Defeating AI's Best Arguments Against God ft. Frank Turek
What does AI think the strongest arguments against God's existence are — and what are the counters to them? Lifelong apologist and evangelist Frank Turek joins Charlie to shoot down some of the most common and most formidable attacks on the Christian faith. Frank and Charlie talk about slavery in the Bible, whether the Old Testament simply copies other religions, the historicity of Scripture, and more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
We have phenomenal conversations with my friend Frank Turek about atheism, morality, and top objections that people have to giving their life to Jesus.
It's a very important conversation.
Text it to your friends and email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
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.
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Okay, everybody, super excited for this conversation with my friend Frank Turuk.
Frank, great to see you, my friend.
It's great seeing you, my friend.
Frank is one of my mentors and friends and teachers, and we've been studying together.
Oh, yeah.
Here in Phoenix.
It's kind of our offseason, right?
So it's a little different than an FL player.
I have two offseasons a year.
So my on, it's similar to you.
Your on season, what is fall and spring?
Yeah, well, I'm doing colleges too.
Just not as many as you, man.
How many?
How many do you do?
We try and do anywhere between 15 and 20 a year.
You're doing 15, you're doing 25 a semester.
Yeah, we do about 50 to 60 a year.
It's more easy.
Yeah, the pace is out of control, but it's great.
And so just remind your audience, you do cross-examined, you have the best books out on Christian apologetics.
That's what my mom says.
Yes.
Yeah, well, she's right.
I don't have enough faith to be an atheist is the big one.
Stealing from God, why atheists need God to make their case.
Those are the two biggies on apologetics.
And so you go to college campuses and you do similar type vibe that I do, open question, open mic, and your stuff has gone very viral throughout the years.
Before we dive into just some of the fun, because I'm going to have you debate our AI in a second.
Let's do it, man.
But before we do that, what are some of the changes today, 2025, versus what you've heard from students five years ago and ten years ago.
Well, let's go back 15 years ago in the heyday of the new atheists.
We got so many questions from atheists and we got so much pushback from atheists, but I'm going to schools now, Charlie, and the organizers are saying, hey, when you come and talk about the evidence for Christianity, could you spend more time on the New Testament than whether or not God exists?
Because we're having trouble finding a lot of atheists on campus.
Okay.
Atheism is waning and the idea that there is at least some spiritual force out there is gaining strength.
And now Christianity is being looked at from all areas, as you know.
what's driving people to consider Christianity?
Evil.
There's too much evil in the world.
Things are getting worse and worse and people are going, there's got to be more to life than this.
There's got to be some standard out there.
Maybe I ought to look at Christianity again.
And the work you're doing on college campuses is making people see Christianity as at least plausible.
This guy, Charlie Kirk, is really sharp.
And he believes in Christianity.
Maybe I ought to look at Christianity again because you're in the political world.
Yes, that's right.
Primarily.
Yeah, yeah.
And so people are going.
going, Charlie is one of the sharpest speakers I've seen and he is an evangelical Christian.
Maybe he knows something I ought to look into.
I do hear that feedback a lot.
By the way, the most promising thing that we receive.
uh freedom at charliekirk.com or emails or messages on social media we probably get a thousand a year charlie i believe in god because of you i go back to church and that doesn't count the comments because the comments you don't know they could be trolls or whatever but we get thousands of comments charlie i'd strengthen my faith in god and jesus and oh absolutely life goes to you and that's awesome because that is a that's an ultimate purpose to what we do it's not the sole purpose i mean we believe that one once we instruct people of the civil law, then that will point people to Christ.
But no, it's a very exciting moment.
Would you say that?
I don't think atheism is dead.
My friend Eric Metaxas, I think, gets a little ahead of himself, but it seems to be dying.
Yeah, it's waning.
Yeah.
And the difference between 15 years ago and now is people used to wonder if Christianity was true.
Now they're asking, is Christianity good?
So the top three objections on a college campus that I get, and I think you're getting too if you think about it, the top three objections to Christianity are morality, morality, and morality.
It's all about morality.
It's all about what does this mean to me?
They don't really get interested in like ancient text disputes very rarely, but they'll say, Oh, why is slavery in the Bible?
Right.
How would you how do you respond when someone says, But Frank, the Bible endorses slavery?
I would say, first of all, what do you mean by slavery?
Do you know what kind of slavery the Old Testament was talking about because it's not the kind of race based chattel slavery we had here in America.
Which actually is prohibited.
Yes.
Kidnapping for slavery was in both the Old and New Testaments.
It was punishable by death in the Old Testament.
Okay.
It was chattel slavery.
It was indentured servitude.
If you were in debt and you needed to get out of debt and you needed to pay for your family, to feed your family.
You could put yourself in an indentured servitude position to work for that person, to work off debt, and to provide for your family.
And if you were in that situation, it was temporary.
It could only go seven years unless by mutual agreement you wanted to become a bond servant.
You could extend that.
It wasn't race-based.
You could get out of it by running away.
You could leave it.
This is in Deuteronomy 15, Deuteronomy 15, 14 to 16.
It's not to chase after you.
Yes, you could.
So it's not like chattel slavery here.
It was not an ideal situation, but you.
But you know, there was no welfare state in ancient Israel.
There was no way to pay off debt other than putting yourself in the employee of someone else.
In fact, it's a version of the Old Testament.
