I noticed that there is a new Dallas, TX Science and Faith conference scheduled for February 8th, 2025. This one is offering online viewing, if you can’t make it to Dallas. Well, I thought it might be fun to review some lectures from the 2019 Dallas, TX Science and Faith conference, because they posted them online. It’s a nice way to get an easy, popular-level introduction to science apologetics.

Here are a few of the sessions from the upcoming conference that I’m looking forward to:

• The miracle of butterfly metamorphosis (Paul Nelson)
• The amazing honeybee (Eric Hedin)
• The scientific evidence of the human soul (Michael Egnor)
• The intelligent design of plants (Emily & Daniel Reeves)
• The theory of ID as fuel for scientific discovery (Casey Luskin)
• The origin of animal body plans (Stephen Meyer)

When it comes to scientific arguments, I have 6 that I usually use:

• origin of the universe
• fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe
• origin of the life
• sudden origin of body plans in the Cambrian explosion
• habitability and discoverability
• molecular machines

If you want to get an idea of what these events are about, the ID folks did one of these conferences about 6 years ago in 2019, and they posted the videos. And they actually covered a few of these arguments.

Here is the YouTube playlist. And below are some of the lectures.

The origin of the universe:

The origin of life:

Habitability and Discoverability:

Cambrian explosion:

If you’re wondering, “is this the lecture where James Tour got really, really excited with a church audience?” Yes, this is the one.

One of my heroes is speaking at the 2025 conference, Dr. Richard Sternberg. You might remember that Dr. Sternberg was thrown out of his job at the Smithsonian Institute, just for publishing a paper by Dr. Stephen Meyer that supported intelligent design in a peer-reviewed journal.

For decades, opponents of intelligent design derided the theory as unscientific because it hadn’t been published in peer-reviewed science journals. “What intelligent design advocates fail to realize is that the peer-review process could benefit them enormously,” sneered one such opponent, computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit, in 2001. But when a peer-reviewed journal published an ID-friendly paper in 2004, the response from Darwinists was simply more derision. And for Dr. Richard Sternberg, it was worse. Sternberg endured sustained hostility from his colleagues at the Smithsonian, including conspiracy theories and wild accusations, that damaged his reputation and resulted in his premature departure.

These are the real heroes. The ones who have to pay a price for standing up for the truth.

Here is his biography:

Richard Sternberg is an evolutionary biologist with interests in the relation between genes and morphological homologies, and the nature of genomic “information.” He holds two Ph.D.’s: one in Biology (Molecular Evolution) from Florida International University and another in Systems Science (Theoretical Biology) from Binghamton University. From 2001-2007, he served as a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and from 2001-2007 was a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Sternberg is presently a research scientist at the Biologic Institute, supported by a research fellowship from the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. He is also a Research Collaborator at the National Museum of Natural History.

From 2001-2004, Sternberg served as Managing Editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, and has also served on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of General Systems. In 1999, he was a Visiting Associate Professor of Biology at Northern Michigan University, and from 1999-2001 was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History. He has received postdoctoral fellowships from both the NIH and the National Museum of Natural History, and has published refereed articles in such journals as Genetica, Evolutionary Theory, Journal of Comparative Biology, Crustacean Research, Journal of Natural History, Journal of Morphology, Journal of Biological Systems, and the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

People sometimes try to talk to me about charismatic pastors, and Big Eva politicians, famous Christian athletes, famous Christian artists, etc. And I just have no regard for people who talk about things that they haven’t investigated themselves. I’m even a little suspicious of analytic philosophers! The guys who I admire and look up to are the STEM guys. The mathematicians and the scientists. The guys who work in the labs. The guys who move the ball forwards by giving us evidence that we can talk about and use with people who don’t even know where to begin looking for evidence.