15 years ago, before I was a Christian, my friend handed me a book by Dr. Frank Turek. I think about this book all the time. It turns out the author was Charlie Kirk's mentor and spoke at Berkeley the other day amidst the violence. Here is our interview with Dr. Turek on ontology, spistomology and theodicy.
Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thank you for being here with a special episode today. This morning on my Sirius XM radio show, Breitbart News Daily, had the honor of talking with a one Dr. Frank Turek, mentor of Charlie Kirk, standing right next to him when Charlie was assassinated on September 10th. And he spoke at Berkeley University the other day where there was all the riots and protests out front. Great honor to talk to this man who is very influential in my becoming a Christian.
I had a militant atheist once at Michigan State ask me this question. He said, if there is a good God, why doesn't he stop all the evil in the world? And I said, sir, that is an excellent question. Maybe because if he did, he might start with you and me because we do evil every day. You ever notice we start complaining about evil. We always start complaining about somebody else doing it.
It's like, hey, God, why don't you stop him? God, why don't you stop her? God, why don't you stop the shooter? God, why don't you stop Hitler?
God, why don't you stop?
Why do we never say, God, why don't you stop me? Ladies and gentlemen, if God were to stop evil at midnight tonight, would you still be alive at 1201?
There you go. America is the greatest country in the world. Good morning. That is Dr. Frank Turek. He is the president of CrossExamined . org and the author of a book that my friend Paul gave to me right before I became a Christian.
It's the most influential book, other than the Bible, of course. I didn't even know what apologetics was. The book's called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and I think about it all the time. It's the book I've given to the most people in my 15 years since it was first handed to me. You also happen to be Charlie Kirk's mentor. And that was a speech last night, or a couple nights ago, at Berkeley University.
Dr. Turek, how are you, sir?
Mike, I'm doing fine. But Antifa, want that event to go on, as you know. But God has a plan. More attention was brought to that event because of their crude, vile behavior. And that's one reason why we're having this conversation, I guess.
Yeah, that's right. Did you feel the chaos? We saw it outside.
Did you feel it?
Oh, yeah. We were already inside before all that had begun. But it's amazing to me, the people who say they're fighting for inclusion, tolerance and diversity will not include you and will not tolerate you for holding a diverse view. I mean, if irony could kill, they'd be dead because they're doing exactly what they charge people on the right are doing. You know, I mean, they charge my friend Charlie Kirk with being a fascist because we all know, Mike, that a fascist tactic is to hand the microphone to your opponent and say, please make your case. I will listen.
I mean, The people against Charlie Kirk are the fascists. The people that shot him or the guy that shot him is a fascist. It's crazy what the left does. They do exactly what they claim you're doing. You're not doing it.
They are.
Do these events feel different since Charlie was assassinated?
Yes. This is the first event where we had mass protest. The other events, I guess I did four or five college events prior to this. They were all scheduled prior to Charlie. Tonight, I'll be at the University of Alabama, Lord willing. And then next Thursday, Boise State.
But so far, other than this event, the college events have been mostly Christians and people sympathetic to TPUSA showing up. And it's been more cathartic than it has been adversarial. Although I will say everybody's been the room at Berkeley the other night was a supporter. The first guy claimed to be part of Antifa, and he asked Rob Schneider a question, and he was very disrespectful to Rob. And Rob got back to him with some sarcasm of his own, and then later shook his hand, because Rob was saying, You know, we're the peaceful ones in here.
We're the ones that want to have a conversation. It's the people on your side who are outside of this venue right now, hurling bottles and and lighting off firecrackers and spitting on people. We want to have a conversation and you guys don't. Now, what's the way forward? Let's have a conversation.
Yeah, that's great. What did you say when the Turning Point people said, hey, Frank, How about Berkeley?
You want to go?
Boise is one thing.
Boise, great.
Alabama, sure. You're going to go to Berkeley too.
What was your first thought?
Well, Charlie and I were talking about it months ago. I said, Charlie, if there's any campus I want to go with you to, it'd be Berkeley. He said, well, let's do it. So it was supposed to be me and Charlie the other night there. He's going to remain in glory, obviously, and did.
So why did you want to go there?