The Old Testament slavery or indentured servitude was really a kind of bankruptcy law.
It allowed you to work off debt and take care of your family.
And so it wasn't the kind of slavery we had here.
It was indentured servitude.
And there's a lot of details on this.
My friend Paul Copan, who wrote a great book called Is God a Moral Monster?
I know it's on my list.
Paul goes into it in great detail.
tail and I think this is true about the questions we have to deal with Charlie on a college campus people say what are the what are the hardest questions to answer and I think the hardest questions to answer are none of them they're just hard to answer in two minutes it take time to explain well it takes time a lot of time a lot of context but we also must be unafraid to brag on how the teachings in the New Testament led to the abolition of slavery.
But also, I mean, in Philemon, like 116, Paul writes the Philemon, you know, you should view your slave as you, like as an equal, basically.
That's right.
If I'm remembering.
correctly.
Yes.
Philemon only has one chapter, so it's Philemon 16.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
So yeah.
And so the, that's very important.
But also that slavery has been the norm for almost every civilization.
Yes.
It is.
It is what worldview has gotten rid of it, which is noteworthy.
Exactly.
And also Jesus came to set the captives free.
That was his initial inauguration.
His inauguration in a ministry is Luke chapter four.
One of the things he says is, I came to set the captives free.
But people will say, well, why didn't the New Testament tell.
tell that culture to eradicate slavery completely right then and there.
Let me ask you a question about this, Charlie.
See if you agree with this.
Would it make any sense to tell people in California right now, particularly the minority of Christians, to eradicate abortion in California right now?
Would I tell them to?
Could they do it?
No.
They couldn't do it.
No.
Right?
What would be a way they could do it?
Incrementally.
They could incrementally work to change the hearts and minds.
This is the least persuasive argument to a college kid.
Oh, it totally is.
Don't you agree?
Incrementalism?
They're like, how dare you?
Yeah.
Because they're nineteen and they're they're zealots.
and they're self-righteous.
And so I would say that incrementalism, would you agree is the least persuasive?
Oh, it's the least persuasive, but it makes sense because of the political realities at the time.
In fact, as you pointed out, it was universal.
slavery was everywhere in the ancient world.
Now, by the time you got to the Roman period, it was...
Okay, so it wasn't like we had here, but it was still something that was not ideal, quite obviously.
And God, the way he got rid of it was through incrementally first of all everyone's made in the image of god everybody is one in christ there are no social distinctions do you know that pliny the younger who was somebody that persecuted christians said he tortured two slave women who were deaconesses in the church how did slave women become deaconesses in the church because the church treated them as equals What do you say to the argument?
And I'm paraphrasing, and I could look it up here, where Paul says you slave should submit to their masters.
Yes.
How do we, how do we, because what Christians are supposed to do is treat everyone as if they're made in the image of God because they are, it is our way of loving people, even those who don't treat us well.
We treat everybody like they're made in the image of God.
So if you're in a slave situation, and Paul says, try to get out of it if you can, but if you're in a slave situation, he does say that.
Yes, you ought to do, you ought to do.
right by the person you're dealing with.
In fact, Peter says this.
He says, what good is it if you treat people well who treat you well?
Even the pagans do that.
He said, but you should treat people who don't treat you well well.
It's better to suffer evil than to do evil.
So they also say in slavery, and then this is a moral pomposity, you know, kind of they say that if the Bible is perfect, like why didn't it explicitly say we got to get rid of this thing?
Well, it did, but in a way that wouldn't have crushed it at its initiation.
Because if the Christian church had all these commands for the people at the time to overthrow the Roman government, they would have completely crushed the Christian church.
So what they said was you can't kidnap anybody, that everybody, regardless of their social position, is an equal, that they get a Sabbath.
They get a Sabbath, they have rights.
If you hurt a slave, they go free.
If you kill a slave, you're going to be punished.
So the slaves weren't property, although when you read in the Old Testament, you'll hear them referred to as property.
What that meant was they were money.
It's equivalent today to say, well, let me ask you this.
Can the owner of the Golden State Warriors sell?
Steph Curry.
Yes.
Yes, he can because he owns the basketball services of Steph Curry.
That's a good analogy.
Yeah, but he can't sell Steph C Curry as a person.
Steph Curry is under contract.
The services, this is the language that was used in the Bible.
It wasn't the kind of language that chattel slavery used.
It was the kind of language that we might relate to a sports team, a sports owner.
You own the services of Steph Curry, but you don't own him as a person.
So on the slavery question, then.
They would also say, why are there so many laws that make it seem like it's okay that doesn't forbid it?
it's case law, just like we have in the United States, where it'll say in the Old Testament, if a man hits his slave and causes damage, then there'll be a penalty to the man.
But that case law isn't presumed.
It's describing what you should do if someone hits their slave, much like we have laws today.
If somebody breaks into a house and steals something, what should you do to them?
It's not prescribing breaking into houses and stealing.
It's telling you what to do when somebody does evil.
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So slavery comes up a lot.
The Canaanites.
Sure.
So how do you answer, by the way, this is part of the work that we were going to do today anyways.
This is great.
How do you answer when someone says, but the Bible.
And I believe I have an answer to this, but you're much crisper than I am.
The Bible told the people of Israel at time to wipe out, to kill women, maybe.
Sure.
