangerous.

Look, emotions may make life fun, but logic makes life safe. And the first way to help a student learn the truth about anything is to teach them how to think. So that's what we try and do. We have a course, actually, on our website called Train Your Brain, and it's really for 6th to 8th graders, how to teach them how to think properly.

Because if you teach kids how to think, then ultimately, if they're honest with themselves, they'll arrive at the truth. But let me also point out there's a difference between belief that and belief in.

In other words, there are two kinds of faith. Belief that is getting evidence that God exists, that Jesus rose from the dead, that the Bible's telling the truth. We use evidence for that. But all the belief that in the world won't get your moral transgressions forgiven.

For that, you've got to go from belief that to belief in. You see, even the demons believe that God exists.

That's what James says.

But they tremble, right? They know intellectually better than we do that there's a God. They're in the spiritual realm. But they don't trust in him.

Why?

They don't want to trust in him.

They want to go their own way.

So apologetics, which just means giving a reason for the hope that you have from 1 Peter 3 .15, giving evidence for your position, only goes halfway. It just tells you intellectually that Christianity is true.

But you don't have to accept it. You can know it's true and still go your own way. So the belief that part of it is just intellectual. The belief in part of it is not only intellectual.

It's also volitional. It's also of the heart.

And most of the time, Greg, I ask these young kids on college campuses, as you see in the question and answers we have on our YouTube channel. I usually ask them the question, if Christianity were true,.

Would you become a Christian?

And most of the time, they'll honestly say no. It's not an intellectual problem with them. They don't want God to exist. They're not on a truth quest. They're on a happiness quest. So they're just going to believe whatever they think is going to make them happy.

So you might ask someone who you love who's not a Christian, hey, if it were really true, would you become a Christian? And if they're honest with you, they'll probably say no.

Yeah, that's such a good point. And it brings me to my next question then, which is, I don't want to sound defeatist or your entire ministry, but then what are we doing if we know that we can sit there and probably out-argue the average atheist, the something out of nothing, the craziness that is taught now in the secular and pagan world of Darwinism and evolution and something out of nothing.

And we go, look, guys, we have to have, something can't come out of nothing. We have all these different arguments, time, space, matter, outside of that, right? And they just look at you and go, well, yeah, I don't care.

And you say, if God did exist, would you serve him? And they say no. Then why? Why do we have a ministry like you have? Or why do I go out and talk about those things with my fellow non-believers? Should it just be gospel only and let God sort them out?

Should it be a mix of the two? You know what I mean? That's kind of what I'm, where's your balance in that personally in your ministry?

I would say for three reasons. Number one, it's commanded that we ought to give reasons.

For what we believe.

Secondly, for some people it does work.

It worked with me.

I wanted to know if it was true.

Right, me too.

Thirdly, it actually affirms Christians who when they go through difficulty can go, okay, despite the fact that I'm experiencing this difficulty, which by the way, the Bible says you will experience, I know that this is true.

I have enough evidence to know that this is true. So it affirms the Christian. It also provides evidence for the non-Christian and it's what God told us to do. Look, nobody, or let me put it another way.

You can't bring anyone to Christ, but you can bring Christ to anyone. You have to allow the Holy Spirit and you also have to allow the person to accept what the Holy Spirit does in order for someone to become a Christian.

You know, God says that he's gonna send his Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, right? But some people will double down on their sin and suppress that truth and go their own way. Other people will accept it and become a Christian.

You don't know who those people are. All you do is you be faithful to presenting the evidence and then allowing people to make their own decisions.

Yeah, so skipping back just a few minutes too, it answers a question that I had. So if you have a, let's say either a new believer or someone who is growing in their faith, maybe a few years into the faith and they just go look at, man, that kind of philosophy and logic and theology.

Man, I wanna feel the presence of God. I'm more of an emotional person, right? They might give you that type of answer. What would you say to them? Would you say, look, no, it needs to be balanced. You need to have a little bit of that and understand truth and philosophy and theology.

I mean, not be a doctorate in it, but would you say that's important? It sounds like what you're saying with the courses you have online too. It's important for even at a young age to kind of understand absolute truth and these kinds of things.

Yeah, nothing gets to the heart without first going through the head. The problem is if you bypass the head, then you can open yourself up to all sorts of false teachings and beliefs. And too many people I think are looking for an emotional experience and sometimes they will manufacture this emotional experience in order to somehow feel close to God.