Oh, because it's the most liberal school in the country. I want to go into that. Those are the people I want to reach, you know, and the people around that area who are Christians, they need a lifeline. They need someone to come in and say, well, we're going to come into your area and speak, because typically you don't get that kind of speaker there. I mean, you remember, how long ago was this, Mike? Was it five or six years ago, six, seven years ago when Ben Shapiro went there?
And they had to have 600 police officers protect him. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Let's let's let's talk about how we're all.
inclusive, tolerant, and diverse, but anybody that disagrees with us, we won't include and we won't tolerate. It's so hypocritical. Lightbulb you lit in my head, which was that people say there's no such thing as truth. Is that true? It's the same illogic right from the very jump for these people.
What would you say your mission is?
Are you there to encourage believers or convince the atheists more?
Yes. How about both? My goal on a college campus is to encourage and equip the Christians and put a stone in the shoe of the skeptics. Look, you're not going to reach people like Antifa because they're totally closed off. And Jesus talked about this. He said, don't cast your pearls before swine because they will trample you to death.
Now, you need to know who the swine are, who are the people that have their minds completely closed, may even have some sort of demonic activity going on. You're not going to reach them. Nobody's going to reach. They're not open. But there are people in the middle. And look, not everybody on the left agrees with Antifa.
We can't be like the left and and paint everybody with a broad brush. If you have leftist political views, I hope you don't agree with Antifa on the method of achieving those views, right?
But about a third of young people who are students think it's okay to use violence to oppose a political idea, whereas only about 3 % of very conservative students think that, and that's 3 % too many. But when you got a third of left -wing students saying violence is okay to advance or to oppose a political idea, we got a big problem here.
Talking to Dr. Frank Turek, Charlie Kirk's mentor. How often do you think about September 10th? First thing I think about when I wake up is Charlie. Last thing I think about before I go to sleep is Charlie. I was there. It's going to take a while.
It was just an awful stain on our country, an awful stain on our politics. But, on the other hand, Mike, it's also a demonstration that this world is fallen, that we're all fallen, that we all need a Savior, that evil is real, and if evil is real, that means good is real, because you can't have evil without good, and you can't have good without God.
So this event actually shows God does exist, not that He doesn't, because it wouldn't even be evil unless God existed, and that's what I was talking about at Berkeley. You played that clip at the top of the show.
Yeah. You weren't there. You were standing right next to him. Yeah, I mean, I was there because Charlie and I had spent the previous couple of days together, you know, talking about how to answer certain questions, particularly about the Christian faith, and even about Israel. People say, oh, he was waffling on Israel. No, he wasn't.
I was in a meeting with him the day before he was murdered, talking about that, in fact, with three Israelis. So yeah, there's so much misinformation put out. And Candace Owens, unfortunately, is putting out a lot of it. She says she's asking questions, but she's insinuating that certain people are guilty when they're not. And that's just ethically wrong. I mean, my friend Mikey McCoy is getting death threats.
I'm having people email me.
You never know what can happen to you.
You know, you ought to repent. Of what? You know, I mean, it's amazing. The ask questions.
Didn't Charlie have a word for that? He had a phrase like the asking questions crowd or something like that. The just asking questions. It's okay to ask questions, it's not okay to insinuate people are guilty when you have no evidence. Okay? There's a difference between a possibility and evidence for a possibility.
By the way, the same kind of thing happens when people talk about the resurrection. They'll say, oh, you know, somebody stole Jesus's body, or, you know, he swooned, or they went to the wrong tomb, and they come up with all these possibilities. All those things are possible, but you don't have any evidence for those.
You need evidence to say, yeah, that's what we think happened. I mean, it's possible aliens took his body, Mike.
But we don't have evidence for that.
Yeah, but we do have evidence for a different thing. Of course, the truth. Yeah, he rose from the dead. Yeah.
I asked earlier in the show, I asked if anyone has any questions for the email. And I got a couple of good ones here. This is from Dan. He said, what was Charlie like in the beginning stages of wanting to understand more and improve his wisdom or knowledge? Well, as I said at the memorial service, it can be hard to mentor somebody smarter than you. but not with Charlie Kirk because the only thing that exceeded his intellect was his humility.
And the few things that I knew that he didn't, he wanted to know. So Charlie was the same always. He was always asking questions. He could learn from anybody because he knew he needed to learn from anybody. I mean, 31 years old, Mike. I mean, look at how accomplished he was at 31.