Yeah, women, children, children, the animals, the whole thing.
What kind of a God would tell a people to, I don't want to say genocide, but to wipe out an enemy?
Okay.
First thing I'm going to ask people who bring up any moral objection is, by what moral standard are you using to say this is wrong?
Right.
Because if they're atheists, they don't have an objective moral standard.
But it's a fair question to ask of a Christian.
You're saying your God is good and he does these things.
So they would say, for, they would say.
My view, I don't know what I believe, but I want to know how you could be consistent.
Sure.
There would actually be a fair question.
It's a totally fair question.
And it's a good question.
It's something that should give us pause.
And I think that skeptics of the Bible bring this up rightfully so.
You should be able to deal with this issue.
Yep.
Okay.
There are two views on this, two major views on it.
One is these were literal commands to wipe everybody out.
The second view is that these were hyperbolic commands.
This is the way the ancient Near East people spoke.
For example, if you go to Egypt, where we just were about six months ago, there's something called the Mernepta stella.
Pharaoh Mernepta on this stella, this standing stone with all sorts of inscriptions says, Israel has been laid waste.
Its seed is no more.
In other words, it's basically saying, I, Pharaoh Meneptah, wiped out Israel off the face of the earth.
Really?
How come they're still there?
It's exaggerated language, much like we would say in sports, we obliterated.
We crushed it.
We annihilated.
We killed them.
We killed the bears, as we always do, right?
Okay.
Or that as a Gen Z would say, like, I'm dead.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
And why do we think this is the case?
Not only are there parallels in other ancient Near East documents, if you go to say Deuteronomy 7, it'll say this.
Wipe everybody out, next verse says, and then don't intermarry with them.
And you're going, wait a minute.
How could you intermarry with a group of people you had just wiped out?
And then, by the way, a couple chapters later., we see these people still around because it's hyperbolic language.
And why is this being used?
Why is this being done to begin with?
This is judgment.
These were people who were sacrificing their children to Molech.
They would melt, they would, or they would heat up this molten hot god who would sear.
the baby on the arms of this molten hot god.
In fact, Plutarch, who's not even a biblical writer, he was a Greek writer in the first century, says that the village drummers would beat their drums louder to drown out the cries of the kids so the parents couldn't hear their own kids being sacrificed Charlie on every college campus I go to on every college campus you go to there's going to be some kid who's going to say why doesn't God stop all the evil in the world well here's a situation where God does stop the evil by judging these people and the atheists are complaining about it look
Wait a minute.
Do you want God to step in or not?
Here he is stepping in.
He is crushing these people because of the evil they've done and people are upset about it.
And they would say, yes, but not the kids and the woman, right?
Right.
If it's a literal command that they did crush everybody, there's no evidence it's literal.
It seems hyperbolic, but if it is literal then the question is does god have the right to take people into the next life whenever he wants of course yes if christianity is true people don't die they just change location they go from this life to the next life and it's up to god when that happens and this if it is true that everyone was killed this is what happened the more um i think proper interpretation when you look at all the data is these
exaggerated commands to push people out of the land so the promised people could get into the promised land to bring forth the promised Messiah to save the whole world.
Remember, God's working with free creatures.
He's not going to overpower their free will.
He's going to warn them for 400 years.
If they don't repent, he's going to judge them so the promised people can get into the land and bring forth Jesus, ultimately.
He's going to bless the whole world.
So there's a lot more on Copan's book on this.
I have a little bit more on my book, Stealing from God, on the killing of the Canaan i so-called killing of the cananites but it's judgment and charlie we don't like judgment in our country right we want God to be, as C.S. Lewis put it, a benevolent old man who just wanted to look down and see that everybody was having a good time.
We want to be nicer than God.
Right, right.
But God is a God of judge.
He's infinitely just and he's infinitely loving.
Which is funny because the campus group is very big on justice.
That's their biggest.
I know.
But not really.
They say they are.
That's why I always ask them, look, there's two things you can have in the afterlife.
You can have either justice or grace.
Does anybody here want justice in the afterlife?
I don't want justice.
I want grace.
If I get justice, Charlie, I'm toast.
An infinitely just being is going to judge me.
He's got, I haven't been infinitely just, so I deserve justice.
What do you have to say?
And this is an AI generated one, but I hear this all the time.
This helps me kind of remember about the Bible., and I think I know your answer to this, and I've read a couple books about this, but that the story of the Old Testament closely resembles Canaanite and Mesopotamian deities, that the Old Testament has like a lot of similarities, such as the story of Moses or the creation story or a flood story.
story.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
Well, every ancient And if you do, it doesn't necessarily mean that Moses copied.
What's unique about the Israelites is that they are told to be separate from their neighbors.
That's one reason they're pushing out the Canaanites.
Holy separate, right?
Same word.
The last thing they want to do is borrow from the people that they're trying to separate from.
In fact.
What happens to them is when they do get too intermingled with the Canaanites, God judges them and continues to say, you're playing the harlot.
You're going with Baal.
You're going with all these other deities, and you should be worshiping me.
So he judges them.
And so without getting into too much detail, though, is there any credence to this idea that the Bible was copied regionally between other River Valley civilization mythologies?
I have not necessarily heard that objection, but I can tell you from— Bill Maher said that on our show, remember?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, here's the problem.
