All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

Should conservatives trust the FBI to be impartial and unbiased?

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It’s the end of the year, and I thought it would be a good time to review five FBI scandals. Then you can decide for yourself whether you think that the FBI is doing a good job of enforcing the law. And remember, you’re paying their salaries with your tax dollars, so you have to decide whether you are getting good value for your money. Let’s take a look at some of the scandals.

Here is an article about the scandals from Fox News.

Attack Republicans:

Former counterintelligence FBI special agent Charles McGonigal — who led New York’s counterintelligence division and played a critical role in the alleged Trump-Russia collusion investigation — was earlier this month sentenced to four years in prison for charges related to colluding with a Russian oligarch.

[…]In May, Special Counsel John Durham released a long-awaited final report to the Justice Department, which spans more than 300 pages of his years-long investigation into the origins of “Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham found that both the DOJ and FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation.

Durham said his investigation also revealed that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically-affiliated persons and entities.”

Protect Democrats:

While Trump and members of his inner circle remain at the center of several investigations, the bureau faced backlash for declining requests from House Republicans to release an unclassified FBI document that contained claims from an informant that President Biden was allegedly involved in foreign business dealings with his family.

But after the bureau balked for months to turn over the document to lawmakers, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, obtained the internal material — known as an FD-1023 — and released it to the public. The document accused the FBI of improperly delaying or completely shutting down a full investigation into the Biden family.

Pre-dawn raiding the homes of peaceful pro-lifers:

When the FBI wasn’t focused on — or allegedly turning a blind eye to — the White House, the bureau was slapped with a $1.1 million lawsuit in November brought by Catholic father and pro-life activist Mark Houck, who was arrested in his home in 2022 by FBI agents over a previous altercation outside a Planned Parenthood. A 12-person jury later unanimously acquitted Houck on all charges of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

Houck filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking restitution for what it called “a faulty investigation” and “excessive force” after a SWAT team of around 25 people arrested him in front of his children. The lawsuit alleges government agents deprived Houck of his Fourth Amendment rights by using excessive force to arrest him on non-violent charges.

Persecute taxpayers for their religious views:

Perhaps the bureau’s most shocking moment in 2023 came in February when former FBI agent Seraphin exposed an unclassified intelligence document from the FBI’s Richmond field office in Virginia that appeared to target traditional Catholics as so-called potential domestic terrorists, which immediately forced the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to purge the anti-Catholic memo from its system.

After the bureau said it would “never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity,” lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government launched an investigation into the FBI and discovered that the bureau interviewed a priest and a choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia.

You have to decide for yourself whether the FBI uses it’s power to break laws for the benefit of the Democrat party. You have to decide for yourself whether they’ve abandoned their duty to protect the Americans who pay their salaries. You have to decide for yourself whether the FBI persecutes American taxpayers solely on the basis of their first amendment activities. You have to decide whether the FBI is in violation of the Constitution – or maybe even at war with the Constitution. Vote accordingly in 2024.

Polemics

Dr. Walter Bradley lectures on scientific evidence the creation and design of the universe

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This lecture is special to me, because I bought a VHS tape of it just after I started working full-time, and watched it a million times. A lot of people come to their convictions about God’s existence because of parents or church or intuitions, but for me it’s all about the scientific evidence. This lecture changed my life. I wish more people taught their children about this evidence! This lecture was delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

About the speaker:

Dr. Bradley received his B.S. in Engineering Science and his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Texas in Austin.

Dr. Bradley taught for eight years at the Colorado School of Mines before assuming a position as Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU) in 1976.

During his 24 years at Texas A&M, Dr. Bradley served as Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University and as Director of the Polymer Technology Center, and received five College of Engineering Research Awards. He has received over $4,500,000 in research grants and has published over 140 technical articles and book chapters. He has also co-authored “The Mystery Of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Materials and of the American Scientific Affiliation and serves as a consultant for many Fortune 500 companies.

He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Baylor University.

The lecture: (63 minutes lecture, 25 minutes audience Q&A)

Summary slide:

This slide summarizes the content of the lecture
This slide summarizes the content of the lecture

Introduction:

  • At the beginning of the 20th century, people believed that the progress of science was pointing away from an intelligent Creator and Designer, and towards naturalism
  • A stream of new discoveries has shifted the support of science towards theism, and away from naturalism
  • Richard Dawkins, an atheist, says that nature only has the appearance of design, but that if you look closer, naturalistic mechanisms can account for the appearance of design
  • When deciding between design and apparent design (“designoid”), it matters whether you think there is an intelligence there to do the designing

Evidence #1: The Big Bang:

  • an eternal “steady state” universe is more compatible with naturalism, but a created universe is more compatible with a Creator
  • In 1929, Hubble used telescopes to observe that the light from distant galaxies was redshifted. The further away galaxies were, the faster they were moving away. Therefore, space is expanding in all directions, suggesting an explosive origin of the universe
  • In 1965, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation matched a prediction of the Big Bang cosmology, and of the creation event
  • In 1992, the COBE space telescope allowed us to test four specific predictions of the Big Bang model, especially the predictions for light element abundances (hydrogen and helium), which matched the predictions of the creation model

