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Creature design videos from the 2025 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith

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I have been trying so hard to get in a weights session and a cardio session on BOTH days of the weekend. On Saturdays, I get to watch sports and funny men’s videos. On Sundays, I’m watching sermons or videos on apologetics. This past Sunday, I watched two videos on animal design from the 2025 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, and Tuesday night I watched two more.

First, I should say that Denton Bible Church is the best church in the United States for Christian apologetics. They have been doing apologetics events featuring people like William Lane Craig as far back as I can remember. The do apologetics conferences. And they do science and faith conferences. If you live near Denton, you should by all means attend this church. And if you like sermons, they have sermons, too. I’d be more inclined to trust these guys for sermons, because of their long, long, long record of apologetics.

So, on the past Sunday, I first watched this lecture with Eric Hedin on the design of the honeybee:

This lecture is only 35 minutes, but it talks about a lot of the strange behaviors of the honeybee, including their weird message-conveying dancing.

I found an article about it at Science and Culture (formerly Evolution News):

The famous “waggle dance” that a scout bee performs back at the hive after discovering a food source communicates to other bees (by touching, since the inside of the hive is dark) both the distance and the direction of the food in relation to the current position of the sun. Bee keepers have found that if they reorient the honeycomb on which the bee is dancing, the undaunted bee will adapt its dance so that it still correctly communicates the proper direction to the food source. Sometimes the dancing scout bee will continue its dance for more than an hour, and over this time, the position of the sun has changed. In response, the bee will compensate for the sun’s movement across the sky by gradually adjusting the angle of its dance.

So, the next one I watched was by Paul Nelson, and he was talking about the Monarch butterfly:

This one is only 30 minutes. Once, when I was at an intelligent design conference in the early 2000s, Paul Nelson came up to ask a question at one of the microphones. My foot was pushing out into the aisle, and he pinched it and said hello, and he knew my real name, because it was on my name tag. I have remembered it all these years. He is one of my favorite intelligent design people.

Finally, here is the one with Ray Bohlin, talking about the design of woodpeckers:

This one is only 15 minutes long!

I have a couple of red-headed woodpeckers in my backyard, and they had been pecking on my guttering very early in the morning. I got so mad at them, that I started bringing the bird feeders in at night, and putting them out in the late morning. That worked. I’m having a lot of fun watching these amazing little creatures, the older I get. I am putting out water, seeds, nuts, fruits, and nectar (if the hummingbirds are around) every morning, and taking it all back in at night. Next I have to build nesting boxes.

The last animal design video from this conference that has to do with design in nature is the one on plants, which is done by Emily and Daniel Reeves. It’s called “Plants are Creatures, Too!”

Daniel is the biologist, and Emily is the biochemist.

I remember in the old days, I would have order videos like this on VHS tapes through a web site, or by mailing in an order form and a check! And then, because I watched them over and over, I would have to rewind them over and over. Things are so much easier now. I would really like it if more young people knew how to make a case for design in nature by watching these videos over and over. What I would like is for Christians to be thinking about their faith. Not just having feelings, not just having community, but really thinking “could this really be true?” and “how would I explain what I believe to someone who doesn’t accept the Bible as inspired by God?”

Do you all have something to watch during your workouts? I stopped going to pay gyms, and made a home gym in my living room (I have no furniture), and that allows me to watch wholesome constructive videos while I work out and cook meals. It encourages me to work out and cook my own meals, because I can learn something and keep my skills up.

Polemics

Most Americans think cohabitation leads to a stable marriage, but what does the data say?

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Men who cohabitate are not certain that the relationship is permanent
Men who cohabitate are not certain that the relationship is permanent

If there’s one thing that ought to lead people to Christianity, it’s the proven ability of the Christian moral rules to guide believers away from the sins that destroy them. A lot of modern “Christians” have reduced Christianity to being about their feelings and their community, while allowing the culture to determine their goals and moral boundaries. But that won’t protect them from danger.

Cohabitation describes the situation of a couple moving into the same home and being sexually active, but without any legally-recognized commitment. It’s extremely popular among young people today, and even Christians.

Consider this article from The Federalist about cohabitation:

A new Pew Research Center study shows Americans both cohabitate (“live with an unmarried partner”) and find cohabitation acceptable more than before.

[…]More young adults have cohabited than have married. Pew’s analysis in the summer of 2019 of the National Survey of Family Growth found that, for the first time ever, the percentage of American adults aged 18-44 who have ever cohabited with a partner (59 percent) exceeded the percentage of those who have ever married (50 percent).

