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News

Knight and Rose Show #60: Doug Groothuis: The Moral Argument

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Welcome to episode 60 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss the moral argument with philosopher Dr. Douglas Groothuis. 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 Podcasts or Spotify.

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 summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Douglas Groothuis to discuss morality. Is morality objective or subjective? Can atheists rationally ground human rights and moral duties? Can atheists appeal to Darwinian evolution to get out of relativism? Is it rational for atheists to do the right thing when it goes against their self-interest? Does the Bible teach Christians not to judge?

Outline and transcript

Here is a transcript of the show (with timestamps) provided by TurboScribe AI. TurboScribe AI allows you to translate the transcript into many, many different languages. You can also export the transcript into many different formats, with optional timestamps.

Episode 60:

Speaker biographies

Dr. Douglas Groothuis is the Distinguished University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at the Cornerstone Theological Seminary.   Dr. Groothuis holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Oregon). He is the author of 20 books, including a popular textbook, Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (IVP Academic, 2022). He also co-authored an introductory textbook on apologetics, The Knowledge of God in the World and in the Word (Zondervan-Academic, 2022) with Andrew Shepardson. Dr. Groothuis has published over 30 academic articles in journals such as Academic Questions and Philosophia Christi, as well as dozens of pieces in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Christian Research Journal.  

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.

Podcast RSS feed:

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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:

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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

Stephen C. Meyer and Marcus Ross lecture on the Cambrian explosion

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Cambrian Explosion
Cambrian Explosion

Access Research Network is a group that produces recordings  of lectures and debates related to intelligent design. I noticed that on their Youtube channel they are releasing some of their older lectures and debates for FREE. So I decided to write a summary of one that I really like on the Cambrian explosion. This lecture features Dr. Stephen C. Meyer and Dr. Marcus Ross.

The lecture is about two hours. There are really nice slides with lots of illustrations to help you understand what the speakers are saying, even if you are not a scientist.

Here is a summary of the lecture from ARN:

The Cambrian explosion is a term often heard in origins debates, but seldom completely understood by the non-specialist. This lecture by Meyer and Ross is one of the best overviews available on the topic and clearly presents in verbal and pictorial summary the latest fossil data (including the recent finds from Chengjiang China). This lecture is based on a paper recently published by Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang” in Darwinism, Design and Public Education(2003, Michigan State University Press). This 80-page article includes 127 references and the book includes two additional appendices with 63 references documenting the current state of knowledge on the Cambrian explosion data.

The term Cambrian explosion describes the geologically sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record during the Cambrian period of geologic time. During this event, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five (of forty total) phyla made their first appearance on earth. Phyla constitute the highest biological categories in the animal kingdom, with each phylum exhibiting a unique architecture, blueprint, or structural body plan. The word explosion is used to communicate that fact that these life forms appear in an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time (no more than 5 million years). If the standard earth’s history is represented as a 100 yard football field, the Cambrian explosion would represent a four inch section of that field.

For a majority of earth’s life forms to appear so abruptly is completely contrary to the predictions of Neo-Darwinian and Punctuated Equilibrium evolutionary theory, including:

  • the gradual emergence of biological complexity and the existence of numerous transitional forms leading to new phylum-level body plans;
  • small-scale morphological diversity preceding the emergence of large-scale morphological disparity; and
  • a steady increase in the morphological distance between organic forms over time and, consequently, an overall steady increase in the number of phyla over time (taking into account factors such as extinction).

After reviewing how the evidence is completely contrary to evolutionary predictions, Meyer and Ross address three common objections: 1) the artifact hypothesis: Is the Cambrian explosion real?; 2) The Vendian Radiation (a late pre-Cambrian multicellular organism); and 3) the deep divergence hypothesis.

Finally Meyer and Ross argue why design is a better scientific explanation for the Cambrian explosion. They argue that this is not an argument from ignorance, but rather the best explanation of the evidence from our knowledge base of the world. We find in the fossil record distinctive features or hallmarks of designed systems, including:

  • a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information
  • a top-down pattern of scale diversity
  • the persistence of structural (or “morphological”) disparities between separate organizational systems; and
  • the discrete or novel organizational body plans

When we encounter objects that manifest any of these several features and we know how they arose, we invariably find that a purposeful agent or intelligent designer played a causal role in their origin.

Recorded April 24, 2004. Approximately 2 hours including audience Q&A.

I learned a lot by watching great lectures from Access Research Network. Their YouTube channel is here. I recommend their origin of life lectures – I have watched the ones with Dean Kenyon and Charles Thaxton probably a dozen times each. Speaking as an engineer, you never get tired of seeing engineering principles applied to questions like the origin of life.

