Frank Turek: How to Use QUESTIONS to REVEAL Evidence of GOD | Kirk Cameron on TBN

Dr. Frank Turek joins Kirk Cameron to dig into the questions that help reveal evidence of God. He walks through the points highlighted in his book, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist,” and shares how to best approach those who question the Biblical worldview. Don’t miss this riveting conversation here on Takeaways with Kirk Cameron on TBN!

Join Kirk Cameron to discuss pressing issues Christians are facing with compassionate, well-informed guests. Together we will find actionable takeaways that we can use today, this week, and this month to bring more of Heaven to Earth.

The greatest miracle in the bible is the first verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
If that verse is true, every other verse is at least possible, including the verses that talk about him rising from the dead.
Why do you
think so many Christians, when they’re asked questions or even when they’re trying to initiate the conversation, uh, with the with the gospel, get so defensive with atheists or critics?
Why do we feel so wrapped up tight and get defensive about stuff when we when we know the truth?
Yeah. I think part of the problem is is that we can’t imagine how somebody couldn’t agree with us, which I find actually kind of odd, Kirk, because people always ask me, you know, you go to these college campuses and sometimes these students get hostile.
Why do you not get mad at them?
And I say to them, you know, I’m 62 years old now.
When I was 22, I didn’t agree with my 62 year old self.
So why should I expect some 22 year old kid right now to agree with my 62 year old self?
I wasn’t a Christian at 22.
Why should I why should I expect this kid to be a Christian now?
I don’t know what family he’s come from, what he’s seen, what he’s experienced, what he’s thought about, what he’s read or haven’t read.
He may really, and I’m sure probably really does believe that what he believes is true.
So I shouldn’t expect him to agree with me. Yeah.
And I remember Paul saying that God, uh, uh, treated me with grace even though I was an insolent and arrogant man at 1 point.
And I think we need to remember that.
When we’re talking to people, we shouldn’t expect them to agree with us.
So simply try and find out why they believe what they believe.
That’s why I ask them a lot of questions. Yeah.
You know, you’re saying, well, they can’t be a good god because there’s too much evil in the world.
Well, what do you mean by evil?
Tell me what evil is because they’re not gonna be able to explain what evil is without reference to good and if they reference good, they’re back to god because there’s no such thing as good in an objective sense unless god exists.
Good is the only way we’d even know what evil was.
So sometimes just by asking a few questions you can get them to realize that the assumption underneath their question is false.
Yes. It took me a lot of years of watching videos of guys like you and Ray Comfort and understanding presuppositions and all of that stuff to even be able to understand what you’re talking about.
But I think a lot of us get defensive because we’re afraid that somebody’s gonna unravel my faith with a question that I can’t answer.
That’s okay. There’s a lot of questions I can’t answer.
Actually, when I get a question I can’t answer, I normally say, you should have asked me that when I was 17 because I knew everything when I was 17.
Somehow, I’ve forgotten. Yeah. So but there’s sure. There’s questions all of us can’t answer.
But I think what we need to remember, Kirk, is that we ought not let what we don’t know cause us to doubt what we do know.
Mhmm. And there’s a lot we do know.
We do know the universe had a beginning, so it must there must be a beginner.
We do know the universe is fine tuned, so there must be a fine tuner.
We do know there’s objective right and wrong, objective moral standard, so there must be a moral lawgiver.
We do know there’s very good evidence that Jesus predicted and accomplished his resurrection from the dead.
We know all those things beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt.
So if we have questions outside of those things, that doesn’t somehow negate the things we do know.
It just means we haven’t thought through these questions enough to figure out what the answer is yet. That’s okay.
We’re finite creatures. We’re not gonna know everything.
That’s right. That’s right. We just need to watch a few more Frank Turek videos and, uh, Greg Cocal videos.
I’m just so grateful for apologetics books.
Mhmm. Um,
I I never felt like apologetics.
I was always waiting for guys like you to come out with the silver the silver bullet that would just end all arguments.
Like, you guys are so smart.
Why don’t you guys all get together, figure out all the questions, answer them, and let’s be done with this.
We’ll just
be done. The problem is there is no silver bullet because most often, I found anyway, that disbelief is not a matter of the mind, it’s a matter of the heart.
