REVIEW: FRANK TUREK STEALING FROM GOD: THE BOOK THAT ACCUSES ATHEISM
OF STEALING FROM BELIEVERS IN GO
Christian Frank Turek of https://impactapologetics.com/ is a prime defender of the Christian faith.
He wrote the runaway best seller Stealing from God.
This book claims that atheists are using arguments that belong to and with
belief in God to argue against God. In a nutshell that is not enough to prove
atheists wrong. Contradictions are when one argument is against another so what
if the reason atheists find themselves contradicting themselves is that the
concepts of God and morality are incoherent? If atheists are actually trying to
talk coherently about what is inherently incoherent then they succeed in
vindicating atheism for they prove that God is self-contradictory confused
nonsense. Turek like all self-styled believers keeps away from any prime and
successful arguments against God and the wisdom of believing in God.
Quote: Thanks to fellow atheist Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins now appears to
affirm objective morality while maintaining his atheism. In his book The Moral
Landscape, Harris takes the position that objective moral values really do
exist, and they can be explained without invoking God. He claims that if we just
use our reason, we’ll see that “human flourishing” is the standard by which we
determine something is good or bad. Anything that helps humans flourish is good.
Since reason and science can tell us what helps humans flourish, there is no
need for God to ground objective moral values. If Harris is correct, it seems
that he has successfully shot down the moral argument for God.
My comment: Christians say that this account does not explain why we should care
about the flourishing of others. But everybody's gut instinct is that even if we
don't know why, it is right. Christians say that morality gets its authority
from God. But you can say this does not explain why we should agree. Some things
you either see or don't like the beauty of a landscape. Maybe morality is like
that too. Why not admit we don't know what we mean when we say we know morality
is valid? Why does that even matter? Religion not the atheist is taking
advantage of the ethereal side to all that that we cannot really explain.
Christians say that God is just and loving and so morality is grounded in his
nature – the kind of God he is. This does not fit the doctrine that we must love
sinners and hate their sin as if their sins say nothing about them as a person.
If you cannot say your badness says something about you then it is the same for
good. You are denying that bad or good deeds say anything about anybody. Thus
you cannot say that God’s goodness reflects on him. You are only being
saccharine and fake. But back to how moral principles are valid because God is
good and just and loving. What is that saying? It is saying God is flourished.
If God being flourished grounds morality then us being flourished and being able
to be grounds morality as well and we don't need God. If there is no God then
morality is indeed grounded in us. So the believers accidentally prove Harris
right!
If human beings flourish without faith or thinking of God and they do then that
shows that if Harris fails to ground morality we can settle for saying, "It is
clear we don't have to have a God or God belief to flourish so if we don't know
what grounds morality we know that something does and it is not God."
Quote: Thoughts can change brain chemistry. In researching “cognitive therapy,”
several studies confirm that psychotherapy patients can use their thoughts to
create metabolic changes in their brains to overcome depression. So there’s some
truth to the saying, “you can become what you think about.” (Not completely
though, otherwise most men would become women.)
My comment here is that people are blamed for their depression. Doing that only
leads to more despair and depression. It’s a cruel irresponsible statement. Even
to suggest that that MAY be the cause is terrible.
His prime point would be that if you think of sin and love sin then you will
become sin. This is a good answer to the love the sinner and hate the sin lie.
The sinner is the sin so to love the sinner is to love the sin. Love the
sinner and hate the sin is confusing so it is good for hiding your admiration
for the sin even from yourself.
It is another proof that the fundamental Christian doctrine that
you/God/Jesus can love the sinner and hate the sin for the sin is not the sinner
is a lie.
As for men thinking about women and not becoming women there is a difference
between thinking of what kind of person you can be and the kind of people others
are.
Quote: Theists are just advocating common sense. There really are immaterial
realities that are intuitively obvious and that we use continuously, such as the
laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, objective moral values, consciousness,
and free will. In fact, some of those immaterial realities you are using right
now to read and understand this sentence.
Comment: But logic and mathematics are not things. They are not spirits! They
are abstract not immaterial! These and the other things need not involve God or
religion. Notice how he says that morality and consciousness are intuitively
obvious. This is admitting that we don't need anything other than our intuition.
If you have no source of information but intuition then as ought implies can
that is enough to establish morality. Simple! No God! No hocus pocus!
Quote: This is not a debate about evidence. Everyone is looking at the same
evidence. This is a debate about how to interpret the evidence, and that
involves philosophical commitments about what causes will be considered possible
before looking at the evidence. If you philosophically rule out intelligent
causes beforehand—as the Darwinists do—you will never interpret the evidence
properly if an intelligent being actually is responsible. Notice that how one
defines “science” is not science itself.
Comment: That is like saying a dice that falls and brings up 6 is evidence but
saying somebody threw it or did not is interpretation. Either way it is the case
that it fell and why not leave it at that? Why not let the evidence suggest the
philosophy instead of the other way around? Atheists and believers who are
studying the evidence have to let the evidence guide the philosophy - one side
is not doing it and lying about it.
