I have exciting news. Do you remember a long time ago, when the famous atheist professor Will Provine invited Michael Behe to make the case for intelligent design at Cornell University? Well, 22 years later, Behe has returned to Cornell, to give a lecture to students and answer questions. Let’s find out what Behe’s arguments were and whether any biologists showed up to stump him.

So, it’s always fun to start with the announcement of the event. I like to support these events because I am very passionate about events on campus where students are presented with evidence that will help them to form more accurate views about the big questions of life.

So, here is the link to the event announcement, and it says:

Throughout history, most people, including most scientists, thought that the intricate mechanisms of life were purposefully designed. The design hypothesis fell out of favor in academia after 1859, the year Charles Darwin instead proposed that life evolved by utterly unguided random variation sifted by natural selection. In the past 75 years, however, much has been learned about the molecular basis of life that was completely unknown in Darwin’s era. In my talk I will argue that the astonishing discoveries of modern biochemistry require a reversal of our evaluation of Darwin versus design: the conclusion that, in large part, life was purposely designed has once again become rationally compelling.

I would like to get my hands on the slides for this lecture. Roger Pielke just gave a talk at Cornell earlier this month, and he posted his slides. Maybe I can get Mike to do the same. If you have ever seen one of his lectures, he actually has fun slides – he puts Far Side cartoons into his lectures to keep people paying attention.

Anyway, here is the audio from the talk, and here are his main arguments: 1) irreducible complexity and 2) Darwinian mechanisms cannot create new forms over time.

But he actually made 5 points in the presentation:

What was interesting about this podcast? Well, like I said, I am really, really committed to helping students to hear two sides to the big questions of life. Most of the college students that I talk to in the workplace explain to me that their process of forming their worldviews was two-fold: 1) I wanted to have fun, and 2) I wanted the smart people (professors) to like me. It was just easier for them to accept certain beliefs in the college environment, and that’s why they accepted them. A lot of things that are false are just easier to believe for social or professional reasons: the universe is eternal, the origin of life is a solved problem, the fossil record shows gradual increases in complexity, the genome is 90% junk DNA – just complete nonsense. And the best way for them to correct these false beliefs is to bring an honest scholar like Mike Behe or Mike Licona to speak about evidence at the local university campus.

The podcast is fun because they really explain all the details of what happened. Who invited Behe to speak? Where did Behe speak? Who did Behe speak to? Were biologists invited? Did any biologists show up to confront Behe? How long was the talk? How long was the Q&A? Was the tone of the Q&A calm or argumentative? Did the Q&A stop because no one had questions, or was there a long line of people waiting to ask more questions?

Confronting naturalism on campus

I have a friend named Stephanie who just loves all sorts of protests and gatherings and marches. But for me, this is much better. Instead of people yelling at each other over politics, we can actually have some evidence presented, and minds can change. Maybe not right in the moment, but afterwards. This worked well for me when I was in my 20s. I used to order dozens and dozens of lectures and debates from university campuses from places like Veritas Forum and Access Research Network. I would listen over and over, and then when I tried out the evidence on co-workers (and I mean people with graduate degrees from good schools like UIUC and Purdue and Northwestern) they always had to concede. There is just something about being able to listen to Christians speak about evidence to college students – it’s just the right level of difficulty for software guys like me to understand it and learn how to speak like that. And this led to a lot of adventures.

Secrets of the Cell with Mike Behe

Well, if you listen to the podcast, and you like it, and you want to try to explain Michael Behe’s arguments to college students yourself, he does have quite a good series of lectures posted on YouTube:

1. Someone Must Have the Answer! (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 1)
2. The Complexity of Life (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 2)
3. Bugs with Gears (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 3)
4. The Effects of Mutation (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 4)
5. The X Factor in Life (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 5)
6. Bacteria: Superheroes of the Microbial World (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 6)
7. Blood Clotting: The Body’s Emergency Response System (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 7)
8. Michael Behe Unravels the Mystery of Biological Information (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 8)
9. The Robot Repairmen Inside You (Secrets of the Cell, Ep. 9)

Everything is so much easier now than it used to be for me in the old days. You guys don’t have to rewind VHS tapes and audio cassettes like I used to have to do! And if you hear a word or phrase that you don’t understand, just ask Grok to explain it to you like it would explain it to a high school student. Anyway, have fun.

It’s helpful to look at countries where the secular left is more powerful, so you can see what they have done with their power. Germany is a good one. France, too. And Canada. And the UK. So, in this post, I have 3 terrifying stories from across the pond that will show you why you should never let the secular left take political power in America. If you do, you will not like the result.

