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Lectures on science apologetics for a general audience

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I noticed that there is a new Dallas, TX Science and Faith conference scheduled for February 17th, 2024. This one is offering online viewing, if you can’t make it to Dallas. Well, I thought it might be fun to review some lectures from the 2019 Dallas, TX Science and Faith conference, because they posted them online. It’s a nice way to get an easy, popular-level introduction to science apologetics.

Here are a few of the sessions I’m looking forward to:

  • How Earth is Designed for Life
    Bijan Nemati
  • How Earth is Designed for Scientific Discovery
    Jay Richards & Guillermo Gonzalez
  • How Earth is Designed for Technological Advancement
    Brian Miller
  • Intelligent Design as a Scientific Theory
    Stephen Meyer
  • Can Evolution and Intelligent Design Be Combined? Why the Front-End Loaded Concepts of Design Fail
    Stephen Meyer

When it comes to scientific arguments, I have 6 that I usually use:

  • origin of the universe
  • fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe
  • origin of the life
  • sudden origin of body plans in the Cambrian explosion
  • habitability and discoverability
  • molecular machines

Well, they did one of these conferences 5 years ago in 2019, and they posted the videos. And they actually covered a few of these arguments. Here is the YouTube playlist.

The origin of the universe:

The origin of life:

Habitability and Discoverability:

Cambrian explosion:

If you’re wondering, “is this the lecture where James Tour got really, really excited with a church audience?” Yes, this is the one.

The 2024 edition seems to be superior to the 2019 edition, because they added two people I really like: Brian Miller and Guillermo Gonzalez. The one I’ve never heard of is Dr. Bijan Nemati, but he has impressive credentials:

Bijan Nemati is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He received his Ph.D. in high energy physics from the University of Washington, based on his research on heavy quark decays detected at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After post-doctoral work at the Cornell synchrotron, he left particle physics to work on advanced astronomical instruments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I wonder if he will be a good speaker? He certainly has an impressive resume, that’s for sure. I wish we had a 100 scholars for everyone one who is speaking at the conference, but maybe if we can get Christian parents excited about the scholars we have, then we can make more of them.

People sometimes try to talk to me about charismatic pastors, and Big Eva politicians, famous Christian athletes, famous Christian artists, etc. And I just have no regard for people who talk about things that they haven’t investigated themselves. I’m even a little suspicious of analytic philosophers! The guys who I admire and look up to are the STEM guys. The mathematicians and the scientists. The guys who work in the labs. The guys who move the ball forwards by giving us evidence that we can talk about and use with people who don’t even know where to begin looking for evidence.

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Is the “RNA world” hypothesis a good naturalistic explanation for the origin of life?

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A very good book on science apologetics was published recently, 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.

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Are the Galapagos finch beaks evidence of Darwinian evolution?

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Were you taught in biology class that the changing lengths of finch beaks was a good proof of Darwinian evolution? Many students were… but is it true?

Jonathan Wells has an article about it at Evolution News.

It says:

When Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands in 1835, he collected specimens of the local wildlife. These included some finches that he threw into bags, many of them mislabeled. Although the Galápagos finches had little impact on Darwin’s thinking (he doesn’t even mention them in The Origin of Species), biologists who studied them a century later called them “Darwin’s finches” and invented the myth that Darwin had correlated differences in the finches’ beaks with different food sources (he hadn’t). According to the myth, Darwin was inspired by the finches to formulate his theory of evolution, thoughaccording to historian of science Frank Sulloway “nothing could be further from the truth.”

In the 1970s, biologists studied a population of medium ground finches on one of the islands in great detail. When a severe drought left only large, hard-to-crack seeds, 85 percent of the birds perished. The survivors had beaks that were about 5 percent larger than the average beak size in the original population. The biologists estimated that if similar droughts occurred once every ten years, the population could become a new species in only 200 years. In a 1999 booklet defending evolution, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences called the finches “a particularly compelling example” of the origin of species.

But after the drought, birds with smaller beaks flourished again, and the average beak size of the population returned to normal. No net evolution had occurred. No matter; Darwin’s finches became an icon of evolution that is still featured in most biology textbooks.

In the 1980s, a population of large ground finches, with larger beaks than the medium ground finches, migrated to the island. When a drought in 2004-2005 again reduced the food supply, the medium and large ground finch populations both declined. But since even the largest beaks among the medium ground finches were no match for the beaks of the large ground finches, the latter pretty much monopolized the larger seeds and the former had to make do with smaller seeds. This time, the medium ground finches that survived the drought had beaks that were smaller than the average size in the original population. Biologists studying the finches argued that birds with smaller beaks were better able to eat the tiny seeds that were left after the large ground finches ate the big ones, and they concluded that this was again an example of “evolutionary change.”

[…]Wait a minute. Average beak size increased slightly during one drought, only to return to normal after the rains return. Then average beak size decreased slightly during another drought. A region of DNA is correlated with beak size. And somehow that tells us how finches evolved in the first place?

There is an important distinction to make between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Changes within a type is micro-evolution. Evolving a new organ type or body plan is macro-evolution. There is plenty of evidence for micro-evolution, but no evidence for macro-evolution.

What needs to be proven by the Darwinists is that the same process that results in different average beak size in a population of finches after a drought can create the finches in the first place. I think that Darwinists are credulous – they believe what they want to believe because they want to believe it, even if the evidence is incredibly weak. Darwinists must demonstrate that heritable variations can result in the generation of new organ types and body plans. Changes in average beak size is not interesting. What is needed is to show how the beaks, much less the wings, evolved in the first place.

Icons of Evolution

Jonathan has actually written about a number of  misleading things that you may mind in Biology textbooks.

Here are the sections in his book “Icons of Evolution“:

  • The Miller-Urey Experiment
  • Darwin’s Tree of Life
  • Homology in Vertebrate Limbs
  • Haeckel’s Embroys
  • Archaeopteryx–The Missing Link
  • Peppered Moths
  • Darwin’s Finches
  • Four-Winged Fruit Flies
  • Fossil Horses and Directed Evolution
  • From Ape to Human: The Ultimate Icon

Dr. Wells holds a Ph.D in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley.