Welcome to episode 57 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. Günter Bechly about whether the fossil record supports Darwinian evolution or intelligent design. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Note: We are releasing this episode a few days early, because of the tragic death of Dr. Bechly in an auto accident. You can read more about it here at Evolution News. Rose and I are devastated. This episode is Rose’s favorite episode of our entire podcast. We just liked talking to him so much. You can find his full testimony, which we thought was really, really valuable. We think that this would be a wonderful thing for you to share on social media to remember him.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome paleontologist Dr. Günter Bechly to discuss the fossil record. Günter explains why the fossil evidence is more consistent with intelligent design than Darwinian evolution. He explains why mutation and selection are inadequate mechanisms for generating the biological information needed for new body plans. Finally, he explains his journey from atheism to Christianity.

Outline and transcript

Here is a transcript of the show (with timestamps) provided by TurboScribe AI. TurboScribe AI allows you to translate the transcript into many, many different languages. You can also export the transcript into many different formats, with optional timestamps.

Episode 57:

Speaker biographies

Günter Bechly, PhD, is a German paleontologist, senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute in Washington state. He has written about 160 scientific publications, described over 180 new species, and been advisor for 3 BBC nature documentaries.

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

Articles:

• Discontinuities in the Fossil Record | Evolution News
• 3 Challenges to the Causal Adequacy of Darwinism | Evolution News
• Seventy Years of Textbook Wisdom Was Wrong | Evolution News
• A Long Surrender by Günter Bechly – Salvo Magazine

Lectures:

• Fossil Explosions in the History of Life: Paleontologist Günter Bechly
• Gunter Bechly on Why Seventy Years of Textbook Wisdom Was Wrong

Debate:

• Gunter Bechly vs Joshua Swamidass – For and Against Intelligent Design

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I have written many times about the sex-trafficking of mainly white girls by gangs of mainly Muslim men in the UK. My main concern in writing these posts is to emphasize what secular leftists do when their policies don’t work. The secular left parties in Europe opened up their borders to unskilled men from the Middle East. And when it failed, they covered it up and blamed the innocent victims.

Here’s a story from the UK Telegraph (archived), entitled “How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up” and the subtitle is “The child victims of rape were denied justice and protection from the state to preserve the image of a successful multicultural society”.

It says:

Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.

I would be very careful about reading the details of these crimes, they are horrific and disgusting.

But these crimes are the direct consequences of the immigration policies of the secular left Labour Party of the UK. The Labour Party wanted more diversity. But they didn’t achieve that diversity with skilled immigrants who could speak English and respect Western culture. They imported large numbers of unskilled Middle Eastern men, who often could not even speak English. And when their decisions had bad consequences, they covered it up, and blamed the victims for being racists.

In Manchester, a 2019 report concluded gangs were left to roam the streets in part because officers were told to look elsewhere. One detective constable was quoted by a report as saying “the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities”.

Central government took a similar view. In 2020, the Home Office refused to release its research into grooming gangs, claiming that it would not be in the “public interest” to do so.

The secular left talks about “objective morality”, but here is what their “objective morality” looks like:

In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was pregnant when she was killed.

Her death was subsequently used to threaten other children. The Telford Inquiry found particularly brutal threats. When one victim aged 12 told her mother, and the mother called the police, “there was about six or seven Asian men who came to my house. They threatened my mum saying they’ll petrol bomb my house if we don’t drop the charges.”

Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.

Similar concerns applied at the council, where anxieties over appearing racist saw safeguarding officers waving away concerns simply because the perpetrators were Asian. It was felt that some suspects were not investigated because it would have been “politically incorrect”.

This is not to say that the council did nothing. Aware that taxi drivers were offering children rides for sex, in 2006 it suspended licensing enforcement for drivers, allowing high risk drivers to continue practicing. As the Telford Inquiry found, this was “borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism; it was craven”.

[…]The result was stasis, despite officials acknowledging in at least one case that abuse by Asian men had gone on for “years and years”.

It had: at least 1,000 girls were abused in the town between 1980 and 2009. Yet even this conservative estimate was disputed by authority figures, with West Mercia police superintendent Tom Harding insisting in 2018 the figure was “sensationalised”. The independent review later found it entirely plausible.

Notice the response of the UK police. The UK is notorious for two-tier policing, which is the idea that people are treated differently based on their race and religion. They arrest Christian pastors. But Muslims breaking the law are ignored.

The UK Telegraph article goes on quite a bit more, discussing many more cases.

For example, the Rotherham cases:

As the 2014 Jay Inquiry into Rotherham found, children were “doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight”, “threatened with guns”, “witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other”.

In the same town, a senior police officer allegedly said the abuse had been “going on” for 30 years, adding “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.

As Louise Casey’s 2015 report on Rotherham Council found, this attitude was widespread. The Pakistani community accounted for around 3 per cent of the town’s population, and the story emerging was clear: Pakistani men were grooming white girls. As a result, one witness said, the council was “terrified of [the impact on] community cohesion”.