When in fact, there are times, look, I'm not a touchy feely person myself. So I don't expect to have this warm kind of feeling with God all the time. But if you expect that all the time, then you're gonna actually have an expectation that you don't even have in the scriptures.

I mean, how many times are the Psalmist saying, God, where are you?

Right?

Why have you abandoned me?

It's not talking directly to people. In fact, there are periods in the Bible where there's hundreds of years, there's no miracle, there's no message from God. You know, none of that's going on. So I actually think the normal way that God communicates through us is through his word.

Can he do it another way when he wants? Of course he can. But the normative way God communicates to us is through his word.

Why?

It's a stable revelation. You can study it. Everyone has the same revelation. You can come to the conclusions as to what's true and false by reading it. And you're not pulled away by just mystical experiences that you don't know how to interpret without some sort of standard that the word of God is.

It's a standard. And so you need to know that standard in order to interpret any mystical experience you get. If you don't have that standard, how are you going to know it's not the devil talking to you?

Right.

Yeah, 100%. So I wanted to talk to you about this because I talk to a lot of people that want to make statements about what they think the culture is doing. But then, you know, you actually sit down with them and they go, well, I'm kind of in my echo chamber of, you know, my five friends or a couple people I hang out with.

You've been on the front lines for decades, for many, many years, talking to unbelievers, people who actively come to oppose you and go, look, I'm an atheist. I don't believe God exists. So I kind of wanted to ask you, as someone on the front lines and you're interacting with these people for the last 25 plus years, where was it when you first started?

What were some of the things that were being said that you just went, okay, I can't believe that's an argument that they're making, to even now to where in the last five years even talk to the average Christian that isn't even that, you know, interactive with the world goes, oh, we've gone off the chains in this country.

We've gone off the edge of the world. What the spectrum of what people were asking you and stating then to now, are they the same things? Are they underlying the same? Are they totally different? Like what's the most concerning to you?

I think probably more recently, more of the questions are related to morality than anything else. In fact, when people ask me, what are the top three questions or the top three objections to Christianity?

I say morality, morality, and morality. In other words, the real objection that people have is that God is somehow going to impose on them some sort of moral position that they don't find attractive. I mean, Pascal said this years ago that people invariably base their beliefs not on the basis of proof, but on the basis of what they find attractive.

And in our country,.

The big thing that people don't want God to get involved in is sex. You can't tell people what they can and can't do sexually because that's going to get in the way of their happiness. See, they're not on a truth quest, they're on a happiness quest.

And so they think that any kind of sexual restriction is somehow unloving. It also, what's happened in recent years is people tend to think that love means approval. Now, any parent knows this is nonsense.

If you approve of everything your 13-year-old wants to do, are you loving? No, you're unloving. You need to stand in the way of evil. Paul does not say that love means approval. Paul says in the chapter that everyone reads at their wedding, but nobody obeys, 1 Corinthians 13, he says that love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, love rejoices in the truth.

He says that love always protects, love always perseveres. How do you love people? You stand in the way of the evil they want to do, even if they hate you for it. In fact, Jesus said, I give you one new command.

What's the one new command, Jesus? Love one another as I have loved you. Okay, how did he love us? He sacrificed himself for us.

And what we tend to do, we tend to think,.

Oh, I don't want to sacrifice myself to love this person. I want to agree with them so they like me. That's not love. That's enablement. You're not helping them. In fact, the amazing Thomas Sowell, who I think is 93 years old now.

Yeah, I love him, yeah.

Yeah, Thomas Sowell said this, he said, when you want to help someone, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. And we often tell people what they want to hear,.

Don't they? Don't we?

Because we don't want them to be mad at us. So we're not sacrificing ourselves for them. We're sacrificing them for ourselves when we do that. When we agree with people on issues that we know God does not agree with, particularly on the sexual issues, whether it's LGBTQ stuff or fornication or divorce or anything.

When we agree with them, we are actually not helping them. We're enabling them. We're sacrificing them for our own comfort.

Yeah, no, that's a great point. We're redefining all types of words over the last 10, 15, 20 years. It goes back farther than that. I remember being in, I went to public school, kindergarten through third grade, homeschool fourth on.

And the reason why I was pulled out in third grade is we had a story about a man who was stealing from a market because he needed to feed his family. And we were asked in third grade, is that right or wrong?

I was the only one in the class that said, it's wrong, you don't steal. Well, he was hungry. It is right. It's okay to steal if you're feeding your family. I said, well, there's other ways. He could have went to family, to a charitable organization.

