Proving God Exists — A Conversation with Apologist Frank Turek
Charlie welcomes Christian apologist Frank Turek from CrossExamined.org for a timeless discussion laying out the rational framework for the existence of God. Frank dissects the universal morality argument, the evidence for a divine creator and designer of the universe, and challenges some of the most compelling arguments of some of the world's most famous physicists and atheists. But if someone can be persuaded to believe in God, can we also prove that Jesus is Lord? Frank walks through the existence of "embarrassing testimony" in the Bible as one piece of proof. But perhaps more compelling, Frank discusses the evidence from the lives of the Disciples, evidence from the scriptures, the history of the biblical texts themselves. If you are having doubts in your faith, or know someone who is, this is a can't miss episode. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Rational Defense of the Gospel00:03:37
Hey, everybody.
Happy Sunday.
No advertisers on this episode.
That's right.
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For my conversation with Frank Turek, Frank makes the rational case for why there's a God, why the resurrection happened.
If you're into apologetics and the case for the faith, Frank Turek from Cross-Examined is the man for you.
Cross-examined is one of the great ministries that defends the faith and gives college and high school kids the ability to be able to rationally explain their beliefs.
Frank Turek is the man.
I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and go to the Charlie Kirk podcast page and make sure you're subscribed or go to charliekirk.com slash support.
Buckle up, everybody, here.
We go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
I feel like meeting an old friend.
We've been texting and talking for years now, and he's had a profound impact on my life.
I first came across Frank Turek when I saw a YouTube ad of yours when you were kind of going back and forth with an atheist and you were so rationally and effectively defending the gospel and Christianity and the Bible.
And I was like, who is this guy?
And I watched, I think, like two hours of your videos, and they were really, really powerful and impactful.
And so we got to know each other.
And I reached out to you through a couple of different ways.
And it's an honor to be connected.
It's an honor to be here, Charlie.
By the way, those who've never been to Turning Point USA, they're doing some great work here.
You need to know about this.
If you're just tuning in for the first time, Turning Point USA, amazing work, Charlie.
Really?
That means a lot.
I mean, having young people.
There's young people all over this place.
That's right.
And they're just great folks.
Thank you.
So thanks for the work you're doing.
The leadership's important.
Thank you.
Really important.
Well, it's a lot of work some days, but it's worth it.
It really is.
It's a lot of work every day, man.
Amen.
Isn't it?
But it's the Lord's work.
So keep it going.
Thank you.
I deeply appreciate that.
Let's first talk about your organization, Cross-Examined, which has kind of a double on time thing, right?
It has a couple different words.
Tell us about it.
Well, we decided many years ago, back in about 2006, 7, after I graduated from seminary, with a degree in apologetics, you go, what is that?
You're not saying you're sorry.
What you're doing is you're giving evidence for what you believe.
And it comes from 1 Peter 3:15 in the Bible.
Always ready to give an answer, give a reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect.
Now, since I'm from New Jersey, gentleness and respect is hard for me, but we try and do that.
The most polite state in the country.
That's right.
So 2006, 2007, we decided that since about 75% of kids who were brought up in the church walked away from the church once they went to college, that we need to go to college campuses and present them with the evidence that Christianity is true, Christianity is true, based on our book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
So we go to college campuses, which I love the work you're doing there.
We go to college campuses and present, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
And we set up a microphone for QA when it's over, and anybody can come and talk and ask a question.
And that's probably where you saw some of those videos.
Yeah, I do a lot of that too.
And I got to say, you're way better than I am at giving, like being magnanimous and trying to not own them, but trying to bring them towards truth.
I struggle with that at times.
You do a great job.
Well, thanks.
Design and Fine-Tuning in Universe00:08:48
But I look at young people, like I'm 60 now.
When I was 20, I didn't believe at 20 what I believe now.
So why should I expect some 20-year-old kid to agree with me?
Yes.
I shouldn't, especially given the fact that they've probably been through an education system that has not really given them the facts.
When they get up there and they express a lot of skepticism or even some hostility, I just say, look, when I was 20, I probably was about in the same place.
So I have to give them some grace.
It's even more saturated our culture now, the hypersecularization, the almost it's cool to be an atheist, right?
You're somehow intellectually superior if you believe in absolute nothingness.
And you do a great job of really diving into it and deconstructing it.
So let's start first with that, and then we can get into the Christianity and the resurrection and the Bible part of it.
What do you have to say for someone listening right now that says, Frank, I've never seen God.
There is no God.
God is what you make of it.
I would say that we know God by his effects.
Look, if you're a scientist, what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out what particular cause caused a particular effect.
So when someone says, How do I know God exists?
I say, I know God by his effects.
There's a creation, Charlie.
