“We love the truth when it enlightens us. We hate the truth when it convicts us.” –  Augustine

I teach Christian Evidences at Frontier School of the Bible, and every year I have our students read Frank Turek’s earlier book, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist”. That book builds a positive case – it walks through the evidences for the Christian faith, brick by brick, from truth to God to miracles to the reliability of the New Testament. It has served our students well, and I don’t plan on replacing it anytime soon.

“Stealing From God” is a different kind of book, and that’s exactly why I enjoyed it so much. Instead of building the case for Christianity, Turek goes on offense. He takes the arguments atheists use against God and shows that every one of them depends on things only God can explain. In other words, the atheist has to reach into God’s pocket to get the tools he needs to argue against Him. Reason, morality, the laws of nature, even the concept of evil – none of these make any sense in a purely material universe, and yet the atheist can’t make his case without them. Pretty witty if you ask me! That’s the ‘theft’ in the title, and Turek organizes the whole book around the acronym CRIMES: Causality, Reason, Information and Intentionality, Morality, Evil, and Science. Each letter gets a chapter, and each chapter exposes another piece of stolen property.

Aiming at God and Hitting Yourself

My favorite section of the book comes early, in the chapter on causality, where Turek takes on atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss is happy to lean on the law of cause and effect when it suits him, but the moment causality points somewhere uncomfortable – like the beginning of the universe – he starts to squirm, suggesting that things that begin only may have a cause. Turek won’t let him get away with it. Science is the search for causes. If things really can pop into existence uncaused, the very science Krauss builds his case on gives way underneath him.

But Turek presses further, and this is where the section gets a bit humorous. Krauss claims that every physical effect has a physical cause – a claim designed to rule God out from the start. So Turek asks a simple question: what about your own mind, Dr. Krauss? If the mind is more than physical, then Krauss has just contradicted himself, because his immaterial mind produced a very physical book. But if the mind is nothing but the brain – just chemistry obeying the laws of physics – then Krauss didn’t reason his way to atheism at all. He merely reacted, the way a can of soda fizzes when you shake it. And nobody looks to a fizzing soda can for arguments. Either way, the atheist’s own claim detonates in his hands. Turek shows over and over that this is the atheist’s recurring habit: exempting himself from his own theory. It is simple logic, and it is devastating.

The Religion of Science

Another section that stuck with me comes from Turek’s chapter on science, where he shows that a scientist’s worldview doesn’t just shape his conclusions about biology – it shapes his cosmology too. When the evidence began pointing to a universe with a beginning, the reaction from the scientific community wasn’t calm, dispassionate objectivity. It was something closer to panic. Fred Hoyle coined the phrase “big bang” as a term of mockery because he wanted an eternal, static universe. Arthur Eddington confessed that a beginning was philosophically repugnant to him and openly hoped for a loophole. Even Einstein admitted the idea irritated him – so much so that he slipped a mathematical fudge factor into his general relativity equations to keep the universe eternal, a move he later repented of after Hubble confirmed the universe was expanding. 

Turek’s point, drawing on the agnostic NASA astronomer Robert Jastrow, is that the atheist scientist is every bit as theological as the theist. “There is no God” is a theological claim. “There is no First Cause” is an article of faith. Jastrow himself described this commitment as a kind of religion within science – and when the discovery of a beginning violated that faith, many scientists coped the same way anyone copes with trauma: by ignoring the implications or trivializing them. Today’s version of that coping mechanism is the multiverse, a speculative escape hatch that still can’t get around the absolute beginning of all material reality. Turek’s conclusion is the common-sense one: the universe looks planned because it is planned.

Laws imply a Law Giver, and as Turek reminds us through John Lennox, Newton’s discovery of gravitation didn’t diminish his admiration for God – it deepened it! The founders of modern science never saw God and natural law as competing explanations, and we shouldn’t either.

Truth Doesn’t Stay Buried

That Augustine quote at the top of this review captures why this book matters. Truth enlightens, and truth convicts – and it is the conviction that people run from or straight up will do whatever they can to suppress it. But here’s the thing about truth: you can’t kill it and bury it. Trying to bury the truth is like burying a dead animal in a shallow grave in your backyard. You may not see it anymore but give it time – it’s going to start to stink, and everyone downwind is going to know something is off. That is exactly what has happened to atheism. The New Atheists made their loud declarations a couple of decades ago, and the smell is getting hard to ignore. Even atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel – no friend of Christianity – has admitted in print that the materialist account of nature is almost certainly false. Atheism has not aged well, and Turek does an exceptional job explaining why: a worldview that cannot account for reason, morality, causality, or truth itself was never going to hold up.

Turek also has a gift for exposing self-defeating statements, and his chapter on truth is worth the price of the book for any teacher. “There is no truth” – is that true? “All truth is relative” – is that a relative truth? “You shouldn’t judge” – isn’t that a judgment? I about laughed out loud more than once, and I’ve already borrowed a few of these for the classroom. 

Who Should Read This

If “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist” is the book that builds your confidence in what we believe, “Stealing From God” is the book that walks through the skeptic’s case against God and shows how each argument collapses under its own weight. It belongs in the hands of pastors, teachers, parents of college students – any believer ready to have their worldview stretched and strengthened. What I appreciate about Turek is that he’s clear, he’s genuinely funny, and he never forgets why he’s writing. The aim was never to win an argument. The aim is to point people to the God from whom they’ve been borrowing all along – and beyond that, to His Son, who gave His life for the sins of the whole world.

This was a great summer read for me – especially since I’ll be teaching “Christian Evidences” my second year now. Highly recommend!