Why does it take more faith to be an atheist? with Frank Turek - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 28

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Welcome to the God Questions Podcast, on today's episode we're going to be discussing the existence of God, and on the show today

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I have Frank Turek, he's one of my favorite apologist experts on this issue.

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I've learned a lot just from reading his book and from hearing him speak on the topic. So, Frank, welcome to the show.

00:44

Shea, thanks for having me on. I love the God Questions website and the God Questions app, in fact,

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I recommend it quite a bit because people can get real short, succinct answers on that one site, so you guys are doing great work.

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Well, thank you. It's good to hear. So, just a little background on Frank, Frank Turek is the president of CrossExamine .org,

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the author of I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Stealing from God, correct?

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Not politically correct, and legislating morality. He's also the host of the

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TV program, I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, and the radio program, CrossExamined, and we will include links to all of these on podcast .godquestions

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.org and also on the description field in our YouTube post of this video.

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So, Frank, let me open up with a question that I know you're well -prepared to answer. So Frank, why don't you have enough faith to be an atheist?

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Well, because there's a lot of evidence that God exists, and we're using this word faith the way the atheists use it, not the way

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Christians use it. Faith to the atheist means if you don't have any evidence, you just have faith, and I think atheists have very little evidence that their materialistic worldview is true, and there's a lot of evidence that the

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Christian worldview is true. Now, the true definition of faith is trusting in what you have good reason to believe, trusting in what you have good reason to believe, and so I think there's a lot of evidence that Christianity is true, so it's easy to trust in the fact that God exists and Jesus rose from the dead and Christianity is true.

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When you use the phrase that it requires faith to be an atheist, I've seen several of your debates with Christopher Hitchens and so forth.

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They typically bristle at this comment, saying atheism doesn't require faith, it just requires reason, and I love how you respond to this.

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How do you respond when people say it does not require faith to be an atheist? Well, using, again, the definition of faith that they use, that if you don't have reason, you have faith,

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I think the atheists have to have a lot of faith because there's very little reason to believe that atheism is true, and they'll say, well, atheism isn't really a worldview, and I say, no, it is a worldview.

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You believe, for example, that this is the view of most atheists today, that everything's made of molecules, that we're just molecular machines, that we're just moist robots.

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Well, if we're moist robots, Shay, and every thought we have is the result of the laws of physics, which means we don't have free will, we don't have really moral accountability because we're not really making free will moral choices.

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We're just reacting based on the chemistry of our minds. If that's really the case, then we don't have any moral accountability, and we shouldn't even believe what we believe because we're not reasoning to conclusions,

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Shay. We are reacting to conclusions. We're not following the evidence where it leads. We are simply compelled to believe what we believe because physics tells us to do so.

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So ironically, atheists who claim to be champions of reason have made reason impossible by their ideology of materialism.

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So I think that takes a lot of faith to believe that everything you think is just the result of the laws of physics, and you have no warrant to believe it then if it is just a result of the laws of physics because, again, you're not reasoning freely to that conclusion.

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You've just reacted to that conclusion without your consent. So here's my copy of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an

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Atheist. As you can see, it's well -worn. My wife and I have both gone through it multiple times and found several chapters and concepts in the book.

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Extremely helpful. I'm sure we've adapted some of your content with attribution, of course, into various articles on GotQuestions.

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It's just a tremendously helpful way of looking at it. So when you debate with an atheist or have a discussion with someone who's questioning the existence of God, what have you found to be some of the more effective ways of at least getting them to think in ways maybe they've never thought about the issue before?

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Well, it really depends on the venue. I mean, if you're talking to an atheist in a formal debate, that's one thing.

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But if you're just talking to somebody in casual conversation, that's another. I think you want to establish common ground first.

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You know, what do you believe is true? And then work from there. Most people around the world, Shay, actually believe that some kind of God exists, right?

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So if they already believe that, then maybe what you just need to do is give them evidence that the

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Christian God is true. And I think you can do that, first of all, by confirming that a theistic

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God exists, a God beyond the world who created and sustains the world. And I normally do that through three arguments.

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The argument from the beginning of the universe, sometimes called the cosmological argument. The argument from design, also called the teleological argument.

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There's design in the universe and design in life. And the argument from morality, known as the moral argument.

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So cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. And when you unpack those arguments, Shay, you get a being that looks like the

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God of the Bible without even opening the Bible. For example, from the cosmological argument alone, which by the way, atheists are admitting the data for the fact that the universe had a beginning.

