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.

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.

A lot of Christians today seem to think that it’s a good idea to deal with the DEI crowd with “compassion”. Instead of laying out standards of merit, and asking everyone to measure up, they want to give special carve out benefits to certain victim groups. But are people who take out student loans for non-STEM degrees really victims? Are people who claim victimhood good people?

Take a look at this story from the New York Post:

From approximately January 2017 to September 2021, [Barbara Furlow-Smiles] “led diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at Facebook and was responsible for developing and executing DEI initiatives, operations, and engagement programs,” prosecutors said.

[…]Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, set up fake business deals, invoices and events — including a Juneteenth celebration — to line her own pockets, the Justice Department said.

[…]To cover her tracks, the disgraced DEI officer submitted fake expense reports claiming her associates had performed work for Facebook, such as providing swag or marketing services.

[…]Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty in December to the wire fraud scheme, which saw her take more than $4.9 million from Facebook before bilking a six-figure amount from Nike “to fund a luxury lifestyle in California, Georgia, and Oregon,” the DOJ said.

This part was interesting, because the virtue of accountability is the exact opposite of the victimhood of the woke secular leftists:

[Facebook] claimed her “crimes also resulted in anguish amongst those employees that worked closely with her,” while Nike said her “complete lack of accountability or remorse was incredibly disappointing,” according to sentencing memos obtained by CNBC.

[…]When she was fired from Facebook, Furlow-Smiles “carelessly continued her fraudulent schemes at Nike, thinking she was untouchable,” said Keri Farley, special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta.

I talk to a lot of men who are struggling in the current dating environment. And their number one complaint about the secular left young women they encounter is a complete lack of accountability. Young women don’t want to be judged, and they don’t want to face consequences for their poor choices. They want to make decisions in the moment, based on feelings, and then play the victim to get out of the consequences further down the road.

Facebook and Nike are known to be far-left companies. So it’s not surprising that they declined to respond to requests for comments. But I hope that other companies begin to realize the risks and costs of hiring people on the woke secular left, who have absolutely zero foundation for morality. And you should be careful about trusting them, too.

The video below was uploaded about 2 weeks ago, but it already has well over 1 million views. In this video, you will get coverage of 5 arguments for a Creator / Designer: origin of the universe, origin of life, cosmic fine-tuning, sudden origin of new body plans in the fossil record, stellar and planetary habitability and they also mentioned consciousness.

Here is the video:

And the description:

In a lively yet in-depth discussion, Piers Morgan drills down to the core of human existence with Stephen C. Meyer, the prominent ‘intelligent design’ advocate.

In this Piers Morgan Uncensored special, Meyers firmly rejects the idea that a scientific worldview leads to atheism, arguing instead that ‘the universe requires a creator or cause’. When Richard Dawkin’s name is mentioned, Meyer claims that he actually really loves the atheist firebrand and admires his intensity. Lastly, Morgan and Meyers agree that the question of God’s existence is tied to more than just cold hard facts, but also human nature itself.

00.00 – Who is Dr Meyer?
02.23 – Is Darwin Wrong?
06.03 – Scientific evidence for God
15.58 – The Multiverse
19.29 – What is the meaning of life?
22.52 – Atheists’ anger
25.48 – Why is there suffering?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer directs Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is my favorite Christian scholar. Why? Because he keeps writing books about what the latest scientific evidence tells us about reality. I understand that many theists and atheists want to keep evidence at a distance, and just decide for themselves what they will accept as true, based on their feelings and communities. But for those who like to have true beliefs, then Stephen Meyer is for you. He is basically the Thomas Sowell of the origins debate.

By the way, if you watch this video and you enjoy it, then please share. A lot of people need to start thinking about these issues based on what science has revealed. People who have not thought about these issues need to start grounding our beliefs on reality. And we have to help them.