Even atheists admit this place was created.
So if there's a creation, that's the effect.
The cause must be a creator.
There's design.
There's design in the universe, the fine-tuning in the universe.
There's design in human life and other life.
That's the effect.
The cause must be a designer.
There's a moral law written on our hearts.
We know certain things are right and other things are wrong.
As you well state on college campuses, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created and endowed by their government.
No, endowed by their creator, right?
With certain unalienable rights.
Look, if there's no God, you can't say Hitler was wrong.
You can't say Putin's wrong.
You can't say anything is wrong.
You can't say torturing babies for fun is wrong.
You can say it.
You just can't justify it.
That's right.
Because everything's just a matter of your opinion.
But if we know that, say, torturing babies for fun is wrong, if we know murder's wrong, if we know Hitler was wrong, then there must be a standard of right beyond us.
That standard is God's nature.
So this effect we call the moral law must have a cause, a moral lawgiver, because laws have lawgivers.
And one other effect I might add is the fact that we can even reason, Charlie.
How can we reason?
Why do our minds know truth about reality outside of our skulls?
Because our mind is made in the image of the great mind.
So we have this effect known as reason, and we have a mind, which is an effect.
And we're reasoning back to a cause, a mind, an ultimate mind.
So we have a creator, we have a designer, we have a moral lawgiver, we have a mind.
And if we could go as far as the resurrection, we could say also someone that came and rose from the dead to show he was God.
So we're reasoning from effect to cause.
That's how we know God exists.
So I want to ask you to unpack two of those.
The one in particular where you say that we know there is a creation, and science actually shows that there was a definitive moment that started the universe.
And even a devout atheist will agree.
Talk a little bit.
Show us the mounting evidence that actually shows that.
Well, for example, Stephen Hawking, who was probably the top physicist in the world until he died about five years ago, said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.
All right.
Universe and time itself.
Now, Hawking tried to come up with another explanation other than God.
He failed, but he's admitting the data that space, time, and matter literally had a beginning out of nothing.
Now, one way we know this, we know it through science.
We know it through the Big Bang cosmology, but we also know it through philosophy.
Think about it this way: if there were an infinite number of days before today, would today have ever arrived?
I don't know.
No, the answer is.
I've never thought to you.
Yeah, I can give you intellectual constipation if you think about it long enough.
Some of these questions really can bring you into calisthenics intellectually.
If there were an infinite number of days before today, you'd always have to live another day before you got to today.
Yes, that's right.
Infinite and it will never end.
So there has to be only a finite number of days before today.
And if there's a finite number of days before today, in other words, if time had a beginning, whatever created time, of course, didn't have a beginning, right?
You're timeless.
It had to supersede or be transcendent over it.
Exactly.
So, what I like to say, and this is what we say on college campuses: if space, time, and matter had a beginning out of nothing, whatever created space, time, and matter can't be made of space, time, and matter.
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 to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation, someone had to make a choice, and only persons can make choices.
The being would also have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice.
So, I always ask people: I say, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?
And they say, well, that would sound like God.
Yeah, exactly.
And you say, well, how do you know it's the Christian God?
And the answer is, we don't yet.
I mean, this is just one argument.
But if we keep looking at the research, if we look particularly at the resurrection of Jesus, Charlie, if Jesus rose from the dead, then I think we can say that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1,989 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing.
In other words, Jesus is the creator in his divine nature.
But you have to get all the way through the evidence to see if the creator is Jesus.
From what we call the cosmological argument, which is the argument from the beginning of the universe, you just get a creator.
You don't know if it's God as we know it.
We don't know what it is.
Or maybe it's Australia, God, or whatever.
Yeah, we don't know if it's the God of biblical Christianity.
But once we know Jesus has risen from the dead, it is the God of biblical Christianity.
And so I want to get to that in a second.
I want to ask you another part of it, which is where Hawkins himself said was the hardest argument for him to overcome, the fine-tuning argument.
Yeah.
Talk about that.
Well, here's what Hawking said.
He said that if the universe, if the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand million million, a second after the Big Bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies.
Now, what could have caused the expansion rate to be that infinitesimally precise from the very beginning?
Only a mind, right?
It started there, didn't evolve to that point.
When space, matter, and time came into existence, the expansion rate was absolutely perfect.
Any change either way, we're not here.
Actually, there's a more interesting way of illustrating this.
The ratio of the proton to the neutron, the weight, is fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 37th power.
You say, I can't get my head around that number.
I know, neither can I. Think about it this way: one part in 1 to the 37th power is one part in one with 37 zeros following it.
Now, here's an illustration of this: the kind of precision that one in 10 to the 37th power would be is if you stacked the entire North American continent in dimes to the moon, Charlie.
That's like, I don't know, over 200,000 miles, right?
And then you did that on a billion other North Americas, and you marked one dime in that whole pile, red, you blindfolded somebody, you threw them in the pile and said, randomly pick one out.
If you pick the red one out, that's one in 10 to the 37th precision.
And then you get to pick one.
You only get to pick one.
Now, what makes more sense that that value was designed to be there or it wasn't?
Those are only two choices we have.
It was either designed or it wasn't.
It was designed.
The odds against that happening by chance, whatever that means, chance is not a cause, as you know, but that's what they use.
They use the word chance.
It's zero.
It's not going to happen.
Somebody designed that ratio of the proton to the neutron to be precisely what it needed to be.
And that doesn't even factor in the fine-tuning of our own planet and the fine-tuning of humanity and the ability to have children and the laws of nature.
Those are all other fine-tuning.
It's one thing to have a universe in galaxies.
Could just be close to nothingness, just kind of adrift.
But then to have life, that's a whole different level of finding.
Exactly.
And the interesting thing about this, Charlie, is that if any one of about a dozen factors that are fine-tuned to that level of precision were that infinitesimally different, it all falls apart.
We don't exist, right?
It's a house of cards.
One thing goes down, everything goes down.
So this universe is designed.
And if it's designed, if that's the effect, the cause is a design.
There has to be a designer.
Resurrection as Foundation for Faith00:11:33
So some people listen to this who will say, okay, I'm with you, man.
But the Christianity thing, no-go.
Timeout.
I believe a God.
I do yoga.
I believe in Buddhism.
I am spiritual, not religious.
We have all sorts of different types of listeners.
And so why is Christianity true?
Because Jesus rose from the dead and there's evidence for it.
That's the bottom line.
Let's go through that.
All right, good.
So we'll focus on that.
And then we'll also then go through the people that say, I don't believe a whale could swallow someone on the sea, could be part of it.
You get these questions all the time.
But let's start with that.
The resurrection, allegedly, I believe, happened 1958 years ago.
1989 years ago, yeah.
And so, I mean, come on, Frank.
It's very simple.
The followers of Jesus, they rolled back the stone.
They stole the body to try to create a narrative.
Yeah.
In order to get themselves beaten, tortured, and killed.
That's right.
You know, Justice Scalia said that in one of his opinions, Charlie, where he said, we all know that the raving evangelists made up the entire resurrection story in a sinister attempt to get themselves all martyred.
To become martyrs.
Yeah, exactly.
They could be remembered forever.
That's right.
So yeah, let's go just through before we get to some of the concrete evidence that you've done a phenomenal job of, let's talk about some of the kind of tangential evidence that I think is interesting.
Female witnesses, right?
The cost of actual what that means post-resurrection.
Just talk about some of the circumstantial evidence that we know is true no matter what.
Well, here's one that I always like to use because it makes so much intuitive sense.
It's called embarrassing testimony.
Embarrassing testimony says that if there's something in a text that's embarrassing to the author or authors, it's probably true, right?
This is what historians know, right?
Because you're not going to make yourself look bad by making stuff up.
You're not going to embarrass yourself.
So this is the case for the Old Testament, for sure.
New and Old Testament.
Well, yeah, but I'm saying old especially.
Like the Jews write so terribly about themselves.
That's right.
It must be true.
That's right.
Yeah.
Like, why are they making this up?
Yes, I mean, David could have been like, cut that out.
That's right.
Get that Bathsheba thing out of it.
That's right.
Totally.
And they didn't.
In fact, the interesting thing is Matthew, when he's recording his genealogy of Jesus, when he gets to Bathsheba, you know what he says?
He doesn't put her name in there.
He says Uriah's wife.
Wow.
See, that's a slam, Charlie.
He's telling the truth, but it's a slam because Uriah was the husband of Bathsheba who saved and had battle.
But let's just think about the resurrection, right?
Peter, their leader.
He's called Satan by Jesus.
Do you think they invented that?
I mean, he's their leader.
And then he says, Lord, I'll never deny you.
What does he wind up doing?
Three times.
Denies him three times.
And then at the crucifixion, all the disciples, maybe with the exception of one, they all run away.
This is like a Monty Python movie, right?
Run away.
They all run away.
And who are the brave ones?
You mentioned it.
The women.
The women.
The women on the breast.
One of the least credible witnesses at a time is a woman.
Yeah.
Now, that's embarrassing to men, but it's also, it doesn't add anything to the case at that time in that culture because a woman's testimony was not considered on par with the people.
But if you were to make it up, why would you make it up with women?
Right.
Actually, there's a woman came up to me once after I was presenting this at a campus.