And that’s why I always ask young people and old people at the microphone.
I asked them if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
And Kirk, 99 times out of 10, they’ll say no.
In front of 100 of people, they’ll say no. I believe
it, and I’ve seen it.
Yeah. And and I’ll say, wait a minute. You claim to be an atheist.
You claim to be a beacon of reason.
How is it that you wouldn’t believe something that was true if you claimed to be reasonable?
Because it’s not a matter of reason. Yeah. It’s not a head problem. It’s a heart problem.
They don’t want it to be true.
They don’t want there to be a God because they wanna be God over their own lives.
They’re not on a truth quest or on a happiness quest. And ladies and gentlemen, can we be honest?
Sometimes we’re on a happiness quest too. We’re not on a truth quest.
We just wanna believe what we wanna believe to make us happy.
So I always ask them, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
And I recommend people out there that you ought to ask that same question and see if people are honest.
If they’re gonna tell you the truth, will they believe if Christianity is true?
And too often, it’s the answer is no. So what do you do with people like that?
You pray for them. You love them, which means you don’t approve of everything they do.
You seek what’s best for them.
You drop seeds or plant seeds every now and then, and then you wait, Kirk.
You wait because sometimes people are only gonna come to faith or be interested when something happens in their life that causes them to wake up, like when tragedy happens.
Right? I mean, sometimes you only look up when you’re on your back.
And when that happens, if you stayed in that person’s life long enough, your phone’s gonna ring and that person’s gonna be on the other end.
They’re not gonna call their atheist friend when tragedy strikes. What’s their what’s their atheist friend gonna say?
All stuff just happens. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Get over it. No.
They’re gonna call you a person of spiritual depth.
When the student is ready, he or she will summon the teacher, but not before. So just wait.
Just pray and wait. I mean, you haven’t always been a Christian. I haven’t always been a Christian.
Why do we expect everybody to believe what we believe right now? We shouldn’t. Yeah.
People are on a a trajectory either moving toward Jesus or away. Everybody is.
Frank, when you when you travel the country and you’re talking to young people on college campuses, what are you being asked most right now?
Well, now the 3 top objections to Christianity are morality, morality, and morality. What do you mean?
Well, it’s all about LGBTQ issues. It’s all about why did God kill the Canaanites?
What about slavery in the Bible? Is is the God of the Old Testament evil?
What about there being only 1 way to Jesus? These are all moral questions.
That’s what people struggle with because they think they have a moral standard that god needs to adhere to.
And so I always ask them, what’s your moral standard? Where where you getting this moral standard from?
And what do they say? Well,
they kinda fumble around because they’ll they’ll just say, well, everybody knows this to be true.
Well, I’m not asking you how you know it.
I’m asking what is the grounding for this standard that you’re saying everybody needs to adhere to?
And and I would imagine, um, from the people I’ve talked to, I’d say, well well, my standard is love.
My standard is compassion. It’s kindness.
Who said why? Why should
you love somebody? Well, because they say because it’s the right thing to do.
That’s that’s the circle, though. You’d ask them Right. Why is it the right thing to do?
What is this standard of rightness that we’re obligated to obey if there is no god?
And if there’s no purpose to life, there’s no right way to live it. Right?
Just like if there’s no purpose to a football game, there’s no way to say that throwing a touchdown is better than throwing an interception.
If there’s no purpose to the game, right? The plays are just different.
And if there’s no purpose to life, there’s no right way to live it and no wrong way to live it.
So the only objective purpose to life can come from the creator.
If there’s no creator, it’s just your opinion against somebody else’s.
You know, these are the kinds of tools that not only help Christians dismantle bad thinking and world views and then tee up the gospel, but it also helps us to have confidence in our own faith.
I know that’s what apologetics primarily did for me. Yes. Agree. Yeah.
It helped me drag the skeletons out of my own closet. Those questions that I was afraid might be true.
And I and I and the fact that no 1 came up with a an airtight bulletproof answer to every single question really, it bothered me.
And so apologetics helped me to shrink that down to only a few.
And so it’s so it’s so valuable.
And and 1 of those 1 of those tools is to understand the standard of morality that we’re working with.