Why was he accomplished at 31? Because he knew that he could learn from other people and he took the opportunity to do so. He wasn't a know -it -all. He was somebody that knew he didn't know everything, and wanted to learn so much so he could be a better ambassador for Christ. He wanted to do two things.
He wanted to bring skeptics to Jesus, and he wanted to bring people on the left to the right, and also affirm people on the right to know that we ought to learn. conserve values, not just values, they're moral truths, they're not just my opinion, to conserve what we know is good, right, true, and beautiful. That's what conservatives are supposed to do, conserve what's right and beautiful. That's what we're supposed to do, and Charlie wanted to do that. Give me an example recently, or whatever, of the stone in the shoe. I love that idea.
You just want to throw a little, just some little thing that sticks with someone. What has been a stone in the shoe lately that someone's come back to you with and been like, oh man, you got me, Dr. Turek. You got me. That was the stone and I couldn't let it go. Well, evil is a big stone in the shoe of unbelievers because they have no standard by which to even tell you what evil is. Because if there is no standard of good that we're obligated to obey, then evil itself doesn't really exist.
It's just your opinion. It's just something you don't like. It's just a preference. But the only way there can be a standard that all humanity is obligated to obey is if there is a God whose nature is good and who has said that we needed to obey that nature, otherwise we were immoral or wrong or unjust. You see, in order to say something's unjust, you have to know what justice is. In order to know what – in order to say something's immoral, you have to know what morality is.
In order to say someone's not right, you have to know what right is. But those things only exist in a theistic world. They don't exist in an atheistic world where we're all just moist robots dancing to our DNA, as Richard Dawkins put it. And so evil is a big stone in the shoe of non -believers. Evil doesn't disprove Christianity. Evil doesn't disprove God.
In fact, Christianity is the answer to the problem of evil. There'd be no reason for Jesus to be evil. if evil didn't exist. That's why he came. So evil is a big stone in the shoe. What you mentioned earlier is a big stone in the shoe.
When people say self -defeating things, you know, when they say there's no truth and you ask them, is that true? Or when they say you ought not judge and then you say to them, then why are you judging me for judging? You know, these are self -defeating statements. When they say there are no absolutes and you say, are you absolutely sure? When they say all truth is relative and you say, is that a relative truth? When they say you can't know anything and you say, then how can you know that?
You see, there's so many illogical things uttered by people on the left that once you unveil the law of non -contradiction on them, they suddenly go – they get all befuddled, and you know what they wind up doing? They don't argue. They wind up emoting, and that's what Antifa does. They can't argue for their position.
It's wrong.
It's indefensible.
So what do they do? They emote. That's all it is. It's just rage. Yeah. Dr. Frank Turek, crossexamine .
org is the website.
I want to talk about some of the curriculum that I've since been doing in a moment at the website. Crossexamine .
org, buy his book, Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
By the way, moist robots, are those your words or his words?
Are those actual Dawkins words?
Moist robots? Moist robots is my word. Okay, that's your assessment. Yeah. His phrase is dancing to our DNA. Okay.
Yeah. So we're just like, Just like our chemicals in our brain and the DNA, either one of those are bleak. That's like a bleak worldview. That's so sad. But on the evil point, I'm channeling Bill Maher and people like Bill Maher.
Two things he'll say. Let me get your first one.
You say he's good. How can we know evil if we don't know good?
and God is good?
Okay.
He's also corrupt and petty and vicious and cruel.
What do you say to that? Yeah. I would ask by what standard?
By what moral standard are you saying those things? My standard. I think it's bad to kill all this giant group of people, which God did. If there's no God, that's just your opinion. Okay. Why is that wrong?
Because I say it's wrong. Can't I just say it's wrong? What's wrong with that? Yeah, it's just your subjective opinion. It's like saying, I like chocolate, vanilla, and you like, or I like chocolate ice cream and you like vanilla ice cream. Okay, it's just a preference.
But he doesn't act like it's a preference. You see, he has to steal a standard from God in order to argue against him. That's another book I wrote called Stealing from God, like atheists need God to make their case, okay? You have to steal a standard to say God is immoral.
Now it turns out when you read the Bible and you see God judging people for evil, that's really what's going on.
