In a free market, private sector companies should serve customers. For banks, that means not losing the money that customers have deposited with the bank. And especially not going bankrupt so that you need a bailout from taxpayers. That bailout also hits taxpayers who have not yet even been born, but who have to pay the national debt. But some companies would rather virtue signal.

Silicon Valley Bank had a choice to make between serving depositors and taxpayers, and virtue signaling to the secular left elites.

New York Post reports:

Fears of a broad financial contagion spread on Friday after tech lender Silicon Valley Bank set off alarm bells over liquidity concerns — sparking share losses across the banking sector worth some $52 billion on Thursday.

On Friday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said regulators have shut the bank down to protect insured deposits.

[…]SVB shares — which plunged 60% yesterday after the company’s CEO begged investors to “stay calm” and not “panic” over liquidity concerns — remained halted as of midday Friday after plunging 47% in premarket trading early Friday.

How could this happen? New York Post has some interesting news about who was running the company:

A head of risk management at Silicon Valley Bank spent considerable time spearheading multiple “woke” LGBTQ+ programs, including a “safe space” for coming out stories, as the firm catapulted toward collapse.

Jay Ersapah, the boss of Financial Risk Management at SVB’s UK branch, launched initiatives such as the company’s first month-long Pride campaign and a new blog emphasizing mental health awareness for LGBTQ+ youth.

“The phrase ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ resonates with me,’” Ersapah was quoted as saying on the company website.

“As a queer person of color and a first-generation immigrant from a working-class background, there were not many role models for me to ‘see’ growing up.”

Her efforts as the company’s European LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group co-chair earned her a spot on SVB’s “outstanding LGBT+ Role Model Lists 2022,” a list shared in a company post just four months before the bank was shut down by federal authorities over liquidity fears.

In addition to instituting SVB’s first “safe space catch-up” — which encouraged employees to share their coming out stories — and serving on LGBTQ+ panels around the world, Ersapah also spent time over the last year serving as a director for Diversity Role Models and volunteering as a mentor for Migrant Leaders.

“I feel privileged to co-chair the LGBTQ+ ERG and help spread awareness of lived queer experiences, partner with charitable organizations, and above all, create a sense of community for our LGBTQ+ employees and allies.”

I thought this was funny:

On Saturday, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus insinuated that “woke” policies like the ones launched by Ersapah could have led to the SVB’s dramatic failure.

It’s not just one person at the top, though. The whole company was basically one enormous gay / feminist activism organization, and being profitable for customers was apparently the least of their concerns.

We are intentionally and strategically working for a world where every client and employee has the opportunity to bring their bold ideas to life. We also know that diverse perspectives and inclusive environments ignite new ideas to power innovation. That is why we’re building a culture of belonging with a global workforce that celebrates greater dimensions of diversity and reflects the markets we strive to serve.

And:

SVB, the financial partner of the innovation economy, today announced that it has been named a member of the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index (GEI) for a fifth year running. The Bloomberg GEI is a modified market capitalization-weighted index developed to gauge the performance of public companies dedicated to transparency in gender-data reporting. This reference index measures gender equality across five pillars: female leadership & talent pipeline, equal pay & gender pay parity, inclusive culture, anti-sexual harassment policies, and external brand.

And:

SVB, the financial partner of the innovation economy and parent of Silicon Valley Bank, has joined CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™, a growing coalition pledging to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace. SVB President and CEO Greg Becker joins more than 2,000 CEOs in committing to promote open internal dialogue on DEI strategies and share examples of action with the CEO Action community.

Be careful where you put your money. It’s fun to virtue signal about how woke you are, but eventually, you’re going to need money in order to retire.

Whenever I bring debate DVDs to work and leave them on my desk, men who like sports more than apologetics ask me: “Was there a winner?” People don’t want to talk about opinions, they only want to talk about things that we know. A while back, there was a formal debate featuring William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens. And yes, there was a winner. One of the speakers admitted defeat.

Here is a video clip of an exchange they had in their debate at the massive Biola University showdown:

Isn’t that interesting?

Do you know how to have a conversation with an atheist? You just have to talk to them about the things we really know to be true. For example, that the universe had a beginning, just like scientists said that it did. That the universe is fine-tuned for allowing complex, embodied life. That our galaxy, star and planet are fine-tuned to provide us with a habitable place to live. The the origin of life required an intelligent designer to do the coding. These are not “faith” topics that we “share”. These are facts. And when we tell an atheist these facts, we are not sharing. We are informing about what is true. In some cases, we are correcting false beliefs.