Quote: [Some] either make God subject to objective morality or an arbitrary
source of morality. The supposed dilemma goes like this: Does God do something
because it is good (which would imply there is a standard of Good beyond God),
or is it Good because God does it (which would imply that God arbitrarily makes
up morality)? But this is not an actual dilemma at all. An actual dilemma has
only two opposing alternatives: A or non-A. We don’t have that here. In this
situation we have A and B. Well, maybe there is a third alternative: a C. There
is. When it comes to morality, God doesn’t look up to another standard beyond
Himself. If He has to look up to another standard, then He wouldn’t be God—the
standard beyond Him would be God. Nor is God arbitrary. There is nothing
arbitrary about an unchanging standard of Good. The third alternative is that
God’s nature is the standard. God Himself is the unchanging standard of Good.
The buck has to stop somewhere, and it stops at God’s unchanging moral nature.
In other words, the standard of rightness we know as the Moral Law flows from
the nature of God Himself—infinite justice and infinite love.
Comment: Turek is saying that God is subject to objective morality because it is
his nature - it is him! He denies there is a dilemma. Notice how he says the
buck has to stop somewhere. The question, "Why should I do this?" stops with,
"Because God is infinite justice and love" But what has the infinite have to do
with it? And it is about getting a parking spot and stopping the questions. That
is using God not respecting him. Why are we not saying we all know we have
justice and love in us and could live by a better standard and stop there? How
could it matter if it is God's justice or love?
Quote: Atheists have long been critical of Christians for trying to legislate
morality. But atheists are trying to do the same thing. They’re trying to
legislate their new absolutes over the old “self-evident” ones grounded in God.
For example, many atheists are ardent supporters of absolute rights to abortion,
same-sex marriage, taxpayer-provided health care, welfare, contraceptives, and
several other entitlements. But who says those are rights? By what objective
standard are abortion, same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, taxpayer-provided
health care, and the like, moral rights? There isn’t such a standard in an
atheistic universe. So atheists must steal the grounds for objective moral
rights from God while arguing that God doesn’t exist.
Comment: So these secular rights which many see as not being rights at all but
just evils are also treating God as real despite themselves! This is ammunition
for say the pro-life atheist who says that faith in God is bad for morality. If
the atheist is necessarily assuming a morality making God and not realising it,
then the doctrine or perception that there is something is responsible for
abortion etc. is accurate. God has written morality into a confused person and
thus must take responsibility for the results.
Quote: While evil is real, it’s not a “thing.” Evil doesn’t exist on its own. It
only exists as a lack or a deficiency in a good thing. Evil is like rust in a
car: If you take all of the rust out of a car, you have a better car; if you
take the car out of the rust, you have nothing. Evil is like a cut in your
finger: If you take the cut out of your finger, you have a better finger; if you
take the finger out of your cut, you have nothing. In other words, evil only
makes sense against the backdrop of good. That’s why we often describe evil as
negations of good things. We say someone is immoral, unjust, unfair, dishonest,
etc. So evil can’t exist unless good exists.
Comment: This is very black and white. A good healthy finger is not that good -
it is ageing and vulnerable and produces toxins. There is no proper good as
such. It's all shades of grey. Good and evil are just rubbish practically
speaking. This is just Turek trying to be so pious that you think he only sees
the good. He is in good company for his doctrine is that of historic
Christianity.
Quote: Hitler was anti-traditional religion because he didn’t want anything to
transcend his authority. Moreover, his disdain for the Jews seemed more focused
on their ethnicity rather than their religious beliefs. As Dinesh D’Souza points
out, “A Jew could not escape Auschwitz by pleading, ‘I no longer practice
Judaism,’ ‘I am an atheist,’ or ‘I have converted to Christianity.’ This
mattered nothing to Hitler because he believed the Jews were inferior racial
stock. His anti-Semitism was secular.” Hitler justified the Holocaust by citing
evolution...
Comment: Hitler did use religion, unorthodox yes but still religion, to hurt the
Jews. He gave no hint that he did not believe his version of religion. Some say
that Hitler and his system abused Darwinism as an excuse for eliminating the
Jews for science did not support any alleged inferiority. Maybe the idea that
God was using evolution to eradicate bad strains of human beings was at the back
of Hitler's head and that was why he was seeing himself as part of this
elimination process. But the reality is that Hitler was a creationist not a
Darwinist. He wrote, “nothing indicates that development within a species has
occurred of a considerable leap of the sort that man would have to have made to
transform him from an apelike condition to his present state.” Faith was to
blame for what the Nazis did not evolution.
https://evolution-institute.org/was-hitler-a-darwinian/
Quote: More Pain, More Gain.
Comment: Turek says the more you suffer the better - since when did he go among
the lepers?