She said, Frank, I know why Jesus appeared to the women first.
And I said, why?
And she said, because he wanted to get the story out.
That's right.
I said, that is an excellent point.
He wanted to everyone.
That's right.
So the skeptics will say Jesus was a heretic or a rabble-rouser or whatever, killed, and body was stolen.
I mean, come on, it's not that hard to do stuff like that.
Yeah, I would say who stole the body and why.
I mean, the Jews to get himself martyred?
Look, he didn't think his own brother was God, and then he dies as a martyr.
And you know who tells us this?
Josephus, the Jewish historian, who was probably in Jerusalem at the time, because he lived at that time.
He tells us that James, the half-brother of Jesus, dies as a martyr.
He's the pastor of the church in Jerusalem.
The Sanhedrin, that's the Jewish ruling council that didn't like Christians, actually sentenced him to die, Charlie.
They threw him over the Temple Mountain and stoned him to death.
Why would he invent this?
I mean, so I'm playing devil's action.
Yeah, keep it going because I'm a devout Christian, but I mean, come on, religious fanatics do stuff that's inexplicable all the time.
They may not have gamed out the martyrdom thing, but they definitely believed in him.
They worshipped with him.
They were disciples of him.
Is it out of the question that a couple of them could have stole the body and they didn't quite play out all the...
What logistically would that have meant, Frank, to actually go through Roman centurion guards and move a boulder?
Talk about the actual logistical improbability of going to what was a tomb and doing that.
Yeah, well, you couldn't do it because you couldn't unilaterally roll the stone away.
It's about 2,000 pounds.
But secondly, it's guarded by a Roman guard.
And if you tried to take them on, you were dead.
And if the tomb was broken into on your watch, you would be killed as a Roman guard.
Yeah, and so let's pause for a second.
Why did they have the tomb guarded for this reason precisely?
Yes, yes, of course.
Yeah, because they wanted to make sure.
Caiaphas wanted to make sure there were no shenanigans going on.
He heard maybe some rumors that this might happen.
So they asked for a Roman guard, and Roman guard was put on the tomb.
But here's the interesting thing, Charlie.
It would have been really easy for anybody to disprove Christianity.
They could have gone to the tomb and taken out his body, right?
The Jews and the Romans wanted Christianity not to be true, but they couldn't do that because Jesus was still using his body.
The disciples had no motive to steal the body.
Why would they do that?
I mean, look, here's what people don't understand, I think, when they think about this.
All the writers of the New Testament, with the exception of Luke, were all Bible-believing Old Testament, Yahweh, chosen people.
Yeah, he was a Gentile.
They're all chosen people, Jews.
They didn't think a guy could claim to be God.
That would be blasphemy.
And they didn't think a guy could resurrect in the middle of time.
They thought he could resurrect at the end of time, Daniel 12, but not in the middle of time.
So why would they, they're already God's chosen people.
Why would they invent a guy who claimed to be God?
That was blasphemy.
And a guy who rose from the dead in the middle of time, which they didn't believe, and then go die for it, unless it really happened.
In fact, I know it's going to sound a little strange, but Christianity is not true because a series of documents we put under one binding we call the Bible says it's true.
In fact, Christianity, Charlie, would be true even if the Bible never existed.
And people go, well, what do you mean?
Because Christianity did not originate with a book.
It originated with an event.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
It originated with an event known as the resurrection.
And because I asked people, I say, do you realize there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written?
Yes, that's true.
Why?
Because they witnessed or saw somebody who witnessed the resurrection of the Christian.
The Bible is simply a catalog of the events.
Exactly.
In fact, we could put it this way: the New Testament writers did not create the resurrection.
The resurrection created the New Testament writers.
Exactly right.
You could draw a parallel.
I know it's not a supernatural event, but you could say, did the newspaper reports of the Titanic sinking cause the Titanic to sink?
Or were they the result of the Titanic sinking?
Of course.
Right.
That's right.
Yeah, the Titanic sinking came first.
The resurrection came first, and then the reports of it came later.
From a historical standpoint, one of the criticisms some people will say is: hey, these books were written decades after Jesus.
Therefore, they're historically questionable at best.
Talk about how that's actually not true.
The window of time is actually shorter than people realize.
Yes.
Talk about also from historical standards, whether it be how we analyze Alexander the Great or Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates, from a historical standpoint, to have even a window of a couple decades, even if that was true, is an unbelievable accomplishment.
Be able to have text to event original source documents that close together.
Yeah, in fact, you just pointed out Alexander the Great.
I mean, the earliest biography we have of him is several hundred years after he was gone.
And people go, yeah, that's good history.
We have materials that are within decades, and many of them earlier than just decades.
Was Mark the first book?
