Recently, I wrote a post about how you can make a simple argument for intelligent design based on junk DNA.  Step 1: find out what Darwinian naturalists claim about junk DNA. Step 2: find out what design proponents claim about junk DNA. Step 3: compare those predictions with scientific discoveries about junk DNA over the past decades. Today we’ll do it with the fossil record.

I’m going to use an amazing article from Günter Bechly from over at Evolution News. Günter writes an article about fossils every Friday (he calls it “Fossil Friday”).

Here’s last Friday’s article, where he gave a nice overview of why Christians should care about the fossil record.

He writes:

This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.

Then he talks about the predictions of Darwinists and design proponents:

Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.

Engineers don’t check in code gradually, one letter at a time. We check in a bunch of related changes to different files that implement some feature. Some days, I have a lot of meetings. Some days, I spend time doing code reviews or making diagrams or writing documentation. And some days, I get to write code all day. So, if you look at my Github history, you’ll see that some days I have 35 commits, and other days none. That’s consistent with having a “designer”. The complexity increases in “jumps”, with each jump containing changes to several files, and the changes add some new feature. But that’s not available to Dawkins and Darwin, they don’t like engineers, or sudden jumps in complexity.

Günter lists out a bunch of biological “jumps”, where God pulled an all-nighter, with pizza and Mountain Dew, and checked in a whole bunch of new code all at once.

Here are a few from his list of about 15 of them:

• The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
• The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
• The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
• The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
• The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
• The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
• Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
• The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
• The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)

Günter has the details of each of these, but if you have listened to our recent episode about the origin of life with Dr. Fazala Rana, then you already know about the first one. The point is that the fossil record has a whole bunch of “big bangs”, where God checked in a whole bunch of new code in a very short period of time. This is strictly forbidden in Darwinian theory, but the fossil record doesn’t care about theories.

Günter concludes:

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

And I found a nice lecture that he gave on the topic:

The article was tough for me to understand, but I think I got the big picture of what he was saying. I blogged on it so that I can find it again if I get questions about what evidence there is for a designer. I sure hope that we are making more scientists like him for Team Design, because his post was quality work.

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).