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.

Earlier this week, I posted about two ways that the Biden-Harris administration targeted Christians. First, by preventing Christians from taking in foster kids. And second, by punishing Christian medical workers who blew the whistle on the transgendering of children. I thought I was done, but Desert Rose sent me a couple more stories, which I will talk about below.

This story is from Christian Post:

The United States Department of Education is being accused of unjustly targeting Christian colleges and universities, allegedly to advance a “woke agenda.”

The American Principles Project, a conservative think-tank, published a report earlier this month that cites the department’s Office of Enforcement actions against Christian schools.

According to the report, although Christian colleges and universities have fewer than 10% of students in the U.S., they make up around 70% of the penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement.

Additionally, over the past 10 years, while the average fine against public and private academic institutions that violated federal law on campus crime was around $228,571, the average fine against a Christian school was $815,000.

The report also took issue with the record fines recently imposed on Grand Canyon University and Liberty University, two prominent Evangelical Christian academic institutions.

Secular universities that had REAL scandals were punished much less:

According to the APP, when the department issued punitive fines on Michigan State University and Penn State University for high-profile abuse scandals, they were several million dollars less.

APP Policy Director Jon Schweppe, author of the report, said in a statement released on Nov. 18 that he believed this was an example of the Biden administration “weaponizing every part of the federal government to target their opponents.”

“As our report details, the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been engaged in a long-running scheme to punish Christian colleges that are ideologically opposed to the left’s agenda. The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately,” stated Schweppe.

As you can see above, I posted a picture of Russell Moore, who rose to the top of a secular leftist advocacy group known as the ERLC. You can see him meeting with Democrat president Barack Obama, in the photo. I show that, because Moore is what I would call an “Evangelical for Biden” and “Evangelical for Harris”. Instead of advocating for Christian positions on fiscal policy, social policy and foreign policy, Moore used his platform to push for Democrat policies. Now that the news is coming out about what Obama did to Christian colleges, it sheds light on what Moore, and people like him, were really up to. There are a lot of fake Christians who advocate for secular left policies.

Here’s another article with four more instances of targeting conservatives, from Daily Wire. (archived)

Here are the four:

• Targeting Political Opponents (parents, pro-lifers, etc.)
• FEMA Skipping Homes Of Trump Supporters
• Censoring Conservative Media (e.g. – Facebook)
• Spying On Financial Transactions

I’ve blogged before about the first 3 (see the links), so let’s look at the last one:

Earlier this year, Rep. Jordan revealed how federal officials were ordering banks to comb through customer data in search of terms like “TRUMP” or “MAGA” used in transactions.

This came after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) asked banks to help federal law enforcement identify transactions of “persons of interest” using specific typologies and Merchant Category Codes after January 6, 2021.

Other transaction keywords identified by the feds included “Cabela’s” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” along with the purchase of “religious texts” as potentially problematic.

“Despite these transactions having no apparent criminal nexus — and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights — FinCEN seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors,” Jordan wrote in January. “This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious doubts about FinCEN’s respect for fundamental civil liberties.”

Why do you think that Evangelicals for Biden-Harris, many of whom are very pietistic pastors and church leaders, would support the secular left using government as a weapon against Bible-believing Christians and Constitutional conservatives? I think it’s because many of these “evangelicals” were raised in a Christian bubble. For them, Christianity is about being liked and feeling good. They embraced it because it made the Christians around them like them. They never had to work through evidence, such as the origin of the universe, fine-tuning, origin of life, Cambrian explosion, habitability, molecular machines, gospel reliability, minimal facts case for the resurrection, etc. like Desert Rose and I do on the Knight and Rose Show. They simply don’t know or care whether Christianity is true, they only care that they signal their virtue to other people.

So, when these pietistic pastors and charismatic church leaders grew older and went into the secular world, they just repeated what had worked for them in the Christian bubble. They said whatever they needed to say to impress the elites in the larger secular culture. There was no foundation for their faith based on truth, and based on experiences of self-sacrificial obedience. They never had the experience of using evidence to win a debate (like Jesus), and then suffering the shame and loss of being obedient to God (like Jesus).

I’m sure that my regular readers or Twitter followers will know about the Supreme Court case that started on Wednesday. The state of Tennessee, the best state in the Union, passed a law banning doctors from giving puberty blockers, hormone treatments and sex-mutilation surgeries to children. And the Biden-Harris Democrats, being secular leftists, decided to contest that law.

So, I am linking to a number of articles in this post.

First, this Daily Signal article explains the case from the secular leftists:

In Wednesday’s oral argument, lawyers for the U.S. government and the American Civil Liberties Union contended that the Tennessee law discriminates based on sex because it bans transgender medical procedures only “when inconsistent with the patient’s birth sex.”