Is that right?
They say Mark is probably the first, could have been Matthew.
But actually, it might be that the first book in the New Testament written could have been something like Galatians or 1 Thessalonians, written in the late 40s, but that's not even the issue.
The issue is that there are small sections of these New Testament documents that go back to the event itself, the resurrection, crucifixion, resurrection itself.
For example, the earliest, they're called creeds.
The earliest evidence for the New Testament.
That's a great argument.
I know what you got.
Yeah, the earliest evidence for the resurrection comes from 1 Corinthians 15, verses 3 to 8.
That creed, Charlie, goes all the way back to the event itself, as even skeptics Bart Ehrman agree with.
He's a skeptic that teaches at UNC Chapel Hill.
He says this creed, which explains that Jesus rose from the dead and who he appeared to, that it was an oral incantation.
Yes.
Is that right?
Yes.
That was repeated verbally so people wouldn't forget it.
Yes.
They wouldn't forget it, and it was passed on verbally until Paul put it in writing in about 55 AD when he wrote 1 Corinthians.
It would be like if we went back and we talked to somebody from 9-11 who went through 9-11.
20 years ago.
Yeah, 20 years ago, and asked them what they remember.
This is another argument, by the way.
9-11 was an impact event.
What's an impact event?
An impact event, you'll never forget.
And you'll remember what you ate, remember where you turned, you'll remember all of it.
That's an impact event.
An impact event like 9-11, or for those of you who are older watching, like the Kennedy assassination, or let me give you something even more closer to home.
You knew where you were when Trump won the presidency in 2016.
Remember everything about that?
You knew where you were.
I could remember where I sat, where I ate, what I wore.
Right.
Everything.
Conversations I had.
Yep.
Sentiments, dialogue, feelings, all of it.
And you'll never forget it.
No, I'll never forget it.
Yeah.
Okay.
You'll never forget.
And even better, I've written it down.
I have my own personal records.
Now, if you went forward now and wanted to write another book, you've already written books, but say you wanted to write another book about that 10 years from now.
You've got those notes.
You've got that impact event in your head.
You know other people would be accurate.
Totally accurate.001%.
There's 41 creeds in the New Testament.
Dr. Gary Habermas, who's the top terrific on the resurrection.
41 creeds he's discovered in the New Testament.
These go way earlier than the events themselves, or I should say the books themselves.
So this is early testimony.
And the argument we make in the book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, is that most, if not all, the documents are written prior to 70 AD.
Most of them are written prior to 60 AD, 62 AD.
This is early stuff, Charlie.
When people are still alive, eyewitnesses, they were there, they can vouch for it.
This happened.
And so some of the pushback people will have at the totality of the Bible, like, okay, maybe I could see the resurrection, but come on, Frank, do I have to buy on to all the miracles of the Old Testament?
Does Jesus really calm the waters and turn water to wine and feed 5,000 people?
Or, you know, did a whale really swallow somebody?
Was the Red Sea really parted?
Did manna come from heaven and was quail blown off course?
How do we navigate fear?
Eyewitnesses Validate Biblical Miracles00:09:40
I always ask people, what's the greatest miracle in the Bible?
And most people will say the resurrection.
And I'll say, no, that's not it.
Oh, is it part in the Red Sea?
No.
Is it walking on water?
No.
The greatest miracle in the Bible, Charlie, is the first verse.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And here's the interesting thing.
Atheists are admitting the data for the first verse, Charlie.
That's great.
They're admitting that the universe came into existence out of nothing.
They don't think it's God, but as we talked about earlier, what else could it be?
It's got to be a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause.
So if that's the case, if Genesis 1-1 is true, every other verse is at least possible.
You can't rule it out.
So I have no trouble believing in any of those miracles because Genesis 1-1 is true and we have evidence it's true.
So, yeah.
And in fact, when people say, I don't believe in miracles, I say, look around.
You're living in one.
This whole universe is a miracle.
Life is a miracle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so there's different ways to try to bring people away from atheism towards Christianity.
I'm sure you know.
Some people to the heart, some people to the head.
Do you find that sometimes there is a reluctance to accept Christianity just because of, I don't want it to be true.
Yeah, that's why I always ask this question.
If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
And many times, Charlie, the answer is no.
Elaborate on that.
It's one of the most powerful things that you've ever said about it.
Yeah, because when they get up to the microphone and express any hostility, if they're an atheist or non-believer, I'll just say, hey, do you mind if I ask you a question?
Sure, go ahead.
If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
They usually hesitate, or if they're honest, they'll say no.
Why?
Lifestyle changes.
Yeah, they don't want it to be true.
They don't want there to be a God.
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 is going to make them happy.
Here's the problem.
You can make yourself happy over the short term, doing a lot of fun things, but over the long term, it's a disaster.
And when you get older, you start realizing, yeah, I thought I could make myself happy doing it my way.
The only way to get contentment is to go straight through truth, and Jesus is the truth.
So always ask the question, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
You'd be surprised how many times people would stop, they'll hesitate, and if they're honest, they'll say no.
And then all I can do at that point is pray for them, love them, maybe plant a seed here or there, and then wait.
Because what's going to happen?
At some point, a tragedy is going to strike.
It happens to all of us.
Tragedy comes into life, right?
At that point, your phone is going to ring and that person's going to be on the other end, right?
They're not going to call their atheist friend when things go bad.
What's the atheist going to say?
There's no rhyme or reason to this.
We're just going to become worm food.
It's over, right?
They're going to call you a person of spiritual depth.
When the student's ready, the teacher will appear.
So I just say, ask him the question and then wait.
Pray and wait.
And you can plant seeds every now and then.
So talk a little about through your ministry, crose examine.org, and also your book, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, some conversion stories you've experienced, people that have really been touched and moved by what you've done.
Yeah, we've had several people email us or when we see them on a college campus, they'll come up and say, I was out or I was an atheist and someone gave me your book and now I'm a Christian.
So thank you.
I mean, it's happened several times.
I don't know how many times.
I can't count how many.
Those are people who are open, though.
You know, there's a lot of people are not open.
But they're not open now.
Maybe they'll be open later, right?
I wasn't pursuing God when I was 20, but when I was 25, I was.
What changed?
Things change.
I met the son of a Methodist minister when I was in the Navy, and I had so many questions for him.
He finally said, you just need to get Josh McDowell books.
Evidence demands a verdict more than a carpenter.
Read those books.
I said, this stuff's true.
And then when I got out of the Navy, I met Norman Geisler, who was sort of the tiger woods of apologetics at the time.
And he was starting a seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.
So my wife and three sons, we moved down to Charlotte back in 1993.
And that's how it happened.
That's amazing.
What do you think churches need to do better to equip the people in their youth ministry to be ready for all of this?
Great question.
They need to start teaching evidence.
Why do you think they're not doing that?
The easiest way to get picked off in a war is to not know you're in one, right?
And this is the work you're doing on college campuses, too, right?
We both go into college campuses trying to throw these young people a lifeline to say, look, look at the evidence.
Look at the truth.
Look at the truth.
Look at liberty.
Look at all these things.
Yeah.
You know, you could use the same question for any issue, Charlie.
You could say if capitalism was the best way to bring people out of poverty, would you become a capitalist?
Yeah, that's right.
You know what they might say?
No.
Yeah, that's right.
Right?
If socialism never worked anywhere it was tried and it had the wrong view of human nature, would you dispense with your socialist objectives?
And the question you're really asking is, if something were true, would you stop doing what feels good?
Yeah.
That's really the question that's interesting, right?
That's right.
Is would you prioritize truth over pleasure or power?
Those are the two things that they really do.
But we have a lot of pastors that listen to our program.
And I could say this.
Most churches are really ill-equipping the people in their youth ministry.
And so you got a wanna, you got teen packed, you got all this stuff.
Give your life to the Lord.
Highly emotional, though.
And that's not bad, right?
God gave us emotions for a reason.
Sure.
Right?
Spirit of God moving.
You're 17 years old.
You got a lot of emotions as it is.
You have probably a transformational relationship with Jesus at that moment.
But then all of a sudden, you're 20 years old and you go to Stanford or go to CU Boulder, right?
People around you are doing drugs.
They're talking about atheism.
And all of a sudden, the moral kind of window moves.
Next thing you know, they're coming home for Thanksgiving a couple years later and they tell mom and dad, yeah, I don't know about that God thing.
I think that was all just a bunch of chemicals in my head.
Talk a little about that.
That happens 75% of kids that walk away.
So can you reiterate that number?
I'm sorry to interrupt.
75%.
I find that hard to believe.
Yeah, 75% of kids that are in church when they're at home walk away from the church once they leave the home, once they go to college.
Now, we've learned in recent years, Charlie, that, okay, they'll still go to church if the parents force them to while they're in high school, but mentally they've checked out before then.
I totally agree.
And as soon as they're on their own, say la vie, baby.
I'm doing what I want to do.
Because there's a moral hazard you just brought up, Charlie.
As you know, when you go to college and you're out on your own for the first time, you don't want to do everything God wants you to do.
You don't want to do everything your parents told you to do or not do.
You don't want to do what feels good.
Yeah, you want to do, you want to fit in, right?
And, oh, this pastor that I brought up, I was brought up with my whole life, never told me about any of these things.
But my parents are paying this professor 50 grand a year to tell me this that I've never heard before.
Who am I going to do?
So eloquent.
Oh, yeah.
Charismatic.
Oh, yeah.
Who am I going to believe?
Charming and funny.
And that's a really important point.
I speak at a lot of churches, and so do you.
And I can see the skeptical teenager from a mile away in the audience.
The body posture, the sulking, the mom and dad that are really engaged, but they were brought just to the event.
You can kind of see that image, right?
And I see him like, boy, they're 16 and they do not want to be here.
And they're just saying in their mind, this stupid guy, he doesn't know what he's saying.
And then there's the other teenager where they might be 16 and they're curious.
They're taking notes and they're kind of joking around with their parents.
And you could see their processing.
And so I think that's interesting, Frank.
In some ways, it happens even before they leave the church.
Oh, it totally does.
In fact, a pastor friend of mine in Charlotte was preached.
This is 10 years ago.
He's preaching against the new atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins and these.
And Harris.
Yeah, yeah.
He's preaching.
He was talking about why they're wrong.
And this kid comes up to me, 20 years old.
He says, you know, I used to be a Christian, but I'm an agnostic now.
Oh, really?
And he said, You shouldn't be doing what you're doing.
My pastor friend David, big church in Charlotte, says, Why shouldn't I be doing this?
What do you mean?
He said, You shouldn't be saying that the atheists are wrong.
That's not loving.
He said, No, no, no.
He said, No, no, no.
That's probably a lie.
Yeah, right.
You have to tell people the truth if you want to be loving.
Love does not mean approval, right?
Every parent knows if you approve everything your kid wants to do, you're not loving.
You're unloving.
You need to tell them the truth.
Anyway, so this goes on back for a few minutes, back and forth.
Every time this kid brought up an objection to Christianity, David would begin to answer it, but the kid was on to the next objection.
You know how this goes.
The goalposts keep moving.
That's right.
So David finally said to him, You know what?
I think you're saying you're an agnostic because you're sleeping with your girlfriend.
Yeah.
He just came out and said the kid just froze.
Yeah, that's right.
Because that was exactly the issue.
It had nothing to do with evidence.
You know, most people.
That's such an important point.
Charlie, most people at this age are looking for God like a criminal is looking for a cop.
They're not looking for God.
It's tragic.
Well, because the laws of nature haven't caught up with them yet.
Because they're able to delay it, right?
Yeah.
Because they're not paying for college.
Right.
Right.
They're not having a job.
They do what they want to do and it feels good.
They can kind of coast through, right?
And the tragedy, they can kind of delay it.
They can punt it.
But all of a sudden, a year and a half later, the girlfriend breaks up or it's, you're not having the same sort of endorphin kick or dopamine kick you did.
And you start going to substance and drugs and you start getting really depressed.
And then you have to get a job and all this and it comes crashing down all around you.
And that kind of world that God wants us to live in that they tried to declare war on, all of a sudden, they become really miserable.
Charlie, who was it?
Was it Churchill who said if you're not a liberal when you're 20, you don't have a heart?
That's right.
You don't have a brain.
When you're 40, you don't have a brain.
Was it Churchill?
Yeah.
You was spectacular.
Yeah.
So I agree so much with all of this.
Changing Lives from Ground Up00:04:00
And I know a lot of parents are listening to this and they're just enamored with kind of your articulate ability to talk about this.
I just want our audience to know that this is like half of 1% of 1% of the library that you're able to talk about.
You can run the whole gauntlet, right?
You can go through objection through objection.
There's also teleological arguments that you make, right?
There's philosophical ones.
You go through the artifact arguments as well.
Archaeology.
Archaeological evidence, I should say, right?
And so we just kind of really barely touch the surface.
And it's very, very compelling and really thoughtfully done.
And I want to compliment you.
There's some apologists out there that I think get really kind of cocky and self-righteous.
You've done a really awesome job of just being magnanimous, right?
Because it's easy when you're talking only about the head, right?
To just be too analytical.
Yeah, you don't want to do that.
You're not, when you're answering a question, as you know, Charlie, you're not really answering a question.
You're answering a person.
That's exactly right.
And you've got to, you don't know why that person's standing at that microphone.
You don't know what their history is.
You don't know what they know.
You don't know what's happened in their lives.
And if they're at one of your events or one of my events and they're at the microphone, they're interested in some way.
It could be a good interest or a bad interest, right?
There's something.
There's a spark there.
They're not sitting at home eating potato chips.
That's right.
They're not apathetic.
Which is something.
Yeah, it's something.
That's right.
So I actually think the people who are hard against us, whether it's politically-they're way easier converts.
