{"id":174,"date":"2026-08-05T20:02:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T20:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/?p=174"},"modified":"2026-08-05T21:04:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T21:04:17","slug":"stealing-from-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"Stealing From God- book review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cWe love the truth when it enlightens us. We hate the truth when it convicts us.\u201d \u2013  Augustine<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I teach Christian Evidences at Frontier School of the Bible, and every year I have our students read Frank Turek\u2019s earlier book, \u201cI Don\u2019t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist<\/em>\u201d. That book builds a positive case \u2013 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\u2019t plan on replacing it anytime soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStealing From God<\/em>\u201d is a different kind of book, and that\u2019s exactly why I enjoyed it so much. Instead of building the case for<\/em> 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\u2019s pocket to get the tools he needs to argue against Him. Reason, morality, the laws of nature, even the concept of evil \u2013 none of these make any sense in a purely material universe, and yet the atheist can\u2019t make his case without them. Pretty witty if you ask me! That\u2019s the \u2018theft\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aiming at God and Hitting Yourself<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 like the beginning of the universe \u2013 he starts to squirm, suggesting that things that begin only may<\/em> have a cause. Turek won\u2019t let him get away with it. Science is<\/em> the search for causes. If things really can pop into existence uncaused, the very science Krauss builds his case on gives way underneath him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Turek presses further, and this is where the section gets a bit humorous. Krauss claims that every physical effect has a physical cause<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 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<\/em> the brain \u2013 just chemistry obeying the laws of physics \u2013 then Krauss didn\u2019t 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\u2019s own claim detonates in his hands. Turek shows over and over that this is the atheist\u2019s recurring habit: exempting himself from his own theory. It is simple logic, and it is devastating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Religion of Science<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another section that stuck with me comes from Turek\u2019s chapter on science, where he shows that a scientist\u2019s worldview doesn\u2019t just shape his conclusions about biology \u2013 it shapes his cosmology too. When the evidence began pointing to a universe with a beginning, the reaction from the scientific community wasn\u2019t calm, dispassionate objectivity. It was something closer to panic. Fred Hoyle coined the phrase \u201cbig bang\u201d 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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turek\u2019s point, drawing on the agnostic NASA astronomer Robert Jastrow, is that the atheist scientist is every bit as theological as the theist. \u201cThere is no God\u201d is a theological<\/em> claim. \u201cThere is no First Cause\u201d is an article of faith<\/em>. Jastrow himself described this commitment as a kind of religion within science \u2013 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.<\/em><\/strong> Today\u2019s version of that coping mechanism is the multiverse, a speculative escape hatch that still can\u2019t get around the absolute beginning of all material reality. Turek\u2019s conclusion is the common-sense one: the universe looks planned because it is<\/em> planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Laws imply a Law Giver<\/strong>, and as Turek reminds us through John Lennox, Newton\u2019s discovery of gravitation didn\u2019t diminish his admiration for God \u2013 it deepened it! The founders of modern science never saw God and natural law as competing explanations, and we shouldn\u2019t either.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Truth Doesn\u2019t Stay Buried<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Augustine quote at the top of this review captures why this book matters. Truth enlightens, and truth convicts \u2013 and it is the conviction that people run from or straight up will do whatever they can to suppress it. But here\u2019s the thing about truth: you can\u2019t kill it and bury it.<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>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 \u2013 it\u2019s 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 \u2013 no friend of Christianity \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. \u201cThere is no truth\u201d \u2013 is that true?<\/em> \u201cAll truth is relative\u201d \u2013 is that a relative truth?<\/em> \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t judge\u201d \u2013 isn\u2019t that a judgment?<\/em> I about laughed out loud more than once, and I\u2019ve already borrowed a few of these for the classroom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who Should Read This<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If \u201cI Don\u2019t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist\u201d<\/em> is the book that builds your confidence in what we believe, \u201cStealing From God\u201d<\/em> is the book that walks through the skeptic\u2019s 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 \u2013 any believer ready to have their worldview stretched and strengthened. What I appreciate about Turek is that he\u2019s clear, he\u2019s genuinely funny, and he never forgets why he\u2019s writing. The aim was never to win an argument. The aim is to point people to the God from whom they\u2019ve been borrowing all along \u2013 and beyond that, to His Son, who gave His life for the sins of the whole world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was a great summer read for me \u2013 especially since I\u2019ll be teaching \u201cChristian Evidences\u201d my second year now. Highly recommend!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe love the truth when it enlightens us. We hate the truth when it convicts us.\u201d \u2013  Augustine I teach Christian Evidences at Frontier School of the Bible, and every year I have our students read Frank Turek\u2019s earlier book, \u201cI Don\u2019t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist\u201d. That book builds a positive case \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marschnerministry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}