Welcome to episode 66 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose complete a two-part series studying the book of James in the New Testament. 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 study James chapters 3-5, emphasizing taming the tongue and pursuing godly wisdom. They discuss humility, patience, and responsible stewardship, critiquing worldly desires and reckless spending. Encouraging Christians to avoid slander and seek reconciliation, they offer practical guidance for living an authentic faith, blessing others through words and actions in a Christ-centered life.
Outline and transcript
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Episode 66:
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.
When I was in graduate school, we studied a book called “Mirror Worlds”, authored by famous computer science professor David Gelernter at Yale University. This week, I noticed that Dr. Gelernter had written an article in the prestigious Claremont Review of Books. In his article, he applies his knowledge of computer science to the problem of the origin of life.
Evolution, if it is going to work at all, has to explain the problem of how the basic building blocks of life – proteins – can emerge from non-living matter. It turns out that the problem of the origin of life is essentially a problem of information – of code. If the components of proteins are ordered properly, then the sequence folds up into a protein that has biological function. If the sequence is not good, then just like computer code, it won’t run.
Here’s Dr. Gelernter to explain:
How to make proteins is our first question. Proteins are chains: linear sequences of atom-groups, each bonded to the next. A protein molecule is based on a chain of amino acids; 150 elements is a “modest-sized” chain; the average is 250. Each link is chosen, ordinarily, from one of 20 amino acids. A chain of amino acids is a polypeptide—“peptide” being the type of chemical bond that joins one amino acid to the next. But this chain is only the starting point: chemical forces among the links make parts of the chain twist themselves into helices; others straighten out, and then, sometimes, jackknife repeatedly, like a carpenter’s rule, into flat sheets. Then the whole assemblage folds itself up like a complex sheet of origami paper. And the actual 3-D shape of the resulting molecule is (as I have said) important.
Imagine a 150-element protein as a chain of 150 beads, each bead chosen from 20 varieties. But: only certain chains will work. Only certain bead combinations will form themselves into stable, useful, well-shaped proteins.
So how hard is it to build a useful, well-shaped protein? Can you throw a bunch of amino acids together and assume that you will get something good? Or must you choose each element of the chain with painstaking care? It happens to be very hard to choose the right beads.
Gelernter decides to spot the Darwinist a random sequence of 150 elements. Now the task the Darwinist is to use random mutation to arrive at a sequence of 150 links that has biological function.
[W]hat are the chances that a random 150-link sequence will create such a protein? Nonsense sequences are essentially random. Mutations are random. Make random changes to a random sequence and you get another random sequence. So, close your eyes, make 150 random choices from your 20 bead boxes and string up your beads in the order in which you chose them. What are the odds that you will come up with a useful new protein?
[…]The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20150. In other words, many. 20150 roughly equals 10195, and there are only 1080 atoms in the universe.
What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable folds—of reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. (Axe is a distinguished biologist with five-star breeding: he was a graduate student at Caltech, then joined the Centre for Protein Engineering at Cambridge. The biologists whose work Meyer discusses are mainly first-rate Establishment scientists.) He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 1074 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 1074 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 1077.
In other words: immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is—so far—a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.
Keep in mind that you need many, many proteins in order to have even a simple living cell. (And that’s not even considering the problem of organizing the proteins into a system).
So, if you’re a naturalist, then your only resources to explain the origin of life are chance and mutation. As Dr. Gelernter shows, naturalistic explanations won’t work to solve even part of the problem. Not even with a long period of time. Not even if you use the entire universe as one big primordial soup, and keep trying sequences for the history of the universe. It just isn’t possible to arrive at sequences that have biological function in the time available, using the resources available. The only viable explanation is that there is a computer scientist who wrote the code without using trial and error. Something that ordinary software engineers like myself and Dr. Gelernter do all the time. We know what kind of cause is adequate to explain functioning code.
Just over 14 years ago I first wrote my first long essay against same-sex marriage. I was still new at making the case, but I did my best. Sadly, we lost. I think we lost because Christians were not being equipped to make a case for natural marriage that would be convincing to non-Christians. If we want to live in a society that protects children, we have to be able to do that.
Before we begin, it’s worth reviewing why the government has an interesting in recognizing marriage as distinct from other relationships. The state recognizes natural marriage as valuable because the state has an interest in what marriage produces, namely, children who are raised in a stable environment.