I thought this was very interesting, especially for the Christian parents and pastors who imagine that their lovely pious daughters all have a Christian worldview just because they sing in the church choir:

Just 14 percent hold a view consistent with a biblical sexual ethic, that cohabitation with an unmarried romantic partner outside of marriage is “never acceptable.”

Just to be clear, in my life I’ve met about 6 non-Christian men who cohabitated with women, and every single one of them cohabitated with a Christian-raised woman. That should tell you what young women are being told about relationships in their homes and churches about sex and marriage. “Do whatever you want”.

So what purpose does cohabitation serve?

A majority of Americans (69 percent) say that “it is acceptable for an unmarried couple to live together even if they don’t plan to get married.” They may assume that they can decrease their chances of a bad marriage and increase their chances of a good one by giving the relationship a cohabitation “test run.”

[…]A plurality of Americans believe cohabitating before marriage yields more successful unions. Nearly half of Americans (48 percent) believe that couples who live together before marriage “have a better chance of having a successful marriage.” This view is even more prevalent among young adults aged 18-29 (63 percent).

Another 38 percent of all Americans say cohabitation “doesn’t make much difference” on marital success. Only 13 percent of Americans believe cohabiting couples have “a worse chance” of having a successful marriage.

[…]Most Americans believe cohabitating couples raise children just as well as married couples. Pew also surveyed people’s opinions about cohabiting couples raising children, and 59 percent of Americans declared that cohabiting couples “can raise children just as well as married couples.” Again, the younger respondents were most likely to have a favorable view of cohabitation: among adults aged 18 to 49, 67 percent agreed cohabiting couples do just as well, while 32 percent said: “Married couples do a better job raising children.”

Yes, cohabitation is seen as a test run, and it’s supposed to make stable marriage more likely and not be harmful to children at all.

But why think that a test run should be part of getting married? After all, when I buy a parrot from the pet store, I don’t expect to later return that parrot. Why not? Because I am not buying the parrot to enhance MY life. I am buying the parrot to make a commitment to care for the parrot. Whether the parrot fulfills any of my needs is irrelevant to me. I want the bird in my house so that I can decide what it eats, what it drinks, and invest myself into making it happy, according to its birdish nature. This is because I think that parrots have value in and of themselves, and they deserve a certain quality of life. When I buy the parrot, I am guaranteeing a permanent commitment to the bird to provide for its needs, physical and emotional. And that commitment carries forward to the time (now) when the bird is elderly, and can’t even fly up to his cage or down to the floor. He calls for me, and I go over and pick him up and move him. That’s commitment.

Cohabitation, on the other hand, is the practice of saying to another human being: “I am going to try you out as an entertaining commodity in my home, but if you don’t fulfill my needs then I’m going to send you right back.” That’s not a commitment. That’s self indulgence. It’s defining a relationship as entertainment that is designed to meet my needs and make me happy. And that’s because the concept of commitment in relationships is not presented to young people at any time in their lives. Not from parents. Not in churches. Not in the secular left culture as a whole. Everything is a consumer good designed for the purpose of entertainment – including people. It was only the Christian worldview that had a view of people as creatures made by God for eternal life, so that marriage was about guarding the other person’s faith, and building them up to achieve all the things that God wanted them to achieve for his purposes.

But does cohabitation really work to create stable relationships? After all, anyone can find a partner when they’re young and pretty. The real question is whether that partner will stick around when you’re old and ugly and can’t be as “fun” as you used to be.

Here’s a recent (2018) study on cohabitation and stability:

A new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that the “premarital cohabitation effect” lives on, despite what you’ve likely heard. The premarital cohabitation effect is the finding that those who live together prior to marriage are more likely, not less, to struggle in marriage.

[…]Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler’s new findings suggest that there remains an increased risk for divorce for those living together prior to marriage, and that prior studies suggesting the effect has gone away had a bias toward short versus longer-term effects. They find that living together before marriage is associated with lower odds of divorce in the first year of marriage, but increases the odds of divorce in all other years tested, and this finding holds across decades of data.

Strategy advice to those who debate this issue: just be aware that Team Secular Leftist is using papers that have short-range samples, which don’t show the instability problem, because they deliberately cherry-pick recently married couples.

And what about children raised in cohabitating relationships?

