Whenever I think of the secular left, I think of people who are desperately trying to portray themselves to others as generous and compassionate, even as they pass the risks and costs of their actions off to the people they hate. That was on display when Martha’s Vineyard – a Democrat stronghold – immediately deported the illegal immigrants that Ron DeSantis bused over to them.

And that’s not unusual. Let’s take a look at a real sanctuary city, Denver, Colorado.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform lists them on their sanctuary cities page:

The City and County of Denver – the capital city of Colorado with a population of 727,000 – became an illegal alien sanctuary on the basis of an April 2014 Sheriff Department memo stating that Denver no longer honors immigration detainers. This was codified into law by a City Council ordinance from August 2017.

Also in 2017, the city stopped sending federal officials its daily booking sheets in order to limit immigration officials awareness of criminal alien activities.

And I found a story on it in the far-left Denver Post:

Denver’s new immigration measures aim to resist federal enforcement in several ways, but Denver Police Chief Robert White summarized them bluntly at a signing ceremony Thursday.

“We do not do the work of ICE,” he said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a comment that prompted wild applause inside Denver’s city hall from the immigrants, advocates and city officials who filled the room.

Minutes later, Mayor Michael Hancock sat down at a table and put his pen — actually 10 pens, in succession — to a new immigration ordinance, with City Council sponsors Paul López and Robin Kniech at his side. He then signed a companion executive order, which directs city agencies to coordinate on additional help for immigrants living in the country illegally and set up a donation-based legal defense fund for people facing deportation proceedings.

Wild applause! Wow! It sounds like all the people in Denver are really proud of their police and government. This is what they voted for, so they are sure to be thrilled with the results. Right?

Well… not so much.

Here’s an article from the New York Post, dated January 30, 2024:

Colorado’s capital has joined the evergrowing list of cities that have become overwhelmed by the influx of migrants — with over 38,000 asylum seekers arriving in Denver in the past year.

How could this happen? As long as the people enacting the policy are virtuous, then how could there ever be any bad consequences? THEIR SUPERIOR VIRTUE MAKES IT WORK OUT. Or does it?

Whenever you bring in a huge number of unskilled immigrants – many of whom don’t speak the language – you end up causing shortages of products and services. The most obvious shortages appear in housing, health care, education and policing.

The article notes:

Dr. Steven Federico, a pediatrician and chief of government and community affairs at Denver Health, told the outlet that hospitals like his have become a “safety net” for the city.

[…]Federico says hospital officials have begged state and federal officials for help covering $10 million in unpaid medical bills from migrants.

What do leftists do when the bill comes due for their “don’t judge” compassion? Why, they pass the bill to other people. People who never approved of their “don’t judge” compassion in the first place. People who warned them about the costs of their “don’t judge” compassion. The grown-ups always get the bill for the children.

Not just health care – education, too:

Denver Public Schools has seen an additional 3,000 students enter the system since July, putting a strain on their budget as funding gets set based on the district’s population the previous October, according to Adrienne Endres, who oversees multilingual education for the district.

Why is housing so expensive? Why is health care so expensive? Why is education so expensive? Why is policing so expensive? These things become expensive when you import millions of unskilled immigrants who use more in services than they pay in taxes.

Let’s look at an article from Denver local news channel KUSA 9NEWS.

It says:

No part of the City of Denver will be spared from proposed budget cuts to help pay for the migrant crisis. Every office, from the police department to the animal shelter, is being asked to cut money. It could even impact the funding our elections department gets this year.

In a critical 2024 election year, the Denver Clerk and Recorder’s Office says Mayor Mike Johnston has asked to cut nearly a million dollars from the department that oversees elections. The money, they say, is needed to help pay for the migrant crisis.

Down the street at the police department, Denver Police Department (DPD) says they’re working on finding places to cut their budget. So is the Department of Public Safety, and the animal shelter, and the health department. Every agency in Denver has been told to find ways to cut its budget for the same reason.

[…]Last Friday, Johnston announced publicly the first two cuts. $5 million from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Denver Parks and Recreation.

The Denver District Attorney’s Office says they’ve been asked to cut their 2024 budget by 5%. The Department of General Services says they’re looking to cut 15%. Even the Department of Human Services, which is leading the efforts to help migrants, has already diverted $15 million from other projects towards the crisis and is looking for ways to cut more money.

Even the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, which is responsible for everything from trash pickup to potholes, may soon have to cut funding.

So, I hope voters can learn from the mistakes of Democrat sanctuary cities. Contrast the jubilant tone, when the city government was crowing about their “don’t judge” compassion, with their anguish now that the bill has come due. But do you think they have learned anything from it, now that they have to beg and plead for money from other taxpayers? Of course not. The virtue signaling is like crack cocaine to them. Once people give up on the objective morality of Christianity, they become obsessed with signaling their virtue to their neighbors, since that’s all morality is to them. Compliance with the expectations of their neighbors. And they can’t stop doing it, because that’s how they deal with the guilt from their own sins, and the consequences of those sins. Sadly, they rarely pay the costs of their virtue signaling. They pass the bill to you.

