Category Archives: News

News

Knight and Rose Show – Episode 6: Knighted by the King: Authentic Masculinity

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Welcome to episode 6 of the Knight and Rose podcast! This is the first episode where my audio is improved, so you should not notice an echo. In this episode, we discuss what it means to be masculine according to a Christian worldview. 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 iTunes / Apple Podcasts.

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 6:

Episode 6 Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss male nature. We discuss Bible verses that describe masculine virtues and roles. We discuss how masculinity is portrayed in classical movies, classical literature, and military history. We talk about male strengths, and how men leverage their strengths to lead and equip others. We talk about which women are the most attractive to men who are on mission. We talk about whether men have to get married and have children in order to be masculine.

Speaker biographies

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.

References

Cultural Marxism, a lecture from Founders Ministries featuring Pastor Voddie Baucham

The First of the Few (movie, aka “Spitfire”)

High Noon (movie)

A lesson about men for marriage-minded women from the movie “High Noon” by Wintery Knight

Cyrano de Bergerac (movie, based on a play by Edmond Rostand)

A Man for All Seasons (movie, based on a play by Robert Bolt)

Emma (movie, based on a book by Jane Austen. Note: the 2009 version is my favorite)

Badly Done, Emma (a scene from the 2009 movie version of Emma)

Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous World War II Submarine  by Richard “Dick” O’Kane

Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang by Richard “Dick” O’Kane

Podcast RSS feed:

https://feed.podbean.com/knightandrose/feed.xml

You can use this to subscribe to the podcast from your phone or tablet. I use the open-source AntennaPod app on my Android phone.

Podcast channel pages:

Video channel pages:

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

News

Evidence for design in living systems is changing the way scientists work

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If you look over in the right column of the blog, you’ll see that I am reading “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith”. It’s a collection of short essays intended for laymen to explain all aspects of the design debate. I’m actually listening to the audio book version, and just looking in the book for diagrams. I wanted to talk about a few resources that are similar to what I’m seeing in the book.

First, there’s this excellent post from Evolution News, where Dr. Casey Luskin (who recently appeared on the Apologetics 315 podcast) lists out all the areas where intelligent design is fruitful for studying living systems.

Here is his list:

  • Protein science
  • Physics and cosmology
  • Information theory
  • Pharmacology
  • Evolutionary computation
  • Anatomy and physiology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Molecular machines
  • Cell biology
  • Systematics
  • Paleontology
  • Genetics

These are all good, but I’m going to focus on some of them that are interesting to me coming from a software engineering background.

Information theory: ID leads scientists to understand intelligence as a cause of biological complexity, capable of being scientifically studied, and to understand the types of information it generates.

I looked into this one when naturalists were trying to argue that specified complexity was just the same as Shannon information. Shannon information is just concerned with the complexity, or information carrying capacity, of strings. But specified complexity is a step further, where certain strings have meaning or purpose, because they conform to a pattern. A random set of characters the same length as this blog post is complex (like Shannon information), but it’s not specified. What makes my letter sequences specified is that it conforms to the English language, and conveys meaning.

Here’s another:

Evolutionary computation: ID produces theoretical research into the information-generative powers of Darwinian searches, leading to the discovery that the search abilities of Darwinian processes are limited, which has practical implications for the viability of using genetic algorithms to solve problems.

When I was in grad school, there were courses on using “genetic algorithms” to solve problems. But thanks to the work of ID proponents like William Dembski, we now know that these algorithms only work if constraints are put on the search algorithm up front. As such, they don’t support undirected evolution at all.

Bioinformatics: ID has helped scientists develop proper measures of biological information, leading to concepts like complex and specified information or functional sequence complexity. This allows us to better quantify complexity and understand what features are, or are not, within the reach of Darwinian evolution.

Before ID came along, people weren’t really interested in calculating the probability of sequencing amino acids into a protein by chance. They just wanted to assume that it happened, because what else could have happened? Sometimes, you make better decisions when you listen to both sides of a debate. Now we have two sides to the debate on origins, and it helps both sides to defend their views.