I mean, this is me in third grade, right? So I got sent down to the principal's office and I got in trouble for it. Looking back in 1984 or five, they were teaching subjective morality to third graders in a public school, right?

Now, how far have we come since then? Before the 60s, we had the sexual revolution. So we're way far off base here when it comes to school.

If it was truly subjective, they would say, well, that's just your opinion, okay. They didn't, right? They had their own standard and said you were wrong.

Yeah, they had their own standards, right? So yeah, even in subjective morality, there's standards that are being brought. And you've touched on that on some of your videos, which I find very interesting.

When people say, I don't think there's any absolute truth. And you go, do you believe that?

Absolutely.

They say, yes, there you go, right? So, so even their own, you know, logical fallacies come into play when they're talking about that. My point was, is it sounds like we're in 2023 now and we have people going, oh my gosh, how this could have happened.

It kind of maybe gets underneath my skin, maybe yours as well, who's people who've been kind of looking at culture for the last 20, 30 years. And you go, yeah, this is the place we have to end up. We're so far off the foundational base of biblical morality that yeah, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, you know, prior, now this is where we are now.

So I think that's why it's important why we have guys like you, they continue doing what you do, which leads me into kind of our last question as we button this up here. How important is it for Christians to be involved in apologetics?

Is it something that everyone should pursue a little bit? No one should pursue, only certain people really get into it. Like, should we have a base knowledge of who God is and defending the faith as just an average believer?

Yes, it's a command. Always be ready to give an answer for the hope that you have. It's not a gift, it's a command. Now, obviously some people are gifted at it and other people are not, just like evangelism, right?

It's a command for everyone. Some people are better at it than others, but we all need to use whatever gifts we have in order to let people know why Christianity is true and present them with the forgiveness that the gospel provides people and the eternal life that God provides to everyone through his death, burial, and resurrection.

So it's a command for everyone. Now, just like anything though, not everyone's gonna be at the same level as anybody else,.

But that's okay.

But we should have a basic knowledge of why Christianity is true, what are the basic arguments for it? And if you had to boil it down to two arguments, Greg, it would be the arguments that show that God exists and the argument that shows that Jesus rose from the dead.

Because if those two things are true, that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead, game over, Christianity's true. Those are the two big questions. And that's why we spend a lot of time in the book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist on that.

We also have a podcast called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. And of course our YouTube channel covers all that as well. So those are the two big questions. Does God exist and did Jesus rise from the dead?

If the answer is yes to those two questions, Christianity follows.

I love it, I love it.

Okay, last little fun one here before we get into our Fresh 10 segment. You know, you've been doing this a long time. I was wondering, and I've heard some, I've heard mental gymnastics from especially atheists, like Hitchens will be like, I can't believe in God, but maybe there's 10 million different realities out there that we haven't discovered.

Or we have Elon Musk saying, maybe we're in a simulation.

They're on our YouTube channel, two debates with Hitchens.

Yeah, he was fun.

There you go. So what has been an argument that you've heard from whether public speaking or interacting with someone who's a non-believer. Where you just went, wow, I can't believe that you believe that or you're promoting that.

That just seems so outside of logic and, you know, rational thought.

Versus what, that's what you just mentioned. In order to explain why this universe exists and why it's so designed, they posit, you know, an infinite number of other universes that we can't see or detect that just enables this universe to be kind of a luck universe.

But it doesn't solve the problem because if there are other universes out there, they would need to be created too. It seems you multiply the need for a creator and a designer. You don't get rid of the need for a creator and a designer by multiplying the fact that this universe is in effect.

And if there's an effect, there's gotta be a cause. And there has to be an uncaused first cause somewhere. Where's the uncaused first cause? It's not the universe. It must be something outside the universe.

Something that's spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, and intelligent. And so the arguments that they give there actually negate all science because if something could come into existence out of nothing without a cause, if there can be an effect without a cause, then you might as well give up on all science.

Because science itself is built on cause and effect. And yet they claim to be champions of science when in fact they are negating the fundamental principle of science and that is every effect has a cause.

That's what you do when you're doing science. You're looking for what caused this particular effect. And if there is no ultimate cause, if there is no self-existing ultimate first cause, some unmoved mover, as Aristotle would say, well, you might as well just give up all the science.