If you’d like to see Dr. Meyer defend his views in a debate with someone who reviewed his book about the Cambrian explosion, you can find that in this previous post.

Further study

The Cambrian explosion lecture above is a great intermediate-level lecture and will prepare you to be able to understand Dr. Meyer’s new book “Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design“. The Michigan State University book that Dr. Meyer mentions is called “Darwin, Design and Public Education“. That book is one of the two good collections on intelligent design published by academic university presses, the other one being from Cambridge University Press, and titled “Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA“. If you think this lecture is above your level of understanding, then be sure and check out the shorter and more up-to-date DVD “Darwin’s Dilemma“.

News

What does scientific evidence tell us about the effectiveness of same-sex parenting?

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I saw that Katy Faust tweeted this article by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist who specializes in dating, marriage and parenting issues. In the article, Regnerus cites the conclusions from several recent research studies. Once we see what he has to say, I’ll pull the data from a Canadian study that he didn’t mention that also shows the effect of same-sex parenting on children.

The article appears in The Public Discourse:

The story of “no differences” between same-sex and opposite-sex households with children hinges on a pair of repetitive themes in the published research: (1) hiding behind small and nonrepresentative samples, and (2) employing analytic strategies that all but guarantee motivated researchers can “explain away” those pesky baseline observable differences between children from same-sex and opposite-sex households.

Baseline differences matter. What happens before control variables matters. Building statistical models to hide differences is called p-hacking, a common but problematic practice. A 2020 study of over 1.2 million children in the (gay-friendly) Netherlands, whose primary media message trumpeted how same-sex parents were better than opposite-sex parents, nevertheless revealed that 55 percent of children living with same-sex parents—the vast majority of which were female couples—experienced the separation of these parents, well above the 19 percent of children of opposite-sex parents who experienced the same. “Controlling” for such instability—in effect implying it doesn’t matter—clears the way to proclaim the benefits of same-sex parents. It’s a common statistical practice, but a deceptive one.

Hence, alternative analyses are always a good idea. For example, a 2020 published reexamination of three nationally representative datasets from the United States and Canada revealed that the presence of children tended to stabilize opposite-sex couples but destabilize same-sex couples. Dissolution rates were 43 percent for same-sex couples, but only 8 percent for opposite-sex couples. Its authors agree, saying that “parental instability is an important factor through which parents’ sexual orientation influences children’s outcomes.”

So, the problem of higher separation between partners in a lesbian relationship is well-known. Lesbian couples have the highest instability rates of any kind of couple, heterosexual or homosexual.

Family Research Council notes:

In the past, same-sex couples who got a slice of the marriage pie immediately wanted their share of the divorce market. In South Africa, couples who were first to wed under a 2006 law also won the race to divorce court only a year later; two Toronto lesbians who wed in 2003 separated after only five days, petitioning successfully in 2004 for a judge to overturn Canadian law so they could divorce. Or take Los Angeles, where 2008’s historic first same-sex couple divorced this summer although they had been together for 18 years! Lest we think these cases are exceptional, of the same-sex couples who did marry in Sweden, males were 35% more likely to divorce than heterosexual couples, while lesbians were up to 200% more likely.

Before same-sex marriage, the concept of marriage included the concepts of permanence and exclusivity. Natural marriage has the production and raising of children at the core. No-fault divorce damaged that core, saying that the happiness of the selfish adults was more important than the children. Then same-sex marriage damaged the core again, saying that producing children isn’t even central to the concept of marriage. As the selfish adults pass more laws against natural marriage, the children suffer more from the decline of permanence and exclusivity.

I found another study related to same-sex parenting, this one out of Canada.

Here is the abstract of the study:

Almost all studies of same-sex parenting have concluded there is “no difference” in a range of outcome measures for children who live in a household with same-sex parents compared to children living with married opposite-sex parents. Recently, some work based on the US census has suggested otherwise, but those studies have considerable drawbacks. Here, a 20% sample of the 2006 Canada census is used to identify self-reported children living with same-sex parents, and to examine the association of household type with children’s high school graduation rates. This large random sample allows for control of parental marital status, distinguishes between gay and lesbian families, and is large enough to evaluate differences in gender between parents and children. Children living with gay and lesbian families in 2006 were about 65 % as likely to graduate compared to children living in opposite sex marriage families. Daughters of same-sex parents do considerably worse than sons.

The author of the study is a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His PhD in economics is from the University of Washington. A previous study had shown that gay relationships typically have far more instability (they last for more shorter times). That’s not good for children either. Another study featured in the Atlantic talked about how gay relationships have much higher rates of domestic violence. That’s not good for children either. So we have three reasons to think that normalizing gay relationships as “marriage” would not be good for children.