What’s the evidence that Christianity is the most reasonable worldview?
You only have to answer 2 questions. Does god exist, and did Jesus rise from the dead?
Because if those 2 things are true, Christianity is true.
If either 1 of those things is false, Christianity is false.
So when we present on a college campus using our book, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist, we spend a lot of time on those 2 questions.
Does God exist, and did Jesus rise from the dead? The first question, does God exist?
We go through 3 arguments, Kirk, and, obviously, we can’t spend a lot of time here going through them, but let’s mention the first 1 and that’s called the cosmological argument, which says that everything that has a beginning has a cause, the universe had a beginning, therefore, the universe has a cause.
Now even atheists are admitting the universe had a beginning.
Stephen Hawking, probably the top physicist in the world until he died about 6 years ago, said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.
Now I know Christians worry, what do you believe in the Big Bang? Yes.
I believe in the Big Bang. I just know who banged it. Alright?
So space, time, and matter literally came into existence out of nothing.
And the second argument is kind of adds to that argument that not only did the universe explode into being out of nothing, it did so with extreme precision.
Hawking, again, an atheist, said this.
He said, if the expansion rate of the universe was different by 1 part in a 1000, 000, 000, 000, a second after the big bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies.
So why is that ex why was that expansion rate so precisely fine tune to bring forth the universe we have here?
It seems like it was designed because if it was slightly off in either direction, we wouldn’t be here.
So when we have a universe exploded into being out of nothing and then it doing so in such extreme precision, we can draw some conclusions about what that cause was.
Space time and matter had a beginning. So what could have caused space time and matter?
Only something outside of space time and matter.
In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing.
Also personal to make a choice to create, because impersonal forces don’t make choices.
You know, gravity doesn’t decide whether or not it’s gonna pull something to the ground. It just does it.
But an a personal force can decide to create something, to go from nothingness to a state of creation.
So the cause had to be personal.
Also, the cause had to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice and also to fine tune the universe and its expansion.
And so I always ask people, Kirk, I ask people these questions.
When you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?
And everyone goes, well, God. You say, how do you know it’s the Christian God, Frank?
And my answer is, we don’t.
Yet I mean, this cause could be Allah or some other theistic or deistic being.
But if the evidence shows that a man predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, then we can say that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1, 990 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing.
Now we haven’t gotten to the evidence for the resurrection yet, but if we have a being that looks like God and when you add the third argument and, by the way, the moral argument that if there is a moral standard out there, a law that we’re obligated to obey, for example, that you ought to love people and not murder them, then there has to be a moral law giver, and that would be another attribute we could say about this being.
He’s not only spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent. He’s also moral. He’s the standard of morality.
So here we have 7 attributes for the God of the Bible, and we haven’t even opened the Bible yet.
Right? This is called natural theology. We’re reasoning from effect to cause. If there’s a creation, that’s an effect.
We’re reasoning to a cause of creator. If there’s design, that’s the effect or reasoning to a cause of designer.
Moral law written on the heart, that’s the effect. Reasoning to a cause of moral law giver.
And then when we look at evidence for the resurrection, we can say, yes.
God must have risen Jesus from the dead.
So that’s the first argument or the I should say the first question you need to answer, does God exist?
Yeah.
If I know that so many people are listening to us right now going, 0II gotta remember those 7 things, those those qualities.
Where do I find those?
Where where where do you find In the book, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
What do you say, Frank, when someone says to you, they don’t believe the Bible?
And because they don’t believe the Bible, don’t don’t share the Bible, don’t quote from the Bible, that’s not gonna be accepted as valid proof.
I would say, why don’t you believe it?
I would ask them because I wanna know why where they’re coming from and why do they think that. Right?
And so if they say, well, I can’t believe the Bible because it’s been changed throughout the centuries, I’m gonna borrow a line from our mutual friend, Greg Cokle.
What do you mean it’s been changed throughout the centuries? What evidence do you have for that?
Have you looked into the Bible manuscript evidence for yourself? I guarantee you the person’s not gonna say, yeah.
Just last night, I was up reading a book about the Byzantine line of manuscripts. Right? Nobody’s gonna say that.