Yeah, well, like you've said so elegantly, it takes a lot of faith to be an atheist. So, all right, let's move into the Fresh 10 segment now. I'm sure you get asked all kinds of questions, but like I said, apologetics, theology, and logic, but we want to get to know you a little bit more so our listeners can get to know you.

We're going to ask some rapid fire personal questions. They don't have to be really long answers, but it's 10 right in a row. We want to get to know you. You down to play?

Let's go, man.

All right, here we go.

I bring my own sound effects, man.

It's going to be magic. What's that?

I bring my own sound effects. This is going to be magic.

Okay, there we go.

We like to play that type of music. We like to bring learned men down to, you know, our level here on the podcast. So that's why we do that. You should have seen when Tom Askle was on and we played that for him.

He looked at me like

That actually brings me up, man, not down.

Okay, there you go.

All right, question number one, Fresh 10 with Frank Turek. What city and state did you grow up in and how did that affect your childhood at all?

Neptune, New Jersey, close to the beach, about an hour south of New York City. So I became a, you know, a fan of all the New York teams basically. And I went to the beach in the summer. It was a great place to grow up.

Yeah, awesome. All right, so you're hanging out, you're in a social situation, maybe with some friends and family, they're all joking around. What's your favorite funny story to tell people? Maybe it's a little joke or it's something, a funny story that might get, you know, get the party going.

What do you, what's your go-to? Do you have one?

I usually say there are three kinds of people, those that can count and those that can't.

Classic.

Mine is, I always, if I'm with people who are believers, I say, what do you get when you cross an agnostic, an insomniac, and a dyslexic? A guy who stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog.

So that's my go-to.

I have one other one. Sometimes I'll say, hey, the next time the phone doesn't ring,.

It's me.

All right, guys. Well, he'll be here all week. Make sure to tip your waitresses.

And I tell you, just watch Rodney Dangerfield's old standup routine.

That was the best.

There you go.

Oh, he was great too, wasn't he?

I worked with my wife for 20 years.

And then we met.

And then we met, right.

Or going back even farther, Henny Youngman had some really good ones too.

Oh yeah.

Take my wife too.

All right.

Yeah.

Question number three. The flux capacitor is fluxing. You're in the DeLorean. Are you going back to visit your great, great, great grandfather? Are you going into the future to visit your great, great, great grandkids?

I'm going all the way back to the resurrection.

Oh, so you just go back over and go right to the resurrection. If it's possible.

I wouldn't want to go back to the crucifixion because I'd probably be one of the ones.

Wanting to crucify him.

You know, it's very good to understand.

The resurrection, Sunday morning.

Oh, what a beautiful thing.

All right.

Question number four, moving right along. What's something people would be surprised to know about you? That doesn't make sense to me.

I thought blank.

Surprised.

I don't know. I ran marathons when I was younger. Ran the New York City Marathon three times.

Yeah.

No way.

But yeah.

How the knees holding up.

Jeez. Yeah.

That's awesome.

All right.

See, this is why we do this. We would have known that. Question number five. Top three bands or music albums that you're taking with you on the island or that essentially has influenced you the most. And if you don't have three, you can just give us one.

A band, an album, something that you just go, yeah, I like that.

The top three bands, The Who, The Beatles, and The Stones. I grew up on the British Invasion. Top album, who's next? 1971, Bob O 'Reilly all the way to Won't Get Fooled Again.

Great album.

Anything by The Beatles I love. And some of The Stones stuff has been great. I mean, these are all secular bands, but that's what I grew up on. Nowadays, my wife and I like some country too.

Sure.

So we love Josh Turner. I don't know if you know who Josh Turner is.

I do.

That's a wide range there. I like that. So you're a music guy.

Yeah.

And Christian. I grew up on Christian bands. I grew up on Stephen Curtis Chapman when I was older.

Sure.

Loved his stuff.

What'd you think of The Beatles' new one that just dropped a few weeks ago? That was great.

Is that crazy? My friend Skip Heitzik, he's a Beatles nut too.

He's a pastor out in Albuquerque, and he sent it to me.

It was just so much fun,.

The way they went back, what, 40 years and uncovered these old John Lennon tapes and made a whole new tune of it.

It was amazing.

That's crazy.

All right, question number six. Favorite thing to do when you just want to relax?

What are you doing? You reading a book?

You watching something?

You taking a walk? Hike?

What are you doing?

My wife and I like to walk, and I like to work out, and I like to watch a good football game.

Yeah.