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They're saying, they're admitting that the universe had a beginning. Stephen Hawking, famous atheist physicist, famously said, almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the

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Big Bang. Okay, so he's admitting the data. He doesn't think it was God. But what kind of cause could it have been,

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Shay? If there was nothing, no space, time, or matter, and then space, time, and matter came into existence. It seems to me that whatever caused space, time, and matter to come into existence can't be made of space, time, and matter.

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In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create, because only persons can choose to create or choose to do something.

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Also intelligent, or to have a mind in order to make a choice. So I always ask people,

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I say, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?

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God of the Bible. Yeah, God, or at least, I mean, it could be Allah at this point, right? We don't know if it's the God of the

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Bible, but it could be the God of the Bible. And all you need to do at that point is to see if Jesus rose from the dead.

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And if he did, it turns out that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1 ,988 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing.

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So it is the God of the Bible. But from just one argument, Shay, the cosmological argument, you get several attributes of God without opening the

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Bible. You get a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent being.

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And so I think if you can show them that the theistic God exists, then it's a short step to showing that the

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Christian God is the true God. And you mentioned also the teleological argument.

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We had a podcast episode several times ago where we're talking with someone from the Discovery Institute about how there's so much evidence for intelligent design out there.

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Do you find that to be an effective argument? And how so? And what are some of the finer points of the teleological argument that you find really get people thinking?

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Well, there's two aspects to it. One is the fine tuning of the universe, and the second is the information and the structure we find in life.

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Both appear to require a designer or let's say the fine tuning of the universe. Scientists have discovered this in, say, the past six or seven decades, that the universe is precisely tweaked to support life.

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If you were to change any one of a number of aspects about our universe virtually imperceptibly, there would be no universe or there would be no universe that could support life.

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For example, Stephen Hawking, again an atheist, famously said this. He said if the expansion rate of the universe were different by one part in a thousand million million a second after the

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Big Bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies. In other words, from the very beginning of the universe, if that expansion rate was any different, none of us would be here, there would be no universe or no universe that could support life.

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Now, what best explains the expansion rate being precisely what it needed to be for us to be here?

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It seems to me the same being that created space, matter, and time is the same being that fine tuned the expansion rate to be precisely what it needed to be today.

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Even if you wanted to avoid the whole biological question, which I don't, I think it's a great argument for the existence of intelligent designer, but even if you wanted to leave all the stuff about evolution on the back shelf, you still need a creator to create the universe and you still need a creator and a designer to design the expansion rate precisely what it needed to be and several other factors about our universe.

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Any one of which, by the way, if it were different, we wouldn't be here. Yeah. Now, there's a lot of great information out there about how intricately programmed the universe is to support life, and it's amazing the detail there, and it's also fascinating and incredibly discouraging to a certain extent to see that people will continue to deny this despite what seems to be overwhelming evidence.

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Well, that's why I think a good question to ask people is, if Christianity were true, would you become a

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Christian? And when I ask that question on college campuses where we do, I don't have enough faith to be in Atheist seminars,

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I ask it of Atheists who get up to the Q &A microphone, and by the way, our viewers and listeners here can see about a thousand of those interactions on our

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YouTube channel, the Cross -Examine YouTube channel. We put all the questions that are asked on campus up on YouTube. Anyway, when an

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Atheist gets up to the microphone and expresses any hostility, I'll normally say, if Christianity were true, would you become a

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Christian? And I've had many Atheists, Jay, in front of hundreds of people say, no!

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I say, no? Wait a minute. You claim to be reasonable and rational. How is it reasonable to say you wouldn't believe something if it were true?

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Well, it's not. The problem isn't in the head, the problem's in the heart. They don't want it to be true. They don't want there to be a

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God. Why? Because they want to be God of their own lives. You see, they're not on a truth quest, they're on a happiness quest, and they're just going to believe whatever they think's going to make them happy.

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And you know, the problem is, is you can make yourself happy over the short term, doing a lot of fun, but ultimately destructive things, yet over the long term, it's a disaster.

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And everyone over 40 who's listening to us right now knows what we're talking about, because many of us have tried it ourselves, right?

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If you want to get contentment, you've got to go straight through truth, and Jesus is the truth. So I think a lot of times, arguments are just ignored or suppressed by people.