If you look at the archaeology, so let's just look at the archaeology.
go back to joshua and jericho the evidence from jericho shows that oddly the walls fell down and out there's no other city that has ever been discovered where the walls have fallen straight down and out.
When you take over a city, you go inward, you crush the wall, you knock it down and the walls go inward.
Here we find in the dirt there in Jericho that the walls fell out.
just like the Bible says.
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
And there are, when we just did a 22, one hour lesson series on the top archaeological discoveries of the Bible, Charlie, we discovered over 107, I think it was 107 people in the Bible that have been found in the dirt.
And about 75 of them were from the Old Testament.
And many of the events of the Old Testament have corroborative data in the dirt.
How would somebody writing the Old Testament, say a thousand years after Joshua, 1406 BC, know that the walls fell down and out?
How would he know that?
He wouldn't.
In fact, you know how many places are named in the book of Joshua?
What is it?
24 chapters in the book of Joshua?
There's over 350 named places in the book of Joshua.
Just in the book of Joshua, it works out to something like 13 places a chapter.
More than that even.
I can't remember the exact number, but it's crazy how many place locations and many of these place locations have been discovered.
This is not an invented storyline that was put into writing a thousand years later.
Moses and editors later, there are editors that came after Moses, like they put his death in Deuteronomy, they wrote this down at the time.
So here's a question of morality.
It's the problem of divine command theory.
I've heard this question only once.
Is something good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?
Euthyphros dilemma from one of Plato's writings.
Socrates says this, and it's supposed to put the believer in God in a dilemma.
If you're going to say God is the source of morality, does he look up at a standard beyond him and say, oh, that's good.
I'll do that.
If so, why do you need God?
We can do that, right?
Yeah, I don't think it's much of a dilemma, though.
Maybe I'm over.
I think the answer to both is yes.
You are correct.
Here's why it's not a dilemma.
Why is it not a dilemma?
Because God himself is, his essence is good.
That's it.
Am I right?
Yeah, he's the standard.
He doesn't have to look up.
Exactly.
He's not arbitrary.
He is the standard.
So it's easily answered, and yet atheists online still think this is a good one.
What am I missing about that, though?
You're not missing anything.
It's a false dilemma.
A true dilemma is A or non-A.
A false dilemma is A or B. Maybe there's a C. Maybe there's a third option.
And in this case, there is.
God is the standard.
His nature is the moral standard.
The buck has to stop somewhere.
It stops with God's nature.
So I ask AI, this kind of goes to show how good of a teacher you are, like the best intellectually rigorous questions.
And like I can answer most of these, honestly.
And I don't do this profession.
I mean, I do somewhat of this, but you're like a super professional on this.
And so that's what my mom says.
I'll read this one.
If God, this is from AI.
If God desires all people to be saved and know the truth, why does he remain hidden or silent to sincere seekers who never experience divine revelation or compelling reason to believe?
Everybody experiences divine revelation because God has written two books.
Yes, he's written through men what we call the scriptures, the Bible, but he's also written the book of nature.
In other words, we could say God has the book of his words and the book of his works.
And everybody has the book of his works.
Everybody knows there's a creator God who's moral because of the creation and the moral law written on the heart.
And the way we know God.
is we know God by his effects.
So if there's a creation, that's the effect.
We reason back to a cause, a creator.
If there's design in the universe, that's the effect.
We reason back to a cause, a designer.
If there's a moral law written on the heart, that's the effect.
We reason back to a cause, a moral law giver.
So there's nobody in the world who doesn't know that there's a creator God who's moral.
And we haven't lived up to that standard.
There are people who've never heard of the solution to our moral problem.
That's Jesus.
But everybody knows that there's a creator moral God.
And the Bible indicates that if you seek, take a step toward that, the works that he's provided, he will get you the word so you can be saved.
This is the other one.
We'd spend a lot of time on this, but let me just repeat it and I want you to answer it as you would a student.
How can we trust Scripture as morally authoritative when it regulates slavery, commands genocidal warfare like 1 Samuel 15, and enforces harsh penalties for non-crimes by modern standards without undermining the concept of God's moral perfection?
I would ask the person again, by what moral standard are you saying?
You're appealing to a Christian.
Yeah, you are.
Secondly, we've already dealt with those before on this program that slavery was not the kind of slavery you were talking about.
It was a kind of bankruptcy law.
Right.
It was a kind of bankruptcy law.
The genocidal warfare.
It wasn't genocide.
It was sinocide.
Now, why do I say that?
Because God wiped out the Israelites for doing the same kind of things.
In other words, it wasn't ethnicity God was worried about.
It was the ethics.
Like after the golden calf after the.
He wipes them out, right?
How many times does God judge Israel for the evil they've done?
Repeatedly.
A lot.
And our mutual friend Dennis Prager puts it this way.
He said, one of the reasons I know the Old Testament— The least flattering— Telling of a, no, it's true.
It's the least flattering telling of an ancient people.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
You know it.
Yeah.
They would never invent such an embarrassing history of themselves.
They keep getting dope slapped by their own God.
And Charlie, you don't see this.
Like if you go to Egypt, all of the monuments in Egypt are propaganda monuments to how good the pharaoh is.
They don't include any negative behavior.
But when you read the Old Testament, this is the history of the Jews.
They get the gold medal in sin every time.
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Here's one that I think is important.
