00:00:06.000For my conversation with Frank Turek, Frank makes the rational case for why there's a God, why the resurrection happened.
00:00:12.000If you're into apologetics and the case for the faith, Frank Turek from Cross-Examined is the man for you.
00:00:17.000Cross-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.
00:00:26.000I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.
00:00:28.000Email 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.
00:01:01.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:16.000We've been texting and talking for years now, and he's had a profound impact on my life.
00:01:21.000I 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.
00:02:23.000Well, 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?
00:02:52.000So 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.
00:03:08.000So we go to college campuses, which I love the work you're doing there.
00:03:12.000We go to college campuses and present, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
00:03:15.000And we set up a microphone for QA when it's over, and anybody can come and talk and ask a question.
00:03:21.000And that's probably where you saw some of those videos.
00:03:24.000And 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.
00:03:49.000I shouldn't, especially given the fact that they've probably been through an education system that has not really given them the facts.
00:03:57.000When 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.
00:05:39.000Because everything's just a matter of your opinion.
00:05:41.000But 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.
00:06:33.000So I want to ask you to unpack two of those.
00:06:35.000The 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.
00:06:47.000Show us the mounting evidence that actually shows that.
00:06:50.000Well, 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.
00:07:44.000So there has to be only a finite number of days before today.
00:07:47.000And 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?
00:08:01.000So, 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.
00:08:10.000In 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.
00:08:26.000The being would also have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice.
00:08:30.000So, I always ask people: I say, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?
00:08:39.000And they say, well, that would sound like God.
00:08:49.000But 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.
00:09:05.000In other words, Jesus is the creator in his divine nature.
00:09:09.000But you have to get all the way through the evidence to see if the creator is Jesus.
00:09:14.000From what we call the cosmological argument, which is the argument from the beginning of the universe, you just get a creator.
00:09:20.000You don't know if it's God as we know it.
00:09:22.000Or maybe it's Australia, God, or whatever.
00:09:24.000Yeah, we don't know if it's the God of biblical Christianity.
00:09:28.000But once we know Jesus has risen from the dead, it is the God of biblical Christianity.
00:09:32.000And so I want to get to that in a second.
00:09:34.000I 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.
00:09:44.000He 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.
00:09:58.000Now, what could have caused the expansion rate to be that infinitesimally precise from the very beginning?
00:10:07.000It started there, didn't evolve to that point.
00:10:10.000When space, matter, and time came into existence, the expansion rate was absolutely perfect.
00:10:16.000Any change either way, we're not here.
00:10:18.000Actually, there's a more interesting way of illustrating this.
00:10:22.000The ratio of the proton to the neutron, the weight, is fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 37th power.
00:10:31.000You say, I can't get my head around that number.
00:10:32.000I 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.
00:10:40.000Now, 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.
00:10:53.000That's like, I don't know, over 200,000 miles, right?
00:10:56.000And 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.
00:11:10.000If you pick the red one out, that's one in 10 to the 37th precision.
00:11:36.000Somebody designed that ratio of the proton to the neutron to be precisely what it needed to be.
00:11:42.000And 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.
00:11:53.000It's one thing to have a universe in galaxies.
00:11:55.000Could just be close to nothingness, just kind of adrift.
00:11:59.000But then to have life, that's a whole different level of finding.
00:12:02.000And 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.
00:13:22.000You 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.
00:13:37.000So 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.
00:15:24.000Now, 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.
00:15:34.000But if you were to make it up, why would you make it up with women?
00:15:37.000Actually, there's a woman came up to me once after I was presenting this at a campus.
00:18:37.000And 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.
00:18:46.000In 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.
00:18:57.000In fact, Christianity, Charlie, would be true even if the Bible never existed.
00:19:02.000And people go, well, what do you mean?
00:19:04.000Because Christianity did not originate with a book.
00:19:56.000The resurrection came first, and then the reports of it came later.
00:20:00.000From a historical standpoint, one of the criticisms some people will say is: hey, these books were written decades after Jesus.
00:20:07.000Therefore, they're historically questionable at best.
00:20:10.000Talk about how that's actually not true.
00:20:11.000The window of time is actually shorter than people realize.
00:20:14.000Talk 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.
00:20:49.000They say Mark is probably the first, could have been Matthew.
00:20:52.000But 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.
00:21:03.000The issue is that there are small sections of these New Testament documents that go back to the event itself, the resurrection, crucifixion, resurrection itself.
00:21:12.000For example, the earliest, they're called creeds.
00:21:14.000The earliest evidence for the New Testament.
00:22:16.000An 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.
00:22:24.000You knew where you were when Trump won the presidency in 2016.
00:22:43.000Now, 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.
00:23:15.000And 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.
00:23:22.000Most of them are written prior to 60 AD, 62 AD.
00:23:34.000And 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?
00:23:46.000Does Jesus really calm the waters and turn water to wine and feed 5,000 people?
00:23:51.000Or, you know, did a whale really swallow somebody?
00:25:24.000It's one of the most powerful things that you've ever said about it.
00:25:27.000Yeah, 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?
00:26:56.000And you can plant seeds every now and then.
00:26:59.000So 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.
00:27:08.000Yeah, 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.
00:28:44.000If socialism never worked anywhere it was tried and it had the wrong view of human nature, would you dispense with your socialist objectives?
00:28:52.000And the question you're really asking is, if something were true, would you stop doing what feels good?
00:29:38.000And all of a sudden, the moral kind of window moves.
00:29:40.000Next 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.
00:29:45.000I think that was all just a bunch of chemicals in my head.
00:29:56.000Yeah, 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.
00:30:04.000Now, 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.
00:33:05.000But 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.
00:33:12.000And you start going to substance and drugs and you start getting really depressed.
00:33:15.000And then you have to get a job and all this and it comes crashing down all around you.
00:33:18.000And 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.
00:36:57.000And this is an interesting ministry opportunity that people don't always capture, right?
00:37:01.000Which 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.
00:38:33.000And the ultimate hero, of course, is Jesus.
00:38:36.000All of these heroes, Charlie, are patterned after the ultimate hero.
00:38:39.000You can get biblical lessons, apologetic lessons, philosophical lessons, theological lessons, life lessons from watching movies and reading this book, Hollywood Heroes.
00:38:48.000And it will change the way you look at these movies.