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Just like Paul says in Romans 1, they suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because they want to do their own thing morally.

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It's not really an intellectual issue, it's a moral issue. So there's a second book of yours

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I want to talk about, and it's in a 25 -ish minute podcast. You could talk about both of these books for hours upon hours.

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But Stealing from God, I really find some of the arguments you make in there fascinating. So the sub -headline of Stealing from God is that atheists need

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God to make their case. And I don't know if this quote is original with you, but it's the idea of you have to sit in God's lap in order to slap him in the face.

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To me, that was this eye -opening to understand that, no, you can't even make a case for atheism without borrowing aspects of the

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Christian worldview. So Frank, explain briefly what does that mean, and how can this be another tool in our chest to hopefully convince people to at least consider the existence of God?

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Well, in the book Stealing from God, we have an acronym, CRIMES. And we claim that many of the attributes of reality, according to this acronym,

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C stands for causality, R, reason, I, information and intentionality,

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M, morality, E, evil, and S, science. Many of these aspects of reality atheists will claim somehow point to atheism.

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And my position is that none of those things would exist unless God existed. Let me just give you one of these six different areas.

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Let's do two of them. How about that? Well, okay. I'll try and do it. It's hard to cover them, but let's do evil for a second.

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That's the E in crimes. A lot of atheists will say, well, there's too much evil in the world, so there can't be a good

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God, right? But as soon as they say that, you want to ask them, what do you mean by evil?

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Now typically they'll try and give you examples of evil, like, oh, murder is evil, or rape is evil.

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And you go, no, no, I don't want an example. I want a definition. What is the definition of evil?

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And they will have a very difficult time explaining or defining what evil is without good.

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But as soon as they refer to good, they're giving evidence for God, because God is what we mean by good.

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Whatever we mean by God, what we mean is his nature is what goodness is, and any deviation from that nature would be evil.

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So if you're going to say that evil is real and everyone knows it is real, then you're implying that good exists as well, which means you're implying that God exists.

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So you have to steal from God in order to say he doesn't exist when you claim evil proves he doesn't exist.

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It's been put this way, that evil doesn't disprove God. Evil may prove there's a devil out there, but it doesn't disprove

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God because there'd be no such thing as evil unless there was good, and there would be no such thing as good unless God existed, because God is the standard of good.

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Another illustration that may help explain this better. I always ask people, let's assume you like football and you've got your favorite football team.

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How do you know that your quarterback throwing a touchdown is better than your quarterback throwing an interception?

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Well, the only way you could know that if you knew the purpose of the game, right? If there's no purpose to the game, you can't say a touchdown is better than an interception.

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In fact, you can't say this play is good and this play is bad unless you know what the goal of the game is, right? Well, the same thing is true in life, that there's got to be a goal to life, a purpose to life for you to know whether something is good or evil, whether something takes you closer to the goal or further from it.

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Just like in football, the rules of life must come outside of the game itself, right?

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The rules of football come outside the game. The players don't make up the rules, in other words. They're made by the commissioner and the owners, okay?

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The league makes the rules, okay? Now, the rules of football are arbitrary. The rules of life are not arbitrary.

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They come from God's nature, but they come from outside of life itself.

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If they didn't, Shay, you couldn't say that, say, loving people was better than murdering them.

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That would be just your opinion against another human being's opinion. It would be your opinion against, say, Hitler's opinion, but we all know that love is better than murder, and if love is better than murder, there must be a purpose to life.

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There must be the fact that love gets you closer to the purpose and murder takes you further away, and that means there's got to be a standard that we're appealing to when we say that.

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Well, that standard just can't be me or you. We're just human beings. Those are just our preferences. That standard must come from God himself, so as soon as you say something is wrong or it shouldn't be this way, you're implying something is right and it should be another way.

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Well, you're implying God then, so you're stealing from God to argue against him. That's what the book's about.

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Sure. I'm not going to let you off the hook. Pick one more letter from the crimes acronym that might be particularly interesting to our listeners today.

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Okay. How about science? People always say, well, science disproves God, right? The title of the chapter on science is

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Science Doesn't Say Anything Scientists Do. Why? Because all data needs to be gathered, all data needs to be interpreted, and science doesn't do that.

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Scientists do that, but science doesn't do that. Now, this is why when people say, well, science says this or science says that, we have to say, nope, time out, science doesn't say a word.