Again, this one is, I can answer this one.
Answer it.
Thanks to you.
Given the discrepancies between gospel resurrection accounts and the lack of external corroboration, how do you defend the resurrection as a historical event without begging the question?
Well, first of all, the discrepancies are a feature, not a bug.
The fact that there are discrepancies means that it's probably true.
Because if you were trying to lie, every single account would be exactly the same, right?
Exactly.
Like if we know this whenever there's, you know, car accident or something in the car.
Yeah.
Or even like, you know, something happens here and there's a little controversy at the Turning Point campus or an event.
I bring three people in and I get a generalized telling, but I realize like, oh, okay.
God, it was what what mile power what mile power do you think they were going what was this what was the color of the car but you know eventually you get towards that so i think it's a feature not a bug and then if there are a lot of external corroboration i mean there's josephus right yes there um there's other roman historians also the talmud talks about jesus not the resurrection but they said that people believed in the resurrection exactly correct i mean that that yeah so how did i I do?
You did excellently.
Okay.
Yeah.
What else am I missing?
Well, let me give another example for our listeners and viewers.
It might be this.
Do you realize that the eyewitnesses of the Titanic, the survivors, disagreed on how the Titanic sank?
Well, I imagine, because we actually didn't know how the Titanic sank for quite some time.
Right.
Because it happened largely below the surface.
That's right.
And some said it went downhole.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you meant, okay.
No, no.
This is a good illustration of what you're saying.
Some said it went downhole.
Others said it broke in two when it went down.
What should we conclude from that, Charlie?
Well, we should conclude that it did go down.
That's it.
That's right.
And the water was cold.
That's right.
No.
And everyone agrees there was a resurrection.
But they also all agreed that there were female witnesses at the resurrection.
Very embarrassing.
No, embarrassing.
And by the way, multi gospel.
That's right.
Every gospel says it.
So, but then also the discrepancies play against a univospel central canon.
What is the right term?
Well, the term that there was a shared canon.
A Q document, they will say.
Yes.
Then they all.
Yeah.
Well, obviously what we're finding in the New Testament, well, maybe not obvious for everybody, is that we have multiple independent sources.
And when you have that, you realize this isn't just one source.
This is several sources.
And there may be a problem for people who have a bible under one binding they go oh this is just one book it's one source no it's not these documents were written down in the new testament written down by eight or nine authors depending upon who wrote hebrews and they're written at different times in different places by people who were not in contact with one another all the time so i don't think that i don't that's a pretty weak one that's the best yeah i could do yeah I want to get to evolution in a second.
Okay.
So let me do this one.
I think I could do this one too.
If Jesus is fully God and fully man, how do you explain instances where he claims ignorance, not knowing the day or hour?
Well, he's not saying that he doesn't know he's just not telling you well that's one way of looking at it or you can also say that jesus had two natures he had a divine nature and a human nature sure and jesus emptied himself of the privileges of his godhead when he was on earth that's philippians two partially though there was still a joyful aspect right right but whenever you ask a question about jesus you have to ask two questions did jesus know when he was coming back as god yes as man no okay did jesus get hungry as god no as man yes sure so
when you're incarnation's a tough issue yes when jesus died on the cross god didn't die the human nature of jesus but so then i here's the counter argument at ai they say that's a heresy in the 5th century that centered that Jesus had two separate persons, one human, one divine, rather than one person with two distinct natures.
Yes.
What's the difference?
Does that make sense?
Yes.
He's one person with two natures.
He had a divine nature and a human nature.
Let's give an illustration from...
Nestorianism.
Let's give an illustration from movies.
Not my favorite movie, but you remember Avatar?
Yeah.
Okay.
It's very environmental earth worshiping.
So there's, you know, remember the guy in the wheelchair?
And he would get in this device and then he'd become something.
He'd be the avatar on the outside, right?
He's one person with two natures.
He has a human nature in the space station in the wheelchair.
That's a good analogy.
And he has an avatar nature outside this space station.
Yeah, okay, got it.
That one's not that hard.
Here's one that I wouldn't know how to answer.
The evolution one, I'm not as equipped to answer because I don't know how important it is, and you could disagree.
But some people have dedicated their whole life to it.
I've never been that interested in it, actually.
I think we're created.
That's it.
Sure.
End of story.
How we're created is the question.
If biological evolution is true and adam and eve are not literal historical figures how do you preserve the doctrines of original sin federal headship and the need for the second atom without unraveling the entire redemptive framework of romans i mean i think they are real historical.
Yeah, the first question I would ask them is why do you think biological evolution is true?
Now, microevolution is true.
That's adaptation within the genotype, but macroevolution from the goo to you via the zoo is not true.
I think there's not only do I think there's not good evidence for it, Charlie, I think there's evidence against it.
Make the case.
All right, let me give you an acronym, L-I-F-E, life.
L stands for the fact that there is limited genetic capability for change.
For example, even intelligent breeders can't break the genus of dogs when they're trying to breed dogs, right?
They can get a dog as small as a chihuahua and as large as a great Dane, but they can't break the genus of dogs.
They can't turn a dog into something else just using that gene pool.
If we, using our intelligence, can't break that genus of dogs, why do we think an unintelligent process can do so?
That doesn't make any sense.
Okay, the I stands for information.
The information we find in every one of our 40 trillion cells is equivalent to a message 3.2 billion letters long.