Natural marriage is built on the norms of gender complementarity, exclusivity and permanence. It’s the coming together of a man and a woman that creates children. And when the children are created, each biological parent has an allegiance to that child, because they contributed to that child’s DNA. And who else but the biological parents will have a stronger interest in the well-being of their own child?
Stability is achieved because of the norms of exclusivity (fidelity) and permanence (commitment). In a properly functioning marriage, the adults give up some of their own freedoms in the short term in order to provide the children with long-term stability. And government used to give a special status to relationships that gave children that stabiliity.
In my original post, I talked about how the normalizing premarital sex and legalizing no-fault divorce would harm children. Same-sex marriage came after, and it also harms children. And some new articles pick up on that theme with new evidence.
Here’s an article from Katy Faust, published in The Blaze. She writes about how parents are now assigned by the state:
Since 2015, activists have been arguing state by state that equality requires making parenthood gender-neutral and elevating “social parents” (unrelated adults in the home who have not undergone background checks). Fathers have been legally erased from birth certificates to accommodate “two moms” and vice versa. Activists have insisted on requiring insurance or the government to fund the creation of fatherless and motherless children. Biology and adoption are bypassed in favor of “intent-based” parenthood. Giving same-sex couples equal access to the marital “constellation of benefits” denied children equal access to their own mother and father.
What happened to the idea of two people with two different natures coming together to commit for life, in order to have and raise children? It’s gone. Now, children are lower than pets. No one is thinking about God’s design for getting men and women to work together to care for their children. Now people are in it for themselves, and children are just expendable accessories.
Katy’s article talks about the cataclysmic effects that undoing the complementary genders norm had on the schools. Schools don’t talk about mothers and fathers. In fact, they indoctrinate kids to think that mothers and fathers are not even normal for marriage and family. Public libraries promote books to children to make them feel bad about needing to be loved by their father and mother. All in the name of “don’t judge”.
Katy also notes:
The culture shift and the legal restructuring contributed to a booming fertility market. Surrogate pregnancies more than doubled from 2.2% in 2011 to 4.7% in 2020. Fertility clinics often direct gay couples to surrogacy grants in the name of “equitable access to parenthood.”
These children did not lose their mothers to tragedy. They lost their mothers to adult “equality.”
Many children are not growing up with a mother and father in the home. By the way, Katy had a civil debate with a gay activist in Australia, and you might like to watch it if you want to debate this issue well.
The second article from First Things talks more about how children are affected:
The overwhelming desire to be connected to one’s biological parents is evident in the 70 percent of donor-conceived adults who believe they have been harmed by not knowing the identity of a biological parent. Seventy-seven percent agree that a sperm or egg donor is “half of who I am,” and 86 percent believe that a biological parent’s information belongs to the adult child.
These are not abstract trends; they negatively impact children every day.
That article also notes how the same-sex marriage has caused all sorts of bad effects on society. Now that relationships are about adult selfishness, people just don’t even bother marrying before they have kids.
Look at this:
[A] historically low marriage rate: An all-time low of 46.8 percent of households were headed by a married couple in 2022.
And this:
[A] historically low birth rate: Live births decreased nearly 9 percent from 2014, the year before Obergefell was decided, to 2019, the year before Covid-19 decreased live births even further.
And this:
Third, young people are increasingly confused about their identity: Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four who identify as transgender increased 422 percent from 2014 to 2023.
It’s not just kids that are affected, it’s society as a whole. It will result in a drop in tax revenues, which are used to pay for social programs. And we will get a drop in workers in sectors like energy, health care, and other critical industries.
My thoughts
I don’t have any experience raising children, but I do have experience with parrots. My family had several, back where I immigrated from. And I know that parrots need to have stability in order to be happy. They need to feel that if they call, their humans will come. They don’t like to move to a different house. They don’t like the furniture to move. They like routines and they like head scratches, but they have to trust you first. I remember being in grad school, and calling home from the computer lab to check on the parrot, because I didn’t trust my lazy, selfish older brother to monitor the bird while I was gone. The TSA staff at my local airport in the US got so used to me bringing home balsa wood blocks and California Spray Millet that they would call me “The Parrot Guy”. Parrots are so little. They need the bigger people to look after them!
I just cannot imagine how people could want children, and then not understand children need stable relationships with their real mother and father! We have so much evidence showing the effects of divorce on kids, and the effects of same-sex parenting on kids. We need marriage to be child-focused, not adult-focused.
If you want to hear Rose and I talk about it, we did an episode. Audio is here.
And we did an episode with Frank Turek. Audio is here.
WINTERY KNIGHT 