First, here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail:

Figures obtained by the Daily Mail show that some forces are making arrests for ‘offensive’ social media posts at ‘extremely concerning’ rates.

[…]The crime of sending ‘grossly offensive’ messages or sharing content of an ‘indecent, obscene or menacing character’ on electronic communications networks is punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine.

[…]Together, the 39 of 45 police forces that replied to the Mail’s freedom of information (FOI) requests arrested around 9,700 people last year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

However, the total arrest figures are likely to be higher, as six forces failed to respond to FOI requests or provided inadequate data, including Police Scotland, the second-largest force in the UK.

Keep in mind that this is the same country that refused to investigate “grooming gangs” (child sex-trafficking rings), because of their fear of appearing “racist”.

And of course, since they are busy intimidating taxpayers for sharing memes, they don’t have time for more serious crimes:

The outcry that the police are wasting their time has increased because official figures show that 90% of all crime went unsolved in 2023, up from 75% in 2015.

Here is an example:

Another alarming example of free speech under threat involved Hertfordshire Police officers arresting parents Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine in January.

Officers held them in a cell for eleven hours, on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications, after their child’s primary school objected to the volume of emails they sent and ‘disparaging’ comments made in a WhatsApp group.

No fewer than six uniformed cops showed up to arrest them for messages which could be deemed sarcastic, but were clearly far from ‘abusive or malicious’.

Under Winston Churchill, the UK won a war against German totalitarianism. Then, under Margaret Thatcher, the UK won a war against Russian totalitarianism. And now the UK is North Korea. You can’t say anything bad about the bad effects of the government’s policies, because the government doesn’t like that.

Second article, also from the UK Daily Mail:

The number of Britons emigrating has hit a new high, it was revealed on Tuesday – as the exodus under Labour gathers pace.

Last year the number of UK citizens going to live abroad was 257,000 – far more than the 77,000 previously estimated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

[…]Net emigration has also peaked since last year’s general election.

In the 12 months to September 2024, a net 116,000 Britons left the country. This is far higher than previously thought. By December, the net figure for the previous 12 months was 114,000. Net British emigration was just 81,000 in 2022.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: ‘Keir Starmer’s punishing tax rises are causing Britons to flee in record numbers.

‘The brightest and the best are leaving the UK for places like Dubai and Milan, leaving the rest of us to pay Labour’s higher taxes.

‘This is evidence that increasing tax too far makes people leave.’

So, every American understands that. We fought a far against the UK over taxation, because when the government taxes you, it diminishes your freedom to live your life how you want. If the government taxes you a lot, then your wife has to work. Then your one child goes into daycare and public schools. But if the government lets you keep what you earn, then your wife stays home and she homeschools your  four children. Taxes are a big deal to people who have a plan about how they want to live. Money is the fuel to run a plan.

Here’s the third article, from ADF International:

75-year-old grandmother Rose Docherty has been arrested a second time and criminally charged for holding a sign within 200m of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, reading:

“Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”

In Scotland, “buffer zones” are enforced within 200m of every hospital, forbidding harassment, intimidation, and “influencing” of anyone seeking to access abortion services.

Despite only having stood silently offering consensual conversation and not having approached any individual, Docherty has been charged with breaching the “buffer zone.”

According to a recent article from Christian Today, it’s not just abortion clinics that have a no-disagreement-with-murder-by-government buffer zone. Soon it wil be expanded to areas around assisted suicide clinics, called “safe access zones”. The UK has found it more profitable to kill patients rather than treat them, so they don’t want any criticism of that policy, either.

I was doing some research on the multiverse theory to prepare myself for an episode of the Knight and Rose Show podcast. I thought it might be a good idea to put the list of objections to the multiverse theory into a blog post, explain them all as simply as I could, and then link to an expert for the details on one more that you can take with you on your apologetics adventures.

So, the first thing is to explain what caused the development of the multiverse theory: the fine-tuning argument. The fine-tuning argument has to do with the constants, quantities and ratios that are simply “given” as parameters to the universe, at the beginning of the universe. The parameters are fine-tuned to allow complex, embodied life to exist. Change the parameters slightly, and you have no life. It’s an argument for design. And the multiverse is supposed to counter it.