And to use an analogy, If you're walking along the beach and you see Charlie loves Erica in the sand, you don't assume the waves did that or crabs came out of the water and made that message.
You would say that's evidence of an an intelligent being, right?
Well, if Charlie loves Erica requires intelligence, why doesn't a message 3.2 billion letters long require intelligence?
Because the software program in any one of our cells, our genome, DNA, is a one-to-one correspondence with digital code.
And we know that codes always come from coders.
We know that programs always come from programmers.
We know that messages always come from minds.
The longest message we've ever discovered is in every one of our 40 trillion cells.
That requires intelligence.
Now, it's a key point here we need to make is people will say that's a God of the g gaps argument.
You're plugging God into the gap of your knowledge.
No, we're not.
We're not arguing from what we don't know.
We're arguing from what we do know.
When you see Charlie loves Erica in the sand, you don't just lack a natural explanation for that.
You have positive empirically verifiable evidence for an intelligent being when you see that in the sand.
And so is that the I or the F?
That's the information.
That's the I. Keep going.
Information.
The F is the fossil record.
The fossil record is a complete embarrassment to evolutionists.
And even Richard Dawkins has noted this, that if you go back to the Cambrian explosion, according to their dating, 523 million BC or 523 million years ago, somewhere in that range, 500 million years ago, you see all most of the major body plans just in the fossil record without fossil precursors.
It's as if they were just created there.
You don't see this tree of life.
Sure.
You see if someone put a botanical illustration in place, it would be more like an orchard.
You would just see these body plans with some diversification at the top, but the body plans just come out of nowhere.
Ex-Nihilo.
Yeah.
Do you then...
So is the age of the earth interesting to you or is that...
I'm absolutely convinced the universe is at least 63 years old.
Okay.
I'm going to throw my mom in there.
It's like 87 years.
Perfect.
Okay.
All right.
I think the better evidence it's old, and we can talk about that in a minute.
Let me finish.
Let me finish the action.
Okay.
So the F is the fossil record.
The E is what's known as epigenetic information.
Scientists have discovered in recent decades that you can mutate DNA from now till doomsday.
You'll never get a new body plan.
Why?
Because DNA alone will not give you a new body plan.
You need the structure of the cell and the structure of the organism to change and you can't mutate that by DNA.
You would need to go into the embryotic stage of a creature and change its gene regulatory network at the embryotic level in order to get a new body plan.
And if you did that, 100% of the time we've tried that, the organism has died.
So to get a new body plan, you just can't mutate DNA.
And this is why, Charlie, even the Royal Society, probably the biggest scientific affiliation or the most august scientific.fic affiliation in the world out of London, once headed by Isaac Newton, called a meeting way back in 2016.
to point out that we need a new theory of evolution because the current theory has too many problems and this is one of them.
You can't mutate DNA and get a new body plan.
You need epigenetic information.
An analogy would be that whereas the DNA might be the software for a particular, say architecture program, the epigenetic information would be the hardware you need to build the house.
You can mutate the software all day.
You'll never get the hardware to build a house.
So those four, and there's other reasons, but those four issues, limited genetic change, information, fossil record, and epigenetic information shows that macroevolution does not appear plausible.
So then is macroevolution at odds with an older universe theory?
No, it would require an older universe theory, but the I'm sorry.
Creation.
Okay.
If you believe we're created, which is a belief I have.
does that mean that you No.
Okay, so we're working through that.
Let's look at it biblically.
What does the first verse of the Bible say?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth okay when was the beginning what when god said it was we don't know it doesn't say right i know the next verse says and the earth was formless and void wait a minute wait wait we've gone from god creating the whole universe in verse one to now we're talking about the earth how long did that take it doesn't say you say what about the days the days don't begin until verse three so well yeah and so the day is yom yeah but yeah also a day is
only possible as long as the sun exists yeah and that comes in day four i believe right exactly so this is denis prager's argument which is that you don't and so the literalists would say, well, it's seven literal days.
Could be, I mean, it says yum.
Sure.
But using its own textual evidence, a day is only a revolution of the sun, the earth around the sun, right?
So if there's no sun, then what do we mean by day?
Exactly.
And not only that, and this is John Lennox's argument, that when you look at the first few verses of Genesis, as we just did, the Bible leaves the age of the earth indeterminate because it's saying that the universe is created before the days ever begin.
In fact, we talked about this earlier, but for your audience, remember the Bible is not written to you.
It's written for you.
Now, who was Genesis written to?
It was written to people who just spent 400 years under slavery in Egypt.
They're not asking the questions you and I are asking in 2025, Charlie.
They're not walking through the desert going, I wonder how old this place is.
That's not their question.
Their question is, is Yahweh the true God or the gods of Egypt the true gods?
And scholars have looked at Genesis 1 and some of them are saying, you know what Genesis 1 is?
It's a polemic.
It's a corrective to the Egyptian creation story.
Exactly.
Because if you look at the Egyptian creation story, these pre-existing superhero gods.
They're not explained.
They just happen to exist already.
Have to fight one another to bring order to chaos.
That's the creation process.
Moses comes along and he says, no, Yahweh's outside the universe.
He just speaks and he brings order to chaos.
And God is not in nature.
He's outside of nature.
That's right.
God is personal.
He's not abstract.