Evidence #2: Simple mathematical structure of the physical laws

  • the simple mathematical structure of natural laws allows us to understand these laws, make discoveries, and engineer solutions to problems
  • early scientists saw the mathematical structure of the universe to mean that nature was designed by an intelligent to be understood
  • the fundamental equations of the laws of the universe can be easily written on one side of one sheet of paper
  • Eugene Wigner’s famous paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences” makes the point that this simple structure is an unexpected gift that allows is to do science

Evidence #3: fine-tuning of the physical constants and quantities

  • in order for any kind of complex life to survive, we need stars that provide energy within specific ranges for long periods of time
  • in order for any kind of complex life to survive, we need planets with stable orbits that will not suffer from extreme temperature swings as it varies in distance from its star
  • in order for any kind of complex life to survive, we need stable atomic structure
  • in order for any kind of complex life to survive, we need to have chemical diversity and correct relative abundances of each element
  • organic life has minimum requirements: process energy, store information, replicate, and you can’t fulfill those functions if there is only one element, e.g. – hydrogen
  • the energy level from the photons from the sun have to match the energy levels of the different elements in order to drive the chemical bonding needed for life
  • These requirements for life of any imaginable type depend on the values of the constants and quantities. The constants and quantities cannot vary much from what they are, or the universe will lose the characteristics (above) that allow it to support complex life of any imaginable time
  • For example, ratio of strong force to electromagnetic force:
    – if 2% larger, then no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars, no compounds containing hydrogen, e.g. – water
    – if 5% smaller, no stable stars, heavy hydrogen would be unstable, few elements other than hydrogen

Evidence #4: initial conditions for habitability

  • Universe: expansion rate of the universe must be fast enough to avoid a re-collapse, but slow enough to allow matter to clump together and form stars and planets for complex life to live on
  • Planet: right distance from the star to get the right climate
  • Planet: right mass to retain the right atmosphere

Evidence #5: origin of life and information theory

  • It’s possible to explain every process in an automobile engine using plain old naturalistic mechanisms – no supernatural explanation is necessary to understand the processes
  • But the existence of engine itself: engineering all the parts has to be explained by the work of an intelligence
  • Similarly, we can understand how living systems work, but the existence of the living systems requires an intelligence
  • Even the simplest living system has to perform minimal function: capture energy, store information and replicate
  • Living systems are composed of objects like proteins that are composed of sequences of components complex such that the order of the components gives the overall structure function
  • Developing the components for a simple living cell is very improbable – even given the large number of galaxies, stars and planets in the universe, it is unlikely that complex, embodied life would exist anywhere in the universe

Evidence #6: more initial conditions for habitability

  • Location within the galaxy: you need to be away from the center of the galaxy, because the explosions from dying stars, and excessive radiation will kill life
  • Location within the galaxy: you need to be close enough to the center in order catch the heavy elements you need for life from the explosions of other stars
  • Location within the galaxy: the best location is between two arms of  a spiral galaxy, where you can get the heavy elements you need from dying stars, but without being hit with explosions and harmful radiation
  • Star mass: determines rate at which the sun burns, determines the energy level of photons that are used to drive chemical bonding reactions, determines the length of time the star will be stable
  • Star mass: star mass must be the correct value in order to allow liquid water on the planet’s surface, while still preserving stable orbit

I wish there was more curiosity about science in churches, and young Christians understood how critical science is for grounding the rationality of the Christian worldview. We need to be training up more scientists who think about the big questions, like Dr. Walter Bradley.

News

Should Christians respect Francis Collins as an authority on science?

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Dr. Francis Collins is apparently in the news again. He claims to be an evangelical Christian, and pushed Christians to wear cloth masks and get vaccinated. Should Christians trust Collins as a scientific authority? Or is he just a willing pawn of the secular left? Let’s take a look at an article from Megan Basham, and find out.

This article from February 2022 is originally from Daily Wire, but full text here. The title is “How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread Covid Propaganda To Churches”.

Excerpt:

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

[…]Their conversation also turned to the subject of masking children at school, with Collins noting that Christians, in particular, have been resistant to it. His view was firm—kids should be masked if they want to be in the classroom. To do anything else is to turn schools into super spreaders. Stetzer offered no pushback or follow-up questions based on views from other medical experts. He simply agreed.

[…]Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by Christianity Today… During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

I blogged previously about how several federal government departments now think that this is the most plausible theory, and how the CIA bribed experts to change their testimony about the lab leak theory. So Collins was actually the one spreading misinformation.

Collins takes secular left positions on abortion and transgenderism:

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures.

[…]When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

[…]Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

[…]Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Megan’s got the names of the people who promoted him in her article: Tim Keller, Rick Warren, N. T. Wright, Ed Stetzer, Russell Moore, and David French:

Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother.  When presenting Collins to Southern Baptists, Moore gushed over him as the smartest man in a book club he attends…

[I]nfluential evangelical pundit David French deemed Collins a “national treasure” and his service in the NIH “faithful.”

Dr. Collins is a Darwinian evolutionist, so you can guess how evidence-based his views are about the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion. I think Christians need to be skeptical of believers in naturalistic religion: Darwinism, man-made catastrophic global warming, abortion, transgenderism, etc. It’s pretty clear that these naturalistic views are not the result of study and debate. People who jump on the speculations of the secular left, and pronounce them as infallible, are not doing it to promote truth. They do it because they want the respect of powerful secular leftists. Dr. Collins is not an independent thinker. He is someone who adopts the views of secular leftist elites automatically and without thinking. He wants to get ahead in the world. That’s it.