Quote: Most philosophers agree that the existence of evil is not incompatible
with the existence of God. In fact, as we have seen, the existence of evil
actually establishes the existence of God! “But are you saying that the ends
justify the means?” No. God is not doing evil so that good may result. In fact,
God is not doing evil at all—we are. We are the rebels. While God holds all
things together and is responsible for the fact of freedom, we free creatures
are responsible for our acts of freedom. Even God can’t force free creatures to
make free choices—that would be a contradiction. Therefore, God allows us to do
evil and allows natural laws to run their course, knowing that, although there
will be pain along the way, good will come from it. As parents, we do this with
our children, even though we don’t know the future for sure. We allow our
children to make some bad choices, knowing that, although pain will result, it’s
the only way to accomplish the good of maturity. If we can allow bad choices
with limited information, God can do it with complete information.
Comment: If I do evil nobody can change the past not even God so God tries to
turn it to good. This is not the end justifies the means or is it? No. But if
God sees what will happen and lets you do harm to yourself then that is the end
justifies the means! It is not the same as a parent living in a world which
throws up the unexpected all the time!
Quote: He argues that given time, evil turns good so it fits an all-powerful and
all-good God...
This ripple effect is the revolutionary insight I referred to earlier that
helped me make sense of what appeared to be senseless evil. It means that even
the worst evil committed by free creatures or the suffering caused by natural
disasters cannot be deemed purposeless. While our time-bound limitations prevent
us from identifying specific good outcomes for every bad event, the atheist
can’t prove they will not materialize. That’s why most philosophers agree that
the existence of evil is not incompatible with the existence of God. In fact, as
we have seen, the existence of evil actually establishes the existence of God!
Comment: Christians like to say logicians tend to find no incompatibility
between a perfectly good God and evil. But what they do not admit is that the
logicians finding none is not the same as saying there can be none. The other
problem is that many philosophers have an inadequate view of evil - they are
captivated by moral toxins such as utilitarianism and relativism so what they
say does not count. Christians cannot solve the contradiction themselves so they
resort to using such people to shore up their God delusions. And he is
dismissing the logicians who DO say evil and God contradict each other.
Good coming at the end of evil has nothing to do with making evil in any way
good or showing that God was right to let free agents do the evil. The argument
itself is evil and hard-faced. It is using the results to justify the evil being
allowed which is the end justifies the means worked backwards.
Quote: Is Jesus telling us not to judge? No, He’s commanding us to take the
speck out of our brother’s eye—that involves making a judgment. He simply tells
us to get our own house in order first so we judge rightly, not hypocritically.
In other words, Jesus isn’t telling us not to judge; He’s telling us how to
judge. Elsewhere Jesus tells us, “Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead
judge correctly.”
Comment: That most Christians think judging is immoral and that Jesus banned it
is alarming. Jesus said that you can judge the person not just the sin for he
wanted you to have the person calling another raca dragged before the Sanhedrin.
Jesus himself would see faith and religion as dangerous and needing careful
regulation when so many abdicate moral responsibility and civic spirit in the
name of minding their own business and not having an opinion. The only truly
non-judgemental person as Turek says is a dead one. We judge endlessly every
day.
Quote: [Somebody] says, ‘I love you so much that I’m going to force you to love
me.’ Can he do that? Can he force you to love him?” Everyone agreed that was
impossible. You can’t force someone to love you. I went on to explain that the
same is true in our relationship with God
Comment: Morality makes allowances for what you cannot help. If the only way you
can love is in a way that forces then that is just the way it is. What if you
turned out naturally that way and cannot help it? Ought implies can. Morality is
about what you can do. Somebody programmed to murder would still be entitled to
the Nobel Peace Prize. Thus there are more important things than love being free
or not. For Buddhists, compassion is a better virtue for instead of you lovingly
deciding what the other needs you put yourself in the other's shoes and make it
about them. It is not true that love alone matters - it is insipid nonsense forged
in the hearts of passive aggressive people like Jesus Christ. It is really about
trying to impose what you want love to be on God and your idea of God.
Turek speaks of how God does not force us to love him. If freedom is so
important then he cannot pressure or threaten us either but he does. Threats
about suffering and Hell and being enslaved to Satan amount to terrible threats.
It is taking advantage of our fears of the unknown. Yet Turek gives us a parable
of how a lady on a date is rejecting the man when she says they should be
friends only. He says the man will get no happiness or value out of forcing her
to love him. It will not work.
Free will is defined as the power to choose on your own so you can do option a
as easily as option b. But that means you can be free despite God when in fact
the doctrine of creation says God creates your freedom and you so there is no
such thing as really being able to create a decision against his will or
permission. Turek's vision of free will is judgemental on us for it blames us
and holds us accountable and is paradoxically atheistic! There is more freedom
in a free agent who is pressured than this straightjacket set up by God.
God in fact is rejecting us by treating us as mere adopted children and calling
us sinners. As God is happy anyway it makes no sense to say he would be unhappy
if we are puppets. He comes first but how can he if he wants us to authentically
love for our benefit not his?
FINALLY
Turek has shown that atheists are not stealing moral ideas from the Church or Jesus. The reason is that the Church and Jesus themselves cannot get their ideas straight for they stole from something else and didn't understand what they were doing.