And God has the right to take people out whenever He wants. Look, we don't have the right to do that, but if God wants certain people to be judged now and move from this life into the next life, that's up to Him. You know, if Christianity is true, people don't die, they just change location. They go from this life to the next life. That's up to God, not up to us. So, look, let me say something about Bill Maher.
I've been on the show years ago, a few times. I think Bill Maher makes more sense than most pastors, many times. Say more.
He will talk on these issues where pastors won't, like transgenderism. Maher's all over it. He's going, this is crazy. He said, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a pirate.
Thank God nobody took me seriously and took me for eye removal and peg leg surgery. You know, I mean, Maher gets many things right, even though he's an atheist. He still has. the standard of good on his heart written there by God, as Paul says in Romans chapter 2, the Gentiles and I have the law of the world written on their hearts, so he gets many things right. He just has no way of justifying what right is unless God exists. What's the best atheist argument to that?
The Sam Harris, what's the Sam Harris argument to what you just said? How do they steal man? Can you steal? Sam Harris's argument is, well, what's right is human flourishing. And we might agree with Sam. Right.
But what he's confusing is a couple of things. First thing, he has no standard by which to say humans should flourish. He's smuggling in a moral law in order to say that. Right. Why human beings? Why not dolphins?
Why not roaches? Why not? And which human beings? Why us and not the Nazis? You know, who should flourish? So he's smuggling a moral standard into a system And secondly, he's confusing two things that many atheists confuse.
They might say something like, hey, Mike, I know right from wrong. I don't need your God. We're not talking about knowing right and wrong. That's epistemology. That's how you know something.
We're talking about the standard of morality itself.
Why does that exist? That's not epistemology. That's ontology.
And they're confusing epistemology, how you know something, with ontology, the existence of the thing you know. You know, you can drive down the street and see the speed limit 70 miles an hour and deny there's a traffic authority, right? You can know the speed limit and still deny that there's a traffic authority, but there would be no speed limit to know unless there was a traffic authority. And that's the problem with atheists. They know right from wrong, but they deny the authority that establishes right and wrong, whose nature is right. and wrong, not wrong, but is right, is the standard of right, and any deviation from that would be what's wrong.
Okay.
All right.
That's a brilliant job explaining that to me like I'm in 10th grade. Can you explain that too? Say everything you just said again, like I'm eight years old.
Like you're eight years old.
It might be wrong to punch your sister, okay, if mommy exists.
But if mommy doesn't exist, it's just your sister's opinion against your opinion, right? In other words, there has to be an authority that establishes what good or right is. And so for you to say, or for someone to say it's wrong to punch your sister, there has to be a standard of good that says it's wrong to punch your sister. If it's just your opinion against your sister's opinion, that's just two opinions. It's a preference. Yes.
Even if you ignore mommy, the example that we used in the, your homeschool curriculum for second to fifth graders that we did last night was literally, if your mom says clean your room and you ignore her, she still said it. Whether you, whether you pretended to, whether you, you still heard it. Like you can, you can pretend like you didn't, but you did and your room still needs to be cleaned. Yep. Yeah. You can, you can know something is wrong and not do it, obviously.
But something wouldn't really be wrong unless there was a standard of right that you could define wrong by. Because you see, evil is not a thing in itself, it's a lack and a good thing. So evil is like cancer. If you take all the cancer out of a good body, you have a better body. What happens if you take all the body out of the cancer? You got nothing, doesn't exist.
Or evil is like rust in a car. If you take all the rust out of a car, you have a better car, but if you take all the car out of the rust, you got a pinto. Now, you got something that doesn't exist, right? In other words, evil is a lack in a good thing. Evil is what we might call anti -creation. God creates good things.
God created Charlie Kirk, and Tyler Robinson did evil by destroying the good thing that God had created. Now, Charlie Kirk still exists, but his body has been destroyed. He still exists, he's absent from the body present with the Lord, But the bad thing that was done was anti -creation. God creates good things and human beings degrade those good things, and that's what evil is. It's anti -creation. I got one more apologetist question.
Bill Maher would ask this too. He calls all the stories comically stupid. Floating hands on walls, people turning into salt, all the animals on a boat. Come on, Frank. Talking donkeys.
Yeah, well, the only reason he thinks that is because he's an anti -supernaturalist.