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Okay, let me go to some of the other hard questions here.
This is a good one.
I've gotten this one before.
God describes himself as jealous in Exodus 34, but jealousy is a vice in human terms born of insecurity and possessiveness.
How can a perfect, self-sufficient being experience jealousy without compromising his nature?
I had this question from a student at the University of California at Fresno.
Common or not common?
In 2010.
It happened two or three times.
Yeah, it's very, I've gotten it once.
Okay.
And I asked him this question.
I said, are you married?
He said, no.
I said, let's suppose for the sake of argument, you were married.
If your wife decided that she was going to start dating to other people, should you be jealous of that?
Of course you should.
Why?
In fact, she belongs to you and you belong to her.
And if you're not jealous of that relationship, there's something wrong with you.
She has broken the covenant and you want what's best for her and that is for her to stay in the covenant with you and that's what Yahweh does for the Israelites and us.
He's jealous of us because he knows that what's best for us is for us to stay in relationship with him.
And if you're not jealous over your loved one, there's something wrong with you.
So jealousy in that regard is a good thing.
Jealousy when it comes to pettiness, that's not a good thing or things that you shouldn't possess anyway.
Right.
But it is good for people who you are in a relationship with, in a covenant with, you ought to guard that relationship.
That's a good thing.
If light was created on day one, but the sun not until day four, What is the nature of light then?
What is the nature of light?
Yeah, what light was, and this is just curious, what light are they talking about?
Well, the light of God pre-existed prior to the light of the sun.
Right.
But I think, let me see here, day one, I'm just looking at this now.
So God said, let there be light, and there is light.
And he called the light day in the darkness night, but that was before he created the sun.
Yes.
Well, he has the ability to.
create light right from his own nature quite obviously uh and uh the sun is just one body in the universe that creates light there are other suns there are other stars obviously in fact, I've seen different estimates, but the number of stars in the universe are equivalent to the number of sand grains on all the beaches on all the earth times 10,000.
Now, when you think about that, that should evoke in us a sense of awe.
The heavens declare the glory of God, that you have stars equivalent to sand grains on 100,000 earths.
So God may have not created our sun until a certain point.
That doesn't mean other sources of light weren't created.
Mm-hmm.
Makes sense.
Yeah.
All right.
We have time for a couple more than I got to get you in front of our turning point staff here.
let me see this one this is it's it's this is a simple yet deep but you get it all the time but i think our audience would really appreciate it okay how can an all-good all-powerful god coexist with the gratuitous horrendous suffering of innocent children natural disasters and systemic injustice especially when no greater good is apparent or accessible to the victims okay You get it all the time.
I get it all the time.
But it blesses our audience.
Yes, yes.
First of all, there are so many assumptions in that question that would need to be challenged.
First of all, how do you know it's gratuitous?
How do you know it's not going to bring forth good later?
Sure, if life ends at the grave and there's no afterlife, there's a lot of injustices that occur but injustice only occurs if there's a standard of justice and the standard of justice is god's nature if god doesn't exist nothing's just or unjust so you can point that out you can also point out the fact that only if god exists do human beings have any objective value totally and if they don't have objective value there's nothing wrong with them so that whole question is a christian question actually sure it is so if it's a christian asking then
let's say hey frank i believe in god i struggle to think he's good i agree yeah that's a better question right right right i'm a christian i believe in god i have a trouble believing that he's all good when a tsunami wipes out 100,000 people.
Yeah, agreed.
Okay.
That's a toughy.
That is a great answer.
And I told you on our walk last night, that's the hardest question I get.
Totally.
The natural disaster is the hardest.
And here's the answer that has helped me because I've studied this and it bothered me.
And if evil doesn't bother you, you probably haven't thought about it enough.
You're supposed to hate evil in Psalm 97.10.
That's right.
We're actually commanded as Christians to hate evil.
That's right.
Love doesn't mean approval.
Correct.
Okay.
So this is what unlocked it for me, Charlie.
If you ask me, why do, say, why do babies die?
I can give you a general answer.
I know why babies die because we live in a fallen world.
Okay.
But if you ask me, why did this particular baby die?
I can't tell you why, but I can tell you why I don't know why because I'm finite.
I'm inside of time.
And I don't know how all this is going to turn out ultimately.
But if there's a being outside of time that can trace all of the ripples, this is called the ripple effect, that every event in this world ripples forward to affect trillions of other events and potentially billions of people, we can't trace all those ripples.
Maybe a baby dying today ripples forward through free creatures to bring forth a great evangelist 500 years from now who saves millions of people.
Can I trace all those ripples?
I can't, but a God outside of time can.
And so the ripple effect, while it doesn't give us a specific answer, it helps us to understand that there is an answer, even if we don't know what it is.
And there is a teaching, John MacArthur would say this, that...
And would you agree with that?
Because it says God will gather the children to him.
Would you agree with that?
Yes.
And I would go to the Old Testament too, when David loses his son.
He says, I will not or the son will not return to me.
I will go to him.
The baby died.
That's right.
So yes, I think God is going to bring people to heaven.
But I would also say this, that the ripple effect explains so much.
The ripple effect you see in the story of Joseph in the Old Testament, his brothers do evil.
They sell them into slavery.
And then they, you know, he goes through all sorts of evil in Egypt, but he somehow rises to power and he puts a whole bunch of grain aside.
