‘I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be an Atheist’

Dr. Frank Turek’s explanation for the existence of god

by Lindsay Fendt, April 16, 2009

Thursday night LaRose Digital Theater was packed. Elon students and Burlington residents filled every seat, every aisle and almost every inch of floor space all to hear a man who claimed to be able to prove the existence of god, Dr. Frank Turek.

“I wish I was Jesus and I could do a miracle like the seating of the 500,” he said upon seeing the crowd.

Turek, a co-author of the book “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” and founder of The Cross Examined web site, laid out an argument through the use of scientific and logical evidence in an attempt to compel the crowd to believe in god.

“Is life just a glorified monopoly game?” said Turek, “or do we have a purpose?”

Turek used logical, scientific and moral facts to argue for the existence of truth and of god In his book, ” I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist,”

Turek uses 12 points to prove that the New Testament is true, but with limited time he was only to get through two. Turek explained by using the law of non-contradiction to explain that there is an absolute truth. The law of non-contradiction states that it is not possible for something to be both true and non-true at the same time. Turek used this law to refute arguments that people can have different truths.

“God either exists or he doesn’t exist,” he said. “He can’t exist for me and not for you.”

[Quantum physics poses an interesting problem for the law of non-contradiction. Using this law, light can’t be a particle and not a particle, but this is precisely the nature of wave-particle duality. Under certain conditions, light behaves like a particle. Under other conditions, light behaves instead like a wave. Context is fundamental. The law of non-contradiction does not support the idea of absolute truth, because no incident is devoid of context.

Even if you agree that the law of non-contradiction supports Turek’s argument for the existence of God, it also supports the existence of any other god.

“Zeus either exists or he doesn’t exist. He can’t exist for me and not for you.”

By this argument, not only should you believe in God (Yahweh), but also Zeus and any other god that anyone has ever believed to exist. Of course, you can simply turn the argument around.

“God either exists or he doesn’t exist. He can’t not exist for me and exist for you.”]

From this point Turek moved on to present evidence supporting the big bang theory. He used five scientific principles and quotes from physicists and astronomers as evidence supporting that, “something once came out of nothing.”

While many see the big bang theory as contradictory to creationism, Turek stated the opposite claiming, “From this point we can reach two possible conclusions; either no one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing.”

[I know admittedly little about the Big Bang theory; however, according to the Wikipedia definition, it does not seem to suggest that something was created out of nothing.

“As used by cosmologists, the term Big Bang generally refers to the idea that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past, and continues to expand to this day.”

In fact, this seems to suggest that something always existed and continues to exist. Unlike the “someone created something out of nothing” theory, the Big Bang model is supported by lots and lots of scientific evidence.]

With photos of the size of the earth in comparison to the universe and diagrams of DNA, Turek then explained his belief that a world so intricate and complex could not have been produced by chance.

“I don’t have enough faith to believe that there is not intelligence behind life,” said Turek.

What made his argument unique of other theologins was his rejection of faith as an explanation for the existence of god.

[Turek doesn’t seem to be rejecting a faith-based explanation to me. It actually takes heaps of faith to believe there is an intelligence behind the complexity of the universe when no evidence of this intelligence exists. His is an argument from design, hardly scientific.]

“It’s not true because you have faith,” he said. “It’s true regardless of how you feel about it.” Rather than using faith as a basis for his argument, Turek presented what he deemed factual evidence of the existence of god.

[Where is this alleged “factual evidence” of god? Turek certainly doesn’t discuss his experiments in particle physics where he uncovers the “god particle”. Perhaps it’s because he conducted no such experiment, and has no factual, empirical evidence of god.]

“I believe that Christians have a lot of good evidence and only need a little faith,” he said. “Atheists, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of evidence and need a lot of faith.”

Even with all of his research and factual evidence, even Turek admits that there is no way to be true of what is really out there.

“I am not absolutely true that Christianity is true,” he said, “but I have enough evidence that I can believe it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

[Atheists would certainly need a lot of faith to believe that there is (scientific) evidence that god does not exist, but because there isn’t any, we don’t rely on faith to reject faith-based claims. We’re still waiting for the “evidence” Christians constantly claim to possess but never supply.]

If I co-authored a book claiming to have evidence of something, had 12 proofs for my claim, and had a limited time in which to present those proofs, then I’d select the two most compelling points to discuss. The fact that Turek chose two feeble and unconvincing arguments speaks volumes about his other ten.