Molecular machines: ID encourages scientists to reverse-engineer molecular machines — like the bacterial flagellum — to understand their function like machines, and to understand how the machine-like properties of life allow biological systems to function.

I’ve blogged before about how human inventors are regularly reverse-engineering natural designs in order to come up with designs for man-made machines.

Genetics: ID has inspired scientists to investigate the computer-like properties of DNA and the genome in the hopes of better understanding genetics and the origin of biological systems.15 ID has also inspired scientists to seek function for noncoding junk-DNA, allowing us to understand development and cellular biology.

By now, everybody has heard about the predictions by Darwinists about the “uselessness” of junk DNA. That all went out the window with the data from the ENCODE project, that found that the so-called junk DNA was almost all useful. Another Darwinian prediction falsified by the progress of science.

A 40-minute lecture

I saw a nice lecture from the recent Science & Faith conference that was held in Dallas this year. The speaker was Dr. Brian Miller:

Dr. Miller is Research Coordinator at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University.

More about him and the articles he has written can be found here: https://www.discovery.org/p/miller/

The video talks about all the areas where evidence for design is changing the way that scientists look at living systems.

The talk was very cutting edge, with a lot of new stuff I had not seen before. It’s worth the time to watch it. There were also a couple of prior lectures from the conference. One from Eric Hedin, where he talked about being “canceled” by Darwinists for teaching both sides of origins issues at Ball State University. Another from Stephen C. Meyer talks about the Judeo-Christian origins of modern science. I’ve only watched the Miller lecture so far, but that’s what Saturdays are for! Watching lectures and debates.

News

Peer-reviewed medical journal blasts Facebook “fact checkers” for censorship

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I’ve just about had it with Facebook’s “fact checkers”. In most cases, these are just card carrying Democrats with worthless degrees in grievance studies. They have limited real world experience. Their only credentials are promoting the Democrat party by censoring news and opinions that make the Democrats look bad. Even peer-reviewed medical journals are censored!

Here’s the story from The Federalist:

The editors of a peer-reviewed medical journal penned a scathing letter demanding that Facebook reevaluate its bogus third-party “fact-checking” processes after the journal was censored for publishing information about COVID-19 vaccine trials.

BMJ editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi addressed the letter to Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with the intention of raising “serious concerns” about Facebook’s third-party “fact-checking” system.

According to the editors, one of the well-researched articles BMJ published on “a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia,” one of the companies facilitating trials for Pfizer’s version of the COVID-19 vaccine, was suppressed by Facebook and censored with labels that directed readers to a “fact check” by the obscure website Lead Stories, which routinely issues fake fact-checks.

“Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share ‘false information’ might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were ‘partly false,’” Godlee and Abbasi wrote.

The editors said that this “fact check,” which Facebook used to justify threats against users who shared the BMJ article, however, was “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”

[…]Godlee and Abbasi concluded their letter by demanding that Facebook, if it continues its censorship campaign against so-called “misinformation,” choose wiser and more competent organizations for fact-checking such as Cochrane, which reviews medical evidence on a regular basis.

This isn’t the only time that Facebook “fact checkers” have twisted the truth to protect the Democrat party. The most recent example was with the Rittenhouse trial.

Consider this article the New York Post:

Consider how Facebook, in particular, treated the circumstances surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen acquitted last week of all charges in the self-defense killings of two men and the shooting of another during last summer’s riots in Kenosha, Wis. Immediately after the incident occurred, and despite video evidence which made a self-defense charge instantly plausible, Facebook declared it a “mass murder” and under that justification blocked searches for Rittenhouse’s name and any content in “praise or support” for him on the site — including links to contribute to his legal defense and videos purporting to show Rittenhouse providing aid to protesters.

In other words, Facebook determined that the only speech allowed on its platform was to declare Rittenhouse’s guilt, not his innocence. Perhaps prompted by Facebook’s actions or merely in spite of them, PayPal cut off affiliation with fundraising efforts for Rittenhouse, and so did GoFundMe.

What were the facts in the Rittenhouse case? The jury heard all the facts, and they acquitted Rittenhouse. No “mass murder” there, just self-defense.

Previously, I wrote articles about Facebook’s bias against the Republican party.