Let’s link to something by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, for a quick version of what that argument is all about:

Beginning in the 1960s, physicists unveiled a universe apparently fine-tuned for the possibility of human life. They discovered that the existence of life in the universe depends upon a highly improbable but precise balance of physical factors.⁴ The constants of physics, the initial conditions of the universe, and many other of its features appear delicately balanced to allow for the possibility of life. Even very slight alterations in the values of many factors, such as the expansion rate of the universe, the strength of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, or the value of Planck’s constant, would render life impossible. Physicists now refer to these factors as “anthropic coincidences” (because they make life possible for man) and to the fortunate convergence of all these coincidences as the “fine tuning of the universe”. Given the improbability of the precise ensemble of values represented by these constants, and their specificity relative to the requirements of a life-sustaining universe, many physicists have noted that the fine tuning strongly suggests design by a preexistent intelligence. As well-known British physicist Paul Davies has put it, “the impression of design is overwhelming.”⁵

To see why, consider the following illustration. Imagine that you are a cosmic explorer who has just stumbled into the control room of the whole universe. There you discover an elaborate “universe-creating machine”, with rows and rows of dials, each with many possible settings. As you investigate, you learn that each dial represents some particular parameter that has to be calibrated with a precise value in order to create a universe in which life can exist. One dial represents the possible settings for the strong nuclear force, one for the gravitational constant, one for Planck’s constant, one for the ratio of the neutron mass to the proton mass, one for the strength of electromagnetic attraction, and so on. As you, the cosmic explorer, examine the dials, you find that they could easily have been tuned to different settings. Moreover, you determine by careful calculation that if any of the dial settings were even slightly altered, life would cease to exist. Yet for some reason each dial is set at just the exact value necessary to keep the universe running. What do you infer about the origin of these finely tuned dial settings?

And in a previous post, I wrote about the three examples of fine-tuning that I personally have ready to go in a discussion, the ones that are the simplest for me.

Anyway, atheists were not very happy about what the progress of science had revealed, so decided to invent a new theory to get them out of the evidence. And that theory is the multiverse theory. The multiverse theory simply states that we shouldn’t be surprised to find evidence for design in our universe, because there are billions and billions of other universes where there is no design, and so, we just got lucky.

So, here is my quick list of objections (and brief explanations) to this multiverse theory:

1. Boltzmann Brains: In an infinite multiverse, random chaos should create lone brains with fake memories way more often than real people with bodies like us. So why do we see a universe with embodied intelligences?
2. Inverse Gambler Fallacy: The multiverse says, “Our universe is rare, so there must be tons of others.” But seeing one rare thing doesn’t prove that billions of hidden common things exist.
3. Universe generating factory still needs fine-tuning: Even if a “multiverse factory” spits out universes with different random quantities and constants, it still needs super-precise settings to make any life-friendly ones. The problem just moves up a level.
4. No direct evidence for multiverse: We can’t see, touch, or detect other universes. So far, it’s a story, not science.
5. Infinite universes means anything can happen, making science impossible: If there is an infinite number of actual universes, then anything can happen, and we can’t do science any more.
6. Multiverse can’t explain independent local fine-tuning: The multiverse might explain one dial being right, but not why we find fine-tuning for habitability (and fine-tuning that is correlated with discoverability) at lower levels.
7. The measure problem: Even if universes exist, physicists can’t agree on how to measure probability. Without that, the multiverse can’t explain anything.

So, people really find #4 to be the easiest to remember. By definition, we can’t ever get out of our universe to be able to observe these other universes that supposedly exist. So definitely remember that one. And then #3, because Stephen C. Meyer makes a big deal out of the universe generator needing fine-tuning itself, in his book “The Return of the God Hypothesis”. You can read an essay that mentions it here, written by Robin Collins. And #6 is good too, here is an article by Guillermo Gonzalez about the local fine-tuning (habitability – discoverability link).

But here are some details on #1 in this article from Science and Culture by physicist Dr. Brian C. Miller. Basically, the multiverse theory makes a prediction about what we should see if it were true, but sadly for the design-deniers, our experience contradicts the prediction.

Boltzmann Brains

Standard multiverse models, such as those based on eternal inflation and string theory, predict that the odds are far smaller for a brain emerging from a gradual process in an ancient universe than for a brain emerging from atoms suddenly coalescing in a young universe. In other words, we are far less likely to possess a brain with memories of a real life history than possess what is termed a Boltzmann brain that emerged from quantum fluctuations in the recent past with fictitious memories.

Since no one desires to believe in such freaky observers as Boltzmann brains, physicists have grappled with our being such seemingly improbable normal observers. In addition, our universe is highly atypical in its old age and its high level of order. Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of a universe appearing as orderly as ours to be 1 chance in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 — a number that includes more zeros than the number of atoms in the visible universe.

So, I hope that’s enough to equip you to discuss this theory. Now you have everything you need. Three easy examples of fine-tuning, and four easy refutations of the the counter to the fine-tuning. This is a solid argument, so have fun with it.