While Americans are optimistic about the ability of cohabiting couples to raise children, a study published by the American College of Pediatricians in 2014 reported that children whose parents cohabit face a higher risk of: “premature birth, school failure, lower education, more poverty during childhood and lower incomes as adults, more incarceration and behavior problems, single parenthood, medical neglect and chronic health problems both medical and psychiatric, more substance, alcohol and tobacco abuse, and child abuse,” and that “a child conceived by a cohabiting woman is at 10 times higher risk of abortion compared to one conceived in marriage.”

I’m just going to be blunt here. The majority of young people are progressives, and they vote for candidates who believe in abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, and even after birth. Why? Because they don’t want to have their right to seek happiness impacted by the needs of other people. Progressives believe that children, if they exist at all, should enhance the lives of their adult owners. No one should be surprised that people who think that killing inconvenient children is moral are willing to inflict other bad outcomes on them by raising them in an unstable cohabitation environment.

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Casey Luskin and Sean McDowell discuss human and chimpanzee DNA

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I listened to a lot of different apologetics-related shows last week, and the very best one was Dr. Casey Luskin appearing on Dr. Sean McDowell’s podcast to discuss new findings about chimpanzee and human DNA. Have you ever heard the argument for common descent that says “human and chimpanzee DNA only differ by 1% so of course they have a common ancestry”? I had a friend in high school who believed that. Let’s see what the evidence says.

This is the YouTube episode from Sean’s popular YouTube channel:

This is 64 minutes long.

Here are the questions from the interview:

  • How did you first get interested in the topic of origins, and human origins in particular?
  • What interested you in the topic of human-chimp genetic similarity?
  • Can you give us some examples of people who’ve claimed that we’re 99% genetically similar to chimps or apes or kind of 1% different from them as they use that to make an argument for common descent slash evolution?
  • How do museums present the data to visitors?
  • When did that data that questions the 1% chimp-human DNA difference first emerge?
  • What is an “icon of evolution”?
  • Does human-chimp genetic similarity falls into that category of “icons of evolution”?
  • Do you have a sense of how significant this piece of evidence is for supporting Darwinian evolution?
  • How was the original 1% genetic difference calculation made?
  • So now we have new evidence that the 1% number was wrong. A new paper suggests that there is a 15%. How did they calculate that?
  • Are these numbers being challenged? Are critics accepting them, saying this is the new data?
  • Now, one response that I’ve heard is that our genome is full of what’s called junk DNA. So, the differences are like repetitive DNA and thus junk. Thus, we can ignore them and get a much smaller number getting closer to that 1% if we assess the genome that way. Is that fair or reasonable?
  • Humans can vary by as much as 10% difference in DNA, so is 15% between humans and chimps really a big difference?
  • Does a small genenetic difference automatically imply common ancestry or it could be because of a common creator?
  • Is this new 15% difference evidence against common descent?
  • You’ve written a piece in the New York Post about how this is presented in museums. Did the museums respond at all? And if so, what did they say?
  • Are there other areas of scientific misinformation at the Smithsonian that either you saw when you were there in person or you’ve just seen in your research?
  • Where does this go next as far as you can see?
  • If a follow-up comes in a journal article as prestigious as Nature and they go, you know what, we got it wrong, it’s 0.5% genetic difference and we blew it, whether two years, five years, 10 years, will you come back and say, you know what, I’ll own it.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, Casey did write a nice recent article in the New York Post about it.

He writes:

The National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins vastly distorts the scientific evidence on human evolution, seeking to convince visitors that there’s nothing special about us as human beings.

“There is only about a 1.2% genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees,” the exhibit starts, with large photos of a human and apes. “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.8% genetically similar.”

No doubt you’ve heard this statistic before because many science popularizers say the same thing.

Yet it’s been known for years that these numbers are inaccurate. Thanks to a groundbreaking April paper in the journal Nature, we know just how wrong they are.

For the first time, the paper reports “complete” sequences of the genomes of chimpanzees and other apes done from scratch. When we compare them to humans, we find our genomes are more like 15% genetically different from chimpanzees’. That means the true genetic differences between humans and chimps are more than 10 times greater than what the Smithsonian tells us.

It’s very good for him to point this out, because we a lot of people go to these taxpayer-funded museums and believe things that we now know have been discredited by the progress of science. I had a friend in high school who saw this in some History Channel or Discovery Channel documentary, and he believed it. So I think it’s important for Christians to know that there is evidence available now, to push back against the claim. Even if you don’t know how to discuss it as well as Sean and Casey, you should know how to pull up this discussion, or maybe the New York Post article, and respond.