News

Teen heroes rescue abducted child in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

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Here’s a great hero story from Lancaster Online.

Excerpt:

[Temar] Boggs, a McCaskey freshman who lives in Gable Park Woods, had been hanging out with a friend at nearby Lancaster Arms apartments and helping move a couch when a man came by asking if they’d seen a missing girl.

They hadn’t, Boggs said, so they went to watch TV.

A short time later, his friend went outside and saw lots of police officers and people from the neighborhood looking for the girl.

Police said that the girl had been taken that afternoon from the 100 block of Jennings Drive.

Boggs and about six friends joined the search.

[…][Boggs] and another friend, Chris Garcia, rode on area streets — Michelle Drive, St. Phillips Drive, Gable Park Road — looking for her.

That’s when a maroon car caught his eye. (He had gotten a bit ahead of Garcia.)

The car was on Gable Park and turned around when it got near the top of a hill toward Millersville Pike, where Boggs said several police officers were gathered with the kind of cart used to carry an injured football player off the field.

The driver, an older white man, then began quickly turning onto and out of side streets connecting to Gable Park, Boggs said.

The neighborhood is something of a maze; many of its streets are cul-de-sacs.

Boggs got close enough to the car to see a little girl inside. Garcia was nearby.

The driver looked at Boggs and Garcia, then stopped the car at Gable Park and Betz Farm Road and pushed the girl out of the car. The driver then drove off, Boggs said.

Boggs said he didn’t see where the car went.

“She runs to my arms and said, ‘I need to see my mommy,’ ” Boggs said.

Boggs scooped the girl onto his shoulders and began riding the bike toward home, but then decided that wasn’t safe, so he carried her and walked back while Garcia pedaled along, guiding the bike Boggs had been using.

Back at Lancaster Arms, when Boggs and Garcia arrived with the girl, someone summoned a firefighter or law enforcement officer.

Boggs said the girl was reluctant to leave him and go to the official.

“She didn’t want to leave me because she thought they were going to do something to her. I said, ‘No, it’s OK,’ ” he said.

[…]Boggs doesn’t see himself as a hero.

“I’m just a normal person who did a thing that anybody else would do,” he said.

That’s a good positive story of young men being heroic.

News

Three labor union leaders write letter to Democrats attacking Obamacare

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The roll out of President Obama’s health care reform package was always going to be tricky, with vehement opposition from his political opponents and pushback from employers large and small. But after announcing last week that penalties for companies failing to comply with the law will be delayed by a year, the Affordable Care Act has a new, high profile set of dissenters: Unions.

The leaders of three major U.S. unions, including the highly influential Teamsters, have sent a scathing open letter to Democratic leaders in Congress, warning that unless changes are made, President Obama’s health care reform plan will “destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

If that’s not bad enough, the Affordable Care Act, if not modified, will “destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans,” the letter says.

Here’s one part from the letter than I think is worth posting:

When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat. Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.

[..]First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.

Of course, when the unions were busy lobbying for the passage of Obamacare, conservative voices were talking about all of these defects in the law, and more besides. But the unions weren’t listening. Labor unions just don’t understand economics, and that’s why people need to be careful about taking their advice on economic issues.

 

 

Podcasts

Dennis Prager interviews Stephen C. Meyer about intelligent design

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This episode of the Dennis Prager show is actually from the day that “Darwin’s Doubt” came out. Darwin’s Doubt is the new book on the sudden origin of animal body plans in the fossil record. Dennis had previously interviewed Dr. Meyer about his first book “Signature in the Cell“, which was about the origin of life. I listen to the Dennis Prager show every day, if work permits. It’s the only radio show I listen to regularly.

The MP3 file is here. (32 minutes)

Summary:

  • What did Darwin have a doubt about? What is the Cambrian explosion?
  • The mystery of the missing precursor fossil record for the Cambrian animals
  • The mystery of the origin of all of the new body plans that appeared in the Cambrian explosion
  • The problem of building a new animal is basically the problem of adding new code
  • Mutations generally don’t improve the quality of code but intelligent agents do improve it
  • Do paleontologists acknowledge these problems? What is their solution to these problems?
  • A new book by non-ID paleontologists Douglas and Valentine admits the two problems
  • They argue that no known mechanism exists to explain the origin of these animal forms
  • What has the reaction to Darwin’s Doubt been from paleontologists?
  • Stephen J. Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory: the fossil record shows stasis and jumps
  • But Gould’s theory did not propose a mechanism adequate to explain the stasis and jumps
  • Caller Bob: what good is partial function? Why would an organism keep half-an-eye around?
  • Meyer: exquisite organs in the Cambrian animals also come into being suddenly
  • Is the book understandable by lay people? Could Dennis Prager understand it?
  • Critiques of naturalistic attempts to explain the sudden origin of the Cambrian animal forms
  • The Cambrian explosion is an explosion of information: where did it come from?
  • Illustrating probabilities with combination locks: the product rule
  • The search for the combination to the lock is bounded by the time available
  • There is not unlimited time to generate this new biological information
  • Prager: how can science conclude that a non-material explanation is the best explanation?
  • Meyer: Darwin used the method of “inference to the best explanation” in his theory
  • the book uses the same method of investigation that Darwin used
  • the best explanation for the explosion of new information is an intelligent agent
  • we are already familiar with intelligent causes creating information – we do it all the time
  • information can be speech, writing, coding, etc., which human intelligence does all the time
  • Prager: is the method of inferring an intelligent cause for this Cambrian data “creationism”?
  • Meyer: ID is based on scientific evidence
  • Meyer: Creationism is an interpretation or deduction from religious authority
  • Meyer: ID is agnostic on the age of the Earth, Creationism requires a young Earth
  • Caller Marty: life could have been brought here on asteroids
  • Meyer: we don’t have evidence to assess whether an alien intelligence was responsible
  • Meyer: the theistic explanation is better because of the cosmology and fine-tuning arguments

It’s very important for Christians to broaden out philosophical and historical arguments with scientific evidence. Most of the people reading this post are familiar with the Big Bang cosmology and the fine-tuning arguments. But the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion are two more areas that we all need to be aware of as much as we can. It probably wouldn’t hurt to be familiar with the galactic and stellar habitability arguments made by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, too. That’s a good half-dozen scientific arguments, which is 6 more than any atheist you meet is likely to have. Why go about unarmed when the scientific data is right there waiting for you? Fill your hands.

Note: if you think that these books might be too difficult for you, then by all means pick up these three intelligent design DVDs for about $18. That will cover the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion and both habitability arguments. You can get a good look at the Big Bang and fine-tuning arguments in this lecture by Dr. William Lane Craig delivered at the University of Colorado (Boulder). If you want to see those two arguments presented in a debate, then get Dr. Craig’s debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens on DVD for $11. Everybody reading this post should own those DVDs so you can show them to other people and change minds.

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