So, when you hear the secular left talking about immigration in America, it’s important to understand what can result from their decision-making. Yesterday, I wrote about how the FBI views pro-lifers as a greater threat than Islamic terrorists. Why do you think that is? It’s because their worldview – secular leftism – doesn’t provide a rational foundation for morality. When the moral law goes against their self-interest, the secular leftist invariably ignores the moral law, and follows self-interest.

By the way, the current Prime Minister of the UK, a secular leftist, played a direct role in enabling the sex-trafficking of underage girls. This UK Telegraph story explains. So this isn’t some fringe minority of secular leftists who put law-abiding people at risk. It’s the secularleftist elites who are doing these things.

America suffered a couple of terrorist attacks recently. And it caused me to wonder whether the Biden administration FBI can be trusted to protect the people who pay their salaries from real threats. The FBI has been focusing on dangerous church-attending Presbyterians and dangerous parents of school children. But are these groups the real threats to liberty and peace?

Here’s an article from Jordan Boyd up at The Federalist entitled “An FBI That Targets Political Opponents Instead Of Terrorists Doesn’t Deserve To Lead New Orleans Investigation” and it says:

The FBI claims protecting the nation from terrorist attacks is its “number one priority.” Yet the agency spent recent years redirecting its attention and resources from top issues like violent criminal acts that lead to mass casualties and child sex abuse cases to arresting meemaws for walking around the U.S. Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021 and praying at abortion facilities.

The FBI’s laundry list of corruption extends far beyond smearing Catholics, concerned parents, and Trump voters as domestic terrorists, manufacturing scandals like the Russia collusion hoax, killing the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell, raiding the home of a former and future president even if it required “deadly force,” and interfering in elections. Yet, the DEI-plagued agency, despite its discrediting track record, is routinely accepted as the lead on investigations into real terrorism.

The FBI wholly disqualified itself from being the lead on the New Orleans investigation when it deemed anyone questioning the regime guilty of wrongthink at the same time it allowed, entrapped, and even groomed true threats. How can an entity that openly hyper-fixated its best efforts on “white supremacy” accurately and adequately evaluate a threat as serious and as widespread as Islamic terrorism? It can’t.

Here’s an article from Brianna Lyman up at The Federalist entitled “Here’s Who Biden’s FBI Decided To Persecute Rather Than Hunt Down Real Terrorists”, and it says:

Early Wednesday morning, a radical Islamic terrorist drove his truck through a crowd of people celebrating the start of the New Year in New Orleans. Fifteen people were murdered and more than 35 injured. But maybe this tragedy could have been avoided if the FBI spent less time targeting parents, Catholics, and countless other dissidents and instead focused its resources on catching actual terrorists.

The list of weaponizations from Jordan’s article was pretty long, but Brianna found a new one:

Unfortunately under the leadership of then FBI Director Christopher Wray, the FBI was too busy doing things like helping to orchestrate a kidnapping plot targeting Democrat Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to catch a terrorist.

And it might be worth expanding on the “concerned parents” one – here’s what the FBI really thinks about the people who ar taxed to pay their salaries, and the children who will be taxed to pay for their benefits when they retire:

[…]The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memo in October of 2021 instructing the FBI to label activist parents at school board meetings with “threat tags.” The guidance came just days after the Biden White House approved a recommendation from the National School Board Association that called for counterterrorism measures to be used against parents who spoke up at school board meetings.

Attorney General Merrick Garland “encouraged the use of an FBI tip line for individuals to flag parents for surveillance,” as my colleague Tristan Justice reported.

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told The Federalist of a mother who was reported to the FBI for simply being “quite upset” at a school board meeting when speaking about the adverse effects of quarantines and school closures.

Maybe expanding a little more on the FBI’s leading bogeyman – people who reject the Democrat party position on abortion:

During the Biden administration, the FBI targeted 55 pro-lifers for “praying, singing, and evangelizing at abortion facilities across the U.S.,” as Boyd reported. Under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, the Biden administration targeted pro-lifers instead of targeting terrorists or the at least 90 instances of “abortion-fueled firebombing, vandalism, and other attacks on lifesaving pregnancy centers, pro-life organizations, and churches …”

In fact, 75-year-old Paulette Harlow was charged and found guilty for violating the FACE Act after she prayed at a Washington, D.C., abortion facility. Harlow was sentenced to two years in jail.

The FBI has long smeared pro-lifers as threats, with former FBI-special-agent-turned-whistleblower Steve Friend revealing in an interview with the Tennessee Informer that the FBI showed agents a video produced by the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center that, according to Friend, “ranked people who oppose abortion, pro-life activists, as a greater threat than Islamists.”

That last paragraph is key: the FBI ranks people who oppose abortion as a GREATER threat than Islamic terrorists. That’s why we are in the situation they are in. The pro-lifers pay their salaries, not the Islamic terrorists, but the FBI is more concerned about the threat posed by their customers. This is an important point.

So, what should we do with the taxpayer-funded FBI?

Maybe we should fire them all, and let them sink or swim in the competitive private sector? Without their pensions and benefits, of course. Then they might learn something about professionalism, and finally be able to demonstrate “fidelity” to their job descriptions (and oaths).  Not the leaders of the FBI of course, they need to be criminally prosecuted for what they’ve done.