He thinks that only natural things can occur, but what he's missing is that this whole natural world was created to begin with and is sustained right now. The natural laws that are governing the universe right now were put there by a lawgiver, and they're sustained by a lawgiver. And they're not even the greatest miracles in the Bible. The greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. If that verse is true, Mike, every other verse in the Bible is at least possible. And now even atheists are admitting the evidence for the first verse.
They're admitting the universe had a beginning. Of course, they don't think it's God, but what else could it be?
If space, time, and matter had a beginning out of nothing, whatever created the universe has to at least be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create, and intelligent to have a mind to make a choice.
So he's asked people, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of? God. That's what we call God, okay? So if Genesis 1 -1 is true, if even atheists are admitting the evidence for that verse, then every other verse in the Bible is at least possible.
Of course it's crazy by natural laws, but we're not saying a natural law caused you know, a hand to write on the wall or Jesus to walk on water or rise from the dead.
We're not we're not saying you need natural law to even recognize what a miracle is. You know, you wouldn't be able to recognize that hands don't normally write on walls, you know, without a without an arm. You know, you wouldn't normally recognize that a man walks on water unless natural laws existed. You know, you wouldn't recognize you couldn't determine what a miracle was or discover what a miracle was. unless you had these natural laws that did the same thing over and over again, because miracles are an exception to those things.
Who made God? No one made God, because He is the unmade maker. You don't ask who created the uncreated creator. We just mentioned that God is timeless. If you're timeless, do you have a beginning? No.
No, you don't have a beginning, you don't have a cause. He is the uncaused first cause. And there has to be an uncaused first cause, otherwise nothing would exist. So it's either the universe is something outside the universe, but all the evidence shows the universe had a beginning, therefore it must be something outside the universe that is the uncaused first cause. Dr. Frank Turk, let me again give the pitch for your book, one of your books, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
There's a few more. But I also got to commend you and co -author on the curriculum. So since last time we talked, I immediately bought the second to fifth grade student workbook. And we've been going through it with the kids. We go through it sometimes in the morning or dinnertime or in bed and we just roll through it. It is phenomenal.
It is so good. The kids are so tracking with it. Dr. Turk, it's like case study, perfect tracking. They'll read it and then they'll ask a question. And it's literally the next part of the thing.
It's perfectly outlined. I cannot give it, it could not be better. the way it's written and how it's written and the flow of it and the building on top of it. It's just perfection. And every single person with a second to fifth grader, Johnny's Johnny's in kindergarten. He gets it.
So you can go, you can go below kindergarten to fifth grade. I would say, get that one. I can't vouch for the sixth, eighth or high school. I'm sure it's just as good, but I can only give you the highest approval for everyone listening to get the, uh, at least the very first second to fifth grade, uh, curriculum. How did you guys develop? I think it's called.
Yes, God, it's real. It's on our website. Cross examine .org.
Just click on store. You'll find it. Yeah.
Go get it. Everyone get, I'm not kidding. You got to get that. And then if you're an adult, Start with five copies of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
Might as well get ten, because you'll read it and then you'll give out a bunch to everyone else.
Dr. Turek, keep up the wonderful work.
Are you slowing down? Are you going to stop at all? Getting tired? Getting old? Well, University of Alabama tonight, Boise State next week. We'll get a little break over Thanksgiving, but yeah, it's been tiring, but we got to move forward.
Hearts are tender, Mike. That's what we're doing. Crossexamined . org, Dr. Frank Turek. Dr. Turek, thank you for your time today. Thank
Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it, God bless. Crossexamined . org, and I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. I'm not exaggerating when I talk about the book. You buy 10 of them, just buy 10 of them, you'll hand them all out.
And we've had a wonderful time. Truly, it's been a joy reading through his homeschool curriculum because the kids, I'm not, I'm not, whatever I said there is 100 % true. I'll be reading something and the kids will ask a question. And I'll do the best I can to answer it. And then it's the very next paragraph in the curriculum is explaining the question that they just asked. It's so logically and perfectly outlined.
And the kids get it and they're excited about it. They're excited that they get it. It's really, really good. Crossexamine . org is the website. A lot of information there to click around on and get the resources you need to help you work.
Mike Slater . locals . com for the transcript and no commercials.