Right? Right. Because people people today believe things based on slogans, not because they’ve investigated, Kirk.
So I always ask them, what evidence do you have for that position?
And then you can say, have you ever considered that we know the Bible has not been changed throughout the centuries?
That doesn’t prove the Bible’s true, but it does show that what they wrote down we still have.
The the next question is is the Bible telling the truth and with regard to the resurrection, which is the second question you need to answer to show that Christianity is true, I always point out to people that the New Testament writers, all of them with exception of Luke, were all Jewish believers in Yahweh.
They already thought they were God’s chosen people.
They had been, uh, believers in Yahweh as long as they had lived and they had, you know, generations going back.
They’re sacrificing lambs to to Yahweh.
And then suddenly Jesus comes along, they toss all that, and they say this guy predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead while claiming to be God.
That was something a Jew didn’t think could happen.
They didn’t think 1 guy would rise from the dead, and they didn’t think anybody claimed to be God.
That would be blasphemy. Yet here are these guys going to their deaths saying this is what happened.
What could have caused them to do that? Why would they do that? Yeah. They wouldn’t do that.
They didn’t get sex, money, or power for saying Jesus had resurrected from the dead. They got the opposite.
They got abused. They got persecuted. They got killed for saying this happened. Yeah.
And I normally will say this, and this is gonna sound weird for you people out there that believe the Bible’s inerrant like I do, but stick with me.
It’s not it’s not heresy. Christianity is not true because the series of documents we put under 1 binding we call the Bible says is true.
In fact, Christianity would be true if the Bible never existed. People go, what do you mean?
I said, do you realize there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written?
Why? Because Christianity did not originate with a book. Christianity originated with an event, the resurrection.
There would be no series of books written in the 1st century by Jews claiming a man claimed to be God and rose from the dead unless a man really did claim to be God and really did rise from the dead, because all they got was abuse for doing this, for saying this.
So I I put it this way. The New Testament writers did not create the resurrection.
The resurrection created the New Testament writers.
There would be no New Testament documents written down by Jews in the 1st century unless this resurrection really happened.
Yeah. They wrote it down because they saw it, not the other way around. They didn’t invent it.
There’s no motive to invent it.
They had every motive to say it wasn’t true, Kirk, from a temporal perspective than to say it was true.
Right? So and then, you know, easily the Jews and the and the Romans could have squashed Christianity by going to the tomb and taking Jesus’s body out.
They couldn’t do that either. Why? Because he was still using his body. The tomb was empty.
Christianity could have been shut down by the 2 biggest opponents of it. At the time, they couldn’t do it.
Why? Because the tomb was empty. He had risen from the dead.
All this is such great and compelling evidence.
Oh, can I say 1 other thing? Yeah. People don’t believe in resurrections because they’ve never seen 1.
You shouldn’t expect to see a lot of miracles. Why?
Because if they occurred all the all the time, they wouldn’t be miracles. Right?
They have to be rare events to get our attention, and the greatest miracle in the Bible, ladies and gentlemen, is not the resurrection.
The greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
If that verse is true, every other verse is at least possible, including the verses that talk about him rising from the dead.
Okay? So we have evidence that even atheists are admitting that that the universe had a beginning.
They don’t think it’s God, but what else could it be? If the universe had a beginning, a resurrection’s possible.
That’s right. What’s the difference though, Frank, between understanding that Christianity is true and becoming a child of God.
Well, there’s
a difference between belief that and belief in. You can know that Christianity is true.
The demons know that according to James, but they don’t trust in Jesus.
They know intellectually it’s true, but they don’t trust in him.
So in order to become a Christian, you gotta go from belief that to belief in, Just like you do when you when you ask somebody to marry marry you.
Right? You’ve gotta go from belief that this person would be a good wife Yeah. To trust in.
That’s what you gotta do with Jesus.
You gotta repent of your sins and trust in what he has provided for you, which is not only forgiveness for everything you’ve done, but giving you his righteousness.
So you’re not only forgiven, you’re given his righteousness.
And so the scriptures talk about that at great length that we’re sinners and we need a savior.
And he died to rescue us from our sins, and he’s gonna forgive us and give us his righteousness.
That’s what Christianity is all about. It’s about grace.