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelagor, representing the Biden-Harris administration, argued that so-called puberty blockers are prescribed to boys and girls with early-onset puberty. It is thus sex discrimination to deny puberty blockers based on sex to children with gender dysphoria, she said.

So, that’s their case.

And this Daily Signal article explains the argument from the Attorney General of Tennessee:

As Tennessee persuasively argues, rather than classifying based on sex, the law classifies on based on purpose. In other words, it distinguishes based on minors seeking drugs for gender transition and minors seeking drugs for any other medical purposes. The Supreme Court has never recognized restrictions on the use of drugs for a particular medical purpose to demand heightened scrutiny review, so rational-basis review applies.

So, the lawyers presented their cases, and they were asked questions by the Supreme Court Justices.

Now here’s an article from Daily Wire, which gives us the three big admissions made by the secular leftist advocates:

Proponents of transgender procedures on children made three stunning admissions on Wednesday as they argued against a Tennessee law protecting children from the irreversible procedures before the Supreme Court.

The admissions — that cross-sex hormones can cause infertility, that people regret the procedures, and that transgender procedures aren’t associated with lower suicide rates — undercut leftist activists’ core arguments that the procedures are necessary and lifesaving.

These revelations were made as justices heard oral arguments in the case brought by the Biden administration and the ACLU against Tennessee for a law that shields children from transgender procedures like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

The big hero of the day was Justice Alito, who knew more about what the evidence says about these issues than anyone else.

This Daily Signal article explains:

Roberts and Kavanaugh also stressed the shaky scientific footing of gender “medicine,” and cited various European reports, saying that “countries who have been at the forefront [are now] pumping the brakes on this,” something that Kavanaugh noted gave the court “a yellow light, if not a red light” in moving forward into “constitutionalizing” a new area of law.

But it was perhaps the line of questioning from Alito that was the most intense of the morning. Alito, too, cited specific studies from Sweden and England, including the bombshell Cass report, which indicated that gender medicine is largely unproven and presents significant health risks to children.

He chided Prelogar, saying that she had “relegated [it] to a footnote.”

And:

When transgender lawyer Chase Strangio took the podium for the ACLU, Alito continued his grilling, asking pointedly “Is transgender status immutable?” When Strangio responded that it would indeed “satisfy an immutability test,” Alito peppered the ACLU lawyer with various hypotheticals: What about people who are “gender-fluid,” or who change gender identities over time, or who are “nonbinary”?

When Strangio floundered, Alito retorted, “So, transgender status is not an immutable characteristic, is it?”

Desert Rose sent me two articles about the arguments of the affirmative action Supreme Court Justices (Sotomayor and Brown-Jackson) who were nominated by Obama and Biden.

Here’s the first article from Daily Wire:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared Tennessee’s law against irreversible medical interventions that seek to change children’s sex to laws against interracial marriage.

Here’s the second article from Daily Wire:

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor drew a wave of backlash when she dismissed concerns about risks associated with gender transition surgeries — particularly among patients who are minors — by arguing that all medical treatments, even aspirin, can have side effects.

Again, you can double-check those articles to get the details, I’m trying to move through a list of notable events, though.

Daily Signal and Independent Women’s Forum both had reporters on the scene, and they were tweeting out useful things all day. Every time I got up to get coffee or go to the bathroom, I was checking my phone to get the latest updates.

This was my favorite tweet of the day:

https://x.com/DailySignal/status/1864341828901740803

That doctor looks Indian – probably East Indian, maybe West Indian. I hope we have a million more conservative Indians like him soon, arguing against secular left lies with evidence.

And here’s a good article about what the Daily Signal reporters saw outside the Supreme Court:

A mother told The Daily Signal her family travelled to the rally from Arizona to support her child “Violet,” a biological male identifying as a girl. Violet told his parents he was trans “when she one and a half,” the mother claimed.

“She knew since birth,” the woman said.

And:

A mom and transgender-identifying adolescent at the rally said they want the Supreme Court to rule the Tennessee law unconstitutional because their home state, Louisiana, bans transgender procedures for minors.

“The wrong puberty can kill us,” the young person who identified as transgender told The Daily Signal. “There are people here who are alive because they got access to gender-affirming care, and restricting the right to that will kill people.”

The mom added that the “most pro-life thing politicians can do” is allow “gender-affirming care” because transgender kids will commit suicide without it.

I know that in the men’s communities that I belong to, whenever we see children of single moms or children of lesbian couples behaving weirdly, we always like to say “The father could not be reached for comment”. That’s not throwing shade at men, that’s noting that the current family laws make it easy for mothers to eject biological fathers from their homes, often using false accusations that never go to trial. And then the children grow up without a male influence, which can sometimes lead to mental health issues.