Where was God? Frank Turek asks the question after Charlie Kirk

Arizona State University’s Ratio Christi chapter hosted Christian apologist Frank Turek Monday night. The topic especially caught my attention as a philosophy professor: If God exists, why is there evil?

I call this the major objection to belief in God. Atheists may begin elsewhere, but once the other objections are answered, the problem of evil keeps returning. I have found that true whether I am talking with an atheist at a bar watching a ball game or an elite physicist at Cambridge.

What if the very problem of evil that you think disproves God actually points to God?

Turek made the question as pointed as possible. He told the audience that when he and Charlie Kirk were approaching Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, Kirk asked him to pray. Turek prayed for the event to be effective and safe.

“God said no,” Turek told the audience. About 20 minutes later, Kirk was fatally shot. Turek has asked the same question publicly ever since: Where was God?

To some smug atheists, and a few conspiracy-minded people, the story invites a sneer: If Kirk was such a good Christian, why didn’t his God protect him? Why would anyone want to be a Christian if that is the outcome?

Turek answered with a challenge: What if the very problem of evil that seems to disprove God actually points toward him?

His argument came in two parts.

First, before we can say evil disproves God, we have to know what evil is. And to know what evil is, we need some account of the good. Invoking Augustine, Turek described evil as a corruption or privation of something good. Augustine’s formulation is simple: Evil depends on the good it damages.

Students are often confident that they can define the good until the examples get difficult. Happiness seems like an obvious candidate, but people can be happy about wicked things. Happiness alone therefore cannot tell us what is good.

That is where students often retreat into relativism: What is good for you is good for you, and what is good for me is good for me.

Turek’s answer was that human beings share a common human nature. If something is genuinely good for a human being as such, it cannot become bad merely because another person prefers something else.

Then he pushed the argument into explicitly Christian territory. If Christianity is true, what could be better than knowing God? He cited John 17:3, where eternal life is described as knowing God and Jesus Christ.

That brought him back to Kirk. Kirk’s murder was evil; Turek did not pretend otherwise. But he argued that God can bring good from evil. Turek says he still hears from people who encountered the gospel because of Kirk’s life and death. In his language, the ripple was not merely a ripple but a tsunami.

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That was Turek’s first point: The objection from evil assumes that some things are objectively wrong. His argument is that objective moral law requires a standard beyond individual preference and that the ultimate ground of that standard is God. The problem of evil therefore borrows the very moral categories it tries to use against him.

Turek then moved from philosopher to pastor.

In a philosophy class, people will debate the logical problem of evil. In the middle of intense suffering, nobody wants a philosopher to arrive with a chalkboard and draw syllogisms. They want to know why this happened: Why this child? Why this cancer? Why this death?

Turek answers with what he calls the ripple effect. We know very little of the past, only fragments of the present, and nothing of the future except what has been revealed to us. We cannot trace all the consequences flowing from a single event.

God, in the Christian account, is not only powerful and good but wise. He knows the whole of history and can order events toward ends we cannot see. Turek appealed to Romans 8:28: God works all things together for the good of those who love him.

That reminded me of an old pastoral illustration. A couple had grown cold in their faith. Their child died, and they asked their pastor why. He told them to imagine a shepherd trying to lead two stubborn sheep across a river from danger to safety. They refuse. So the shepherd picks up their lamb and carries it across. The sheep follow.

Was that for their good?

The point is not that suffering itself becomes good. It is that suffering can force us to confront questions comfort lets us avoid. It exposes our finitude and can make us consider our own sin. When we recognize how little we know and how much God would have to know, Paul’s question in Romans 9:20 becomes harder to brush aside: Who are we to correct God?

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With those two claims — objective goodness and divine wisdom — Turek took questions.

One student asked why God creates people who will be damned to hell. Turek answered that people who finally reject God receive what they insist upon: separation from Him. If that is what they choose, he asked, on what grounds do they complain about receiving it?

Another asked about animal suffering that no human being ever sees. How could that possibly help us?

Turek’s answer was essentially: How do you know it does not? Human knowledge is extraordinarily limited. The fact that we cannot identify a good purpose for some instance of suffering does not prove that no such purpose exists. He also noted that in the Christian account, the whole creation is affected by human sin.

So is Turek right? Does the problem of evil point toward God rather than away from him? Are atheists borrowing from an objective moral framework they cannot ultimately ground without God?

The audience was clearly intrigued. Skeptics had something substantial to push against, and Christians had to think more carefully about what they claim the Bible teaches concerning good, evil, suffering, and God’s wisdom.

As a philosophy professor deep in the heart of Sun Devil territory, I count that as a good thing.