I noticed that there is a new Dallas, TX Science and Faith conference scheduled for February 17th, 2024. 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 I’m looking forward to:

• How Earth is Designed for Life
  Bijan Nemati
• How Earth is Designed for Scientific Discovery
  Jay Richards & Guillermo Gonzalez
• How Earth is Designed for Technological Advancement
  Brian Miller
• Intelligent Design as a Scientific Theory
  Stephen Meyer
• Can Evolution and Intelligent Design Be Combined? Why the Front-End Loaded Concepts of Design Fail
  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

Well, they did one of these conferences 5 years ago in 2019, and they posted the videos. And they actually covered a few of these arguments. Here is the YouTube playlist.

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.

The 2024 edition seems to be superior to the 2019 edition, because they added two people I really like: Brian Miller and Guillermo Gonzalez. The one I’ve never heard of is Dr. Bijan Nemati, but he has impressive credentials:

Bijan Nemati is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He received his Ph.D. in high energy physics from the University of Washington, based on his research on heavy quark decays detected at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After post-doctoral work at the Cornell synchrotron, he left particle physics to work on advanced astronomical instruments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I wonder if he will be a good speaker? He certainly has an impressive resume, that’s for sure. I wish we had a 100 scholars for everyone one who is speaking at the conference, but maybe if we can get Christian parents excited about the scholars we have, then we can make more of them.

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.

A very good book on science apologetics was published recently, called “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos“. Well, there’s an ongoing series of posts about the book at Evolution News, and one of them caught my eye. They are talking about the origin of life, and what’s needed to create life from non-life.

Here is the post from Evolution News.

The article starts by explaining the what is required to show how non-living components could be organized into a living system:

• plausible biochemical paths from individual bio-building blocks like amino acids or nucleic acids to functional polymers such as proteins and DNA.
• ways to speed up chemical reactions that are naturally slow.
• the ordering of amino acids in proteins and nucleotide bases in RNA and DNA that allows them to function properly.

The leading naturalistic explanation to solve these problems is called the “RNA world” hypothesis:

The most popular proposal for the first self-replicating molecule is RNA — where life was first based upon RNA carrying both genetic information (akin to modern DNA) and performing catalytic functions (akin to modern enyzmes), in what is termed the RNA world.

The article lists several problems with the RNA world hypothesis. Dr. Walter Bradley lists two of those problems.

First, the assembly of RNA requires intelligent design:

First, RNA has not been shown to assemble in a laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Origin-of-life theorist Steven Benner explained that a major obstacle to the natural production of RNA is that “RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair” due to water’s “rapid and irreversible” corrosive effects upon RNA.³ In this “water paradox,” Benner explains that “life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g., RNA) necessary for life.”⁴

To overcome such difficulties, Benner and other chemists carefully designed experimental conditions that are favorable to the production of RNA. But Robert Shapiro explains that these experiments do not simulate natural conditions: “The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth.”⁵ Reviewing attempts to construct RNA in the lab, James Tour likewise found that “[t]he conditions they used were cleverly selected,” but in the natural world, “the controlled conditions required to generate” RNA are “painfully improbable.”⁶ Origin-of-life theorists Michael Robertson and Gerald Joyce even called the natural origin of RNA a “Prebiotic Chemist’s Nightmare” because of “the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth.”⁷ In the end, these experiments demonstrate one thing: RNA can only form by intelligent design.

The second problem is that the RNA world hypothesis is that it requires the existence of a self-replicating RNA molecule in order to get started. But this self-replicator contains a lot of biological information that is beyond the reach of chance to produce:

The most fundamental problem with the RNA world hypothesis is its inability to explain the origin of information in the first self-replicating RNA molecule — which experts suggest would have had to be at least 100 nucleotides long, if not between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.¹⁰ How did the nucleotide bases in RNA become properly ordered to produce life? There are no known chemical or physical laws that can do this. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, origin-of-life theorists have no explanation other than blind chance. As noted, ID theorists call this obstacle the information sequence problem, but multiple mainstream theorists have also observed the great unlikelihood of naturally producing a precise RNA sequence required for replication.

Whenever I sit down to write some code or to write a blog post, I can start with one letter, then add another, then add another, until I have a functioning program, or a legible blog post. It might be possible for random chance to make a meaningful word out of 3 letters, like “the” or “hat”. But it’s not possible to make a self-replicating RNA molecule that way. The required sequence is just too long, and every letter has to be just right in order for it to function as a self-replicating system. The simplest self-replicating molecule is extremely complicated.

Anyway, check out the article, and if you want to read all about Walter Bradley (my role model), there is a new book out about him called “For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley” which I finished, and it was great.