They totally are.
They are.
Because the hardest thing is to activate.
To convert apathyism, to go from apathetic to interested.
So the people that are at least coming to our events are interested, and that's a good thing.
And so I want to commend people for doing that, even if they're on the other side.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're wonderful.
It's crose examine.org.
Anything else you want to plug?
Conferences, things you're doing?
Yeah, we do have a podcast every week.
Yeah, it's a great podcast I listen to every so often.
It's really good.
It's called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
We have a YouTube channel with all these little videos on it, QA from the college campus.
So you can see all that there.
We have a TV show on NRB TV.
It's all just go to crosexamine.org.
We have an app, the whole deal.
But, Charlie, the work you're doing here is fabulous.
I mean, getting all these young people engaged.
And I know it's not just politics, Charlie.
You've got Turning Point USA Faith.
That's exactly right.
Right?
And so people need to know that.
This is a whole worldview ministry.
It's not a ministry that's just as important as politics are.
Two of my five books are on politics, okay?
So I'm interested in politics, but it's not just about politics here at Turning Point.
You're trying to change lives from the ground up.
Transformation.
Transformation.
Get people to become Christians to know the right worldview.
And that will inform their politics and everything else they do.
Yeah, we have an expression here.
Once people start drinking from the streams of liberty, they're going to want to find its source.
Nice.
And so it's really interesting.
We had 10,000 people at America Fest.
Jack Kibbs spoke, and I'd say probably 60% are Christians.
And not all of them are serious Christians, but 40% or whatever, agnostic or whatever.
And Frank, we had hundreds of people give their life to the Lord, and they never would have went to a church service ever.
Beautiful.
But they agreed with conservative values, Constitution, all that good stuff.
But all of a sudden, Jack Hibbs gets up there and gives a sermon.
They never heard a servant in their life.
Oh, really?
Right.
And this is an interesting ministry opportunity that people don't always capture, right?
Which is, you know, there's a portion of the population that believes in the principles of liberty, and they've never really understood that liberty is not man's idea, but it's God's idea.
That's what we're contesting for.
Well, this goes back to what we were saying earlier: that every effect has a cause.
Amen.
And the effect of the moral law we all know, that's the effect.
The cause is God's nature.
That's right.
And without God's nature, there's no liberty because there are no rights.
There's no rights without God.
That's right.
There's people out there running around saying they got rights to do this and that, Charlie, but they're atheists.
Where are you getting rights?
Where do you get the rights from?
It's just your existence.
It's just your opinion.
That's right.
If there's no God.
If there's no objective standard.
That's right.
So that's great.
Hollywood Heroes Teach Life Lessons00:02:02
Frank, it's such an honor to meet you in person.
Same here, brother.
Crose examine.org.
Keep up the wonderful work on it.
Hey, one more thing.
Can I say one more thing?
We have a book coming out.
I don't know when this is going to air, but my son and I just wrote a book together.
And he is in the military right now, but he's also a seminary grad.
He went to Southern Evangelical Seminary like I did.
He's a movie buff.
We just wrote a book called Hollywood Heroes: How Your Favorite Movies Reveal God.
One's coming to you soon, Charlie.
And if you go to Hollywood Heroes, I've got to have you back on for that.
Oh, I'd love to.
HollywoodheroesBook.com.
If you pre-order the book, it comes out May 3rd, 2022.
You pre-order it.
We're going to send you the audio version for free.
Hollywoodheroesbook.com.
Here are the franchises we go through.
Captain America, Iron Man, Harry Potter.
Harry Potter?
Yeah, you'd be surprised.
Wow.
Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Batman, Wonder Woman, and one or two others.
That's very unique.
Yeah.
And the ultimate hero, of course, is Jesus.
All of these heroes, Charlie, are patterned after the ultimate hero.
You can get biblical lessons, apologetic lessons, philosophical lessons, theological lessons, life lessons from watching movies and reading this book, Hollywood Heroes.
And it will change the way you look at these movies.
That's right.
There's a reason why these movies do so well.
That's right.
It's because they're telling the ultimate story.
They are.
And people don't even consciously realize it at times, but their soul is trying to get the attention of the viewer.
Hey, like, I like this story because this is what we actually need.
That's right.
That's right.
Screaming at them.
And I think you might be able to connect it with them.
We need somebody to rescue us from evil.
That's what all these stories are.
And people are like, I just love Lord of the Rings.
Why?
I love Star Wars.
Why?
Yeah.
It's because it's that tension of good versus evil.
That's right.
The force versus the Sith, whatever.
Right?
Frank, thanks so much.
Charlie.
God bless you.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Turning point USA.
Cross-examination.
Check it out.
Beautiful.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and support our show at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.