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It's scientists that say things because science is built on philosophy. You can't do science without philosophy.

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If you're going to interpret data, you have to use your mind to interpret the data.

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I'll give you an example of this. When it comes to whether we were created or we were evolved, Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist will say, and evolutionists will, when he was asked, what's the best evidence you have for macroevolution, he said, the common genetic code and other biochemical fundamentals.

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Well, it is true there's a common genetic code, but does that common genetic code point toward a common ancestor?

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It might. You could interpret the data that way and say, oh, we've got this common genetic code. Maybe there's a common ancestor. We're all ancestrally related.

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That's certainly a possible interpretation of the data, but what's the other possible interpretation he's not considering?

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Instead of a common ancestor, maybe we have a common creator, a common designer who put this same code in all of us because that's how he created this particular biosphere.

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This code helps us live in this biosphere, just like most car manufacturers design their cars with four tires because that works best to get small groups of people around on our road system.

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It's not because the cars are ancestrally related. It's because they have a common designer with a common goal.

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Science requires us to use our minds to try and discover how something operates in the natural world.

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In the book, we say this, that natural laws, which drive science, require someone to create these natural laws and to keep them going in the direction they're going.

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My claim in the book is that science requires God. It requires a universe of reliable cause and effect with reliable laws that do the same thing over and over again.

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If the laws were not consistent, say if the law of gravity changed every 10 minutes, you couldn't do reliable cause and effect.

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You couldn't predict anything. Obviously, you couldn't live if it kept changing all the time, but you couldn't figure out what particular cause caused a particular thing related to gravity.

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The question is always asked, where do the laws come from? No scientist who's an atheist wants to answer that because laws come from law givers.

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Why do the laws keep doing the same thing over and over again? Because there's a mind behind it.

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Because there's an orderer behind reality. That's how we can do science because science requires an orderly cause and effect universe.

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Without God, that's hard to explain why A, the universe exists at all, or B, it's orderly and consistent.

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There's a lot more in the chapter, obviously, but that's why I think science requires God, and yet they're claiming that science has disproven

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God. Thank you, Frank. I actually enjoyed stealing from God even more than I don't have enough faith to be an atheist because it really challenged me to think through these issues on a little deeper level.

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I know many people probably have heard you speak at a conference or have read the book.

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I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, but I'd recommend stealing from God as well to say, again, a powerful compliment to it.

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Frank, as my final question to you today, maybe break it into two questions.

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One, for the Christian who's trying to convince a loved one or a friend who is an atheist to at least consider the existence of God, what to you, in your tremendous experience of debating, of discussing, of researching, of writing, what is the best method?

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I know it depends, obviously, on the situation, but what are some basic pointers on how to point people to God's existence?

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Well, again, I think the key question to ask is if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? If someone is an atheist, at least probably a majority of the time, the answer to that question is no.

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They're not really interested. In fact, they've taken an interest against God. They don't want

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God to exist. In that case, giving them arguments isn't going to help. They're not interested in arguments.

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What you can do is just love them as a human being and maybe plant seeds every now and then. Typically, what happens in everyone's life at some point is some difficulty comes up, some tragedy strikes, some suffering happens.

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If you're still in that person's life, your phone will probably ring and that person will be on the other end because when things go wrong, they're not going to call their atheist friends.

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What are their atheist friends going to say? Well, look, there's no rhyme or reason to any of this. This stuff just happens. They're going to call with somebody who has some spiritual depth, somebody who can offer some hope and that would be you.

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So I don't think arguments are going to work with somebody who is set up against arguments because it's not so much about God's existence, it's really about their resistance.

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So you have to ask the question to expose that, to see if they're really open. If they are open, then maybe they can get the book,

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I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and go with it, go through it with the other person and see if they're really interested in pursuing the truth.

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That's a powerful reminder. I mean, I've met numerous people in my life who have been on one to faith, first in God's existence, but then faith in Christ through apologetics arguments.

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But often until God is doing a work in that person's heart and mind, they're going to be completely closed minded.

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You could use the best arguments, explain the most eloquently they have in the history of the universe, and it's not going to change anyone's mind unless God is not first doing a work.

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But at the same time, by showing them love, by just being willing to engage in a respectful conversation when

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God begins to do that work, whether it's through a difficult circumstance or just God opening their mind, the fact that you were able to show them kindness and love, as you said, will bring them back to you when the time is right.