He's like the number two guy in Egypt.
And then his brothers flee Israel to escape a famine.
And as soon as Joseph sees him, what does he say?
He says, you dirty rat, you're going to pay for what you did to me.
No, he doesn't say that.
He said, what you meant for evil, God meant for good.
Genesis 50, 20.
The saving of many lives.
Exactly.
The evil they did rippled forward to help them later.
Most of the time, we don't see the ripple effect.
In this case, we do.
You know, there was a Roman Catholic priest in Notre Dame in Paris 150 years ago who said this.
This is one of the best quotes, I think, on this topic.
He said, if you were to give me God's power for 24 hours, you would see how many changes I would make in this world.
But if he gave me his wisdom too, I would leave things as they are.
Because God is working.
We're to fight evil because we don't know where it's going to wind up.
But God can even allow evil that gets through to bring good later to those that love him and are called according to his purpose.
And by the way, one last thing on this.
Any God who is big enough for you and me to be mad at is big enough to have reasons we don't know about.
Yeah, that's right.
Right.
The great quote from Dennis, he got...
got it from a rabbi is that we as theists have to explain child suffering natural disasters and atheists have to explain everything else everything else existence that's right love mercy joy forgiveness so we have our challenge in front of us right all right let me do one more here but can i say one other thing on that?
Evil doesn't disprove God.
It actually shows God does exist.
Yeah, keep going.
Because there'd be no such thing as evil unless there was good, and there'd be no such thing as good unless God existed.
Because evil is not a thing in itself.
It's a lack in a good thing.
It's like cancer.
If you take all the cancer out of a good body, you got a better body.
If you take all the body out of the cancer, you've got nothing.
Or it's like rust in a car.
If you take all the rust out of a car, you got a better car.
If you take all the car out of the rust, you got a pinto.
No, you got nothing, right?
It doesn't exist on its own.
So evil is a lack in a good thing, but good in an objective sense only exists if God.
exists.
If God doesn't exist, nothing's good or bad, things are just different and evil doesn't exist.
So evil doesn't disprove God, it may prove there's a devil out there, but it doesn't disprove God.
Okay, here's the last one.
How can an absolutely perfect, changeless, timeless, necessary being who lacks nothing create a contingent temporal change-filled universe without undergoing change or acquiring a new will?
Well, there are theologians like William Lane Craig who would argue that when God created, he entered time.
I don't agree with that, but that's a view that some Christians might actually be like it's God, he can do whatever he wants.
Yeah, right.
Anything, everything he wants, it's not logically impossible.
Like he can't create a square circle or a one-edged stick.
But no, but he created the rules of reason, though.
Well, he can read.
He is the rules of reason.
So I don't think he created them.
I think they're his nature, just like his moral nature.
So then how would you answer this question?
The one, the one I just said.
Oh, how could a timeless, necessary being who lacks nothing create a contingent, temporal, change-filled universe?
I don't see why that would be a problem.
I don't understand why that would be a problem.
What's the paradox?
How can a being that doesn't change or do anything new suddenly do something like create a world?
Who's to say?
When we say God doesn't change, it doesn't mean that he doesn't act.
What it means is his nature doesn't change.
Yeah, I agree with that.
His nature doesn't change.
He's always good.
He's always moral.
He's always just.
He's always loving, right?
It doesn't mean he can't do things.
It means that his nature doesn't change.
Yeah.
So then they would also say there's a dilemma of God did not freely choose to create, which is not true.
The universe is co-eternal with God.
We don't believe that.
No, no, no.
Not co-eternal.
Or that God changes.
We say that God acts, not changes.
His nature is eternal.
Yes.
His nature doesn't change.
He is the standard of goodness, the standard of rightness, the standard of life.
That's really interesting what you're saying.
So you're saying geometry, math, that's all the language of God.
Yes.
The physics, chemistry.
No, physics can be different because they're not based on his nature, but morality can't be different because it is based on math.
But is math and geometry based on his nature?
Yes, because why would geometry be yes and physics be no?
Because, well, if in all possible worlds, two plus two equals four, but not in all possible worlds does gravity have to be the strength that it is?
Sure.
Right.
And so then in all possible worlds, a square circle can never exist.
Yeah, because it's a logical contradiction.
Got it.
Right.
We make since it's a political show, we'll.
I always say, does force always have to equal mass times acceleration?
I don't know if God could create a different universe where that was reversed.
This is what we always say, that God can't do impossible things.
He can't create a square circle.
He can't create a one-ended stick.
He can't create a married bachelor.
He can't create an honest politician, right?
There's some things that are just too hard for God.
Yes.
And so so then When we say God is all-powerful, we don't mean he can do everything.
What we mean is he can do everything consistent with his..
So he couldn't make 2 plus 2 equals 5 because his nature is such that his nature is logic, is truth.
He could create a different universe because that's within his power, but he can't create a universe that has square circles in it because it's not possible given his nature.
So when we say God is all-powerful, it doesn't mean he can do everything.
He can do everything that's not logically impossible or that contradicts with his nature.
Got it.
Frank Turik, how do people find out more?
Cross-existence.org plus we have a podcast twice a week.
I don't have enough faith to be an atheist podcast.
We have a TV show.
Go to crossexamine.org.
There's so much on there.
We've got a YouTube channel, obviously, crossexamine.