Here’s a quote from famous atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel of New York University:

“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

(”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)

It really makes me think that Christian churches should be more interested in showing these debates, and in learning how to debate like William Lane Craig. Sadly, most churches do not focus on the things that work. Most churches to not want to win. They want to lose. That’s why we put charismatic leftists in charge, who don’t know anything – like Russell Moore and Beth Moore. Because we don’t want to have answers. We just want to lose. Lost the culture. Lose congregants. Lose our children to the secular left.

America today is in religious decline. But it’s not because we don’t have the arguments and the evidence. It’s because most churches have decided to focus on “compassion” and “kindness” and “hearing the voice of God” about their own desires and needs.

If you haven’t seen this debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens, then you should watch it. Yes there is a winner. Yes something was decided. It was not just two people sharing their opinions. There was a final score.

If you look closely at this blog, you’ll see that I am currently reading  a book called “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos“. Well, there’s an ongoing series of posts about the book at Evolution News, and one of them caught my eye. They are talking about the origin of life, and what’s needed to create life from non-life.

Here is the post from Evolution News.

The article starts by explaining the what is required to show how non-living components could be organized into a living system:

• plausible biochemical paths from individual bio-building blocks like amino acids or nucleic acids to functional polymers such as proteins and DNA.
• ways to speed up chemical reactions that are naturally slow.
• the ordering of amino acids in proteins and nucleotide bases in RNA and DNA that allows them to function properly.

The leading naturalistic explanation to solve these problems is called the “RNA world” hypothesis:

The most popular proposal for the first self-replicating molecule is RNA — where life was first based upon RNA carrying both genetic information (akin to modern DNA) and performing catalytic functions (akin to modern enyzmes), in what is termed the RNA world.

The article lists several problems with the RNA world hypothesis. Dr. Walter Bradley lists two of those problems.

First, the assembly of RNA requires intelligent design:

First, RNA has not been shown to assemble in a laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Origin-of-life theorist Steven Benner explained that a major obstacle to the natural production of RNA is that “RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair” due to water’s “rapid and irreversible” corrosive effects upon RNA.³ In this “water paradox,” Benner explains that “life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g., RNA) necessary for life.”⁴

To overcome such difficulties, Benner and other chemists carefully designed experimental conditions that are favorable to the production of RNA. But Robert Shapiro explains that these experiments do not simulate natural conditions: “The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth.”⁵ Reviewing attempts to construct RNA in the lab, James Tour likewise found that “[t]he conditions they used were cleverly selected,” but in the natural world, “the controlled conditions required to generate” RNA are “painfully improbable.”⁶ Origin-of-life theorists Michael Robertson and Gerald Joyce even called the natural origin of RNA a “Prebiotic Chemist’s Nightmare” because of “the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth.”⁷ In the end, these experiments demonstrate one thing: RNA can only form by intelligent design.

The second problem is that the RNA world hypothesis is that it requires the existence of a self-replicating RNA molecule in order to get started. But this self-replicator contains a lot of biological information that is beyond the reach of chance to produce:

The most fundamental problem with the RNA world hypothesis is its inability to explain the origin of information in the first self-replicating RNA molecule — which experts suggest would have had to be at least 100 nucleotides long, if not between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.¹⁰ How did the nucleotide bases in RNA become properly ordered to produce life? There are no known chemical or physical laws that can do this. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, origin-of-life theorists have no explanation other than blind chance. As noted, ID theorists call this obstacle the information sequence problem, but multiple mainstream theorists have also observed the great unlikelihood of naturally producing a precise RNA sequence required for replication.

Whenever I sit down to write some code or to write a blog post, I can start with one letter, then add another, then add another, until I have a functioning program, or a legible blog post. It might be possible for random chance to make a meaningful word out of 3 letters, like “the” or “hat”. But it’s not possible to make a self-replicating RNA molecule that way. The required sequence is just too long, and every letter has to be just right in order for it to function as a self-replicating system. The simplest self-replicating molecule is extremely complicated.

Anyway, check out the article, and if you want to read all about Walter Bradley (my role model), there is a new book out about him called “For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley” which I finished, and it was great.