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And you may not even need apologetics at that point because if God's doing the work, well, then he will open their heart to their need for Christ in the gospel, which is ultimately our goal as defenders of the faith.

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It's not just, we've proved that God exists, but don't point people to Christ. We really haven't accomplished the message of the gospel.

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Right. In fact, think about some of the people that saw Jesus literally raise Lazarus from the dead. Some of the

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Sanhedrin apparently did. Some of the chief priests apparently did. They knew it was true, and what did they want to do? They wanted to kill him.

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They wanted to kill Jesus and Lazarus. So it had nothing to do with the evidence.

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There was plenty of evidence. They had an agenda. They knew that if Jesus succeeded, they were out of a job.

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And so that's why Caiaphas famously said, it's better that one innocent man die than all of Israel go down.

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So then, yes, to me, that's one of the most amazing passages, amazingly distressing passages in Scripture, in that Jesus performs,

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I think, the most amazing miracle in all of Scripture is raising someone from the dead who'd been dead for three days, and with their reaction, how could they not recognize this is the

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Messiah? I need to have faith in him, follow him. And now it's like, we need to kill Jesus.

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Oh, and we also need to kill Lazarus, because a lot of people are believing because of him. So it's like, it's a wow. So totally.

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That's why when atheists or people say today, if God would only appear to me, I'd believe. I don't always agree. I think what they'll say is, oh,

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I have to go see a psychiatrist because I'm seeing visions. I mean, they wouldn't believe even if he were to show up because he's already done it and people killed him for it.

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So part two of the question I introduced earlier. So in your vast experience, what to you is the most effective argument for the existence of God?

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Or what argument or method have you found is the most effective? And at least starting the conversation or starting a person thinking that there might be a

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God? Well, probably today. I mean, I like the cosmological argument because it shows so many attributes of the existence of a theistic

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God. However, from a personal standpoint, most people are more interested in morality because morality is everywhere.

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You can ignore the beginning. You can't ignore right and wrong because you deal with it every day. Everything our country is talking about now, all this stuff about social justice and critical race theory.

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And, you know, it's all related to morality, transgenderism, same sex marriage, abortion.

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It's all related to morality, right? And well, the truth of the matter is, if there's no God, there's no right or wrong.

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No one has a right to anything because rights come from God. They don't come from human beings or governments. Those are just opinions.

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If there's no God, there's no right to anything, which means there's no justice or injustice, which means there's no social justice, which means no black lives don't matter if there's no

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God. Right. Which means there's nothing right or wrong about abortion. There's nothing right or wrong about life.

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There's nothing right or wrong about natural marriage or same sex marriage. There are no rights to anything. There's no right to transgenderism or non -transgenderism.

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Everything's a matter of opinion. Nobody really believes this. But the only way that there are rights is if God exists.

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And everybody knows that rights exist. That's the case. God exists. So I think that's probably the easiest way to demonstrate to people that there is a

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God. The only question, who is he? And that's why you go then and you look at the evidence for Jesus and you look at who

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Jesus was and you realize, yep, this guy was God, is God. That's excellent.

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I've been talking a lot about critical race theory, social justice, and so forth. And it's just amazing that if you look at the philosophical worldview that's behind it, ultimately, you hinted at this, no lives matter.

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Yeah, exactly. If we're all just relatively highly evolved blobs of matter, then nothing matters.

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Yeah, without a goal. There's no purpose to life. Yeah. Why should we care? There's no purpose to life, right? There's no purpose to life.

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You can't say this is the right way to live it and this is the wrong way to live it. Just like a football analogy, right?

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You can't say a touchdown is better than an interception for your team, for your quarterback, unless you know what the goal of the game is.

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And if there's no God, there's no goal. Everything just is. So again,

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Frank, thank you for being on the show. This has been the Got Questions podcast with Frank Turek, the president of crossexamine .org.

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And again, we will have links to Frank's books and his website, especially his YouTube channel where you can hear him debating and discussing many of these same issues with atheists on college campuses.

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So books highly recommended, his ministry highly recommended. Please check it out. So Frank, again, thank you for being on the show.

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Thanks, Shay. And by the way, our podcast we just renamed, it's called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist as well. So people can, if they look and they can look and find the

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I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist podcast just once a week. This is the Got Questions podcast, Got Questions, Bible -ized answers, we'll help you find them.