Statistics show that men are choosing to disengage from dating and marriage. There are many reasons for this. I can name a dozen. One of the reasons is “paternity fraud”. Paternity claims occur when a woman has a child, and then tries to collect child support from a man by claiming that he is the father. Sometimes, the man she identifies as the father is not the actual father. This is “paternity fraud”.

Before I get started on paternity fraud, let me explain how child support works today, from this article in USA Today:

The most well-known case was of a Kansas boy who, at age 13, impregnated his 17-year-old baby-sitter. Under Kansas law, a child under the age of 15 is legally unable to consent to sex. The Kansas Supreme Court in 1993 ruled that he was liable for child support.

California issued a similar state court ruling a few years later in the case of a 15-year-old boy who had sex with a 34-year-old neighbor. In that case, the woman had been convicted of statutory rape.

In both cases, it was the state social-services agency that pursued the case after the mother sought public assistance.

[…]In Arizona, the Department of Economic Security oversees child–support enforcement. Its written policy is not to exempt situations like Olivas’ from child-support responsibilities, unless the parent seeking child support has been found guilty of sexual assault with a minor or sexual assault.

[…]The state has more routes than the courts to acquire money from a parent. It can garnishee wages up to 50 percent of disposable income. It can take a tax refund. It can put a lien on a home or a vehicle. It can suspend driver’s licenses or revoke passports. And it can seize money out of bank accounts.

And another one from Fox 2 Detroit:

A Metro Detroit man cleared his name after Friend of the Court sent him a letter saying he had a baby with a woman he never met.

[…]Late last year, DeAngelo received a letter from Friend of the Court in Berrien County saying that he was the father of a baby girl.

“Said she’s a stripper from Detroit, we had a one-night stand at some hotel, and this is the story that was told to me,” DeAngelo said.

His wife first spotted the letter in the mail from Friend of the Court.

“Let’s just set the record, I trust my husband,” Tyahvia Smith said. “I know his character, man of integrity.”

While waiting for the child’s mother to take the baby for a DNA test, DeAngelo said the school where he teaches received an inquiry for possible garnishment in case the child was his.

“It made it something that is not being alleged, but now it’s something that’s being taken into action and no paternity has been established,” he said.

Finally, the woman had the DNA test done, and DeAngelo has since gotten a letter confirming he was not the father.

The request for money comes to the man’s employer first, the DNA test comes later, and only if the man fights the system to get it.

I show these cases, so that people will understand what men are facing from social services agencies and courts. Basically, in cases where a woman statutory rapes a man, she is still entitled to child support from the victim of the rape. One can imagine the uproar if the sexes were reversed. The laws are anti-male in many ways, this is just one example. Anti-male laws deter men from dating and marrying women.

Now let’s look at paternity fraud, another example of anti-male bias in the legal system.

Here’s a story about it from CBS News Detroit:

A Detroit man has been ordered to pay $30,000 in back child support for his ex-girlfriend’s child — even though he’s not the father.

Carnell Alexander brought his case to Wayne County Circuit Court with hopes for a fix. Instead, Judge Kathleen McCarthy told him Tuesday he waited too long to challenge the situation and “failed to take this matter seriously.”

Alexander said the paternity case started in the 1980s when the woman gave his name to a case worker so she could get assistance for her baby, who was born in 1987.

The woman agrees that Alexander wasn’t the father and a DNA test taken in 2013 backs that up. But that wasn’t enough to sway McCarthy, who ruled that despite the case being decades old, Alexander still has to pay.

Here’s another story of paternity fraud from NBC News Miami:

A man in North Florida is fighting the state after he was told to pay child support despite DNA tests proving that he was not the father.

Joseph Sinawa told NBC affiliate WTLV-TV that he signed the birth certificate because he did truly believe he was the father – adding that the mother of the child doesn’t want him to have to pay, but the state is forcing the issue.

“She told the judge she just wants this to be done and over with, and so do I,” he said from his home in St. Augustine.

Sinawa found out he was not the father after the DNA test was administered by a St. Johns County court following a custody question – but the state’s Department of Revenue appealed the decision because they say Sinawa has not properly attempted to disestablish paternity.

“At the time it had been taking $83 out of my paycheck, more than 1/3 of my pay,” he says. “When I thought I was the father I didn’t have a problem with it.”

Sinawa is currently representing himself in court cases due to financial issues and has filed the necessary paperwork, but no time table has been set and it is unknown if he will be refunded any of the money spent.

According to this study in  the peer-reviewed journal Epidemiology & Community Health, the median rate of paternity fraud across various studies is 3.7%:

Paternal discrepancy (PD) occurs when a child is identified as being biologically fathered by someone other than the man who believes he is the father. This paper examines published evidence on levels of PD and its public health consequences. Rates vary between studies from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%, n = 17).

Even men who are not at risk for paternity fraud understand the lesson of paternity fraud. The courts are anti-male, and men need to stay well clear of those courts. And that means minimizing exposure to those courts. And that means keeping to themselves, and tending to their own problems and pursuing their own goals.

Men are getting smarter now. Men understand that society does not have their interests at heart. Now men want to be left alone.

There’s an interesting article posted at Universe Today by Dr. Paul M. Sutter. Although he does accept unguided evolution after the origin of life, he doesn’t think that naturalism can account for the origin of life. On this blog, I’ve talked about three problem’s with life’s origin: 1) getting the right building blocks, 2) getting the right information, and 3) irreducible complexity. Let’s take a look.

Here is a link to the article from Universe Today.

Here is a quick bio of the author:

Paul M. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist, award-winning science communicator, NASA advisor, U.S. Cultural Ambassador, and a globally recognized leader in the intersection of art and science. Paul is a research professor at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a visiting professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.

[…]Paul earned his PhD in physics in 2011 as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow at the University of Illinois. He then spent three years as a research fellow at the Paris Institute for Astrophysics followed by two years at the Trieste Observatory in Italy. Prior to his current appointment, he held a joint position as the chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio and as a cosmological researcher at the Ohio State University.

Now let’s turn to his article.

It’s always good to remind people what is required for the simplest kind of life, and he does that:

To succeed at evolution and separate itself from mere chemical reactions, life must do three things. First, it must somehow store information, such as the encoding for various processes, traits, and characteristics. This way the successful traits can pass from one generation to another.

Second, life must self-replicate. It must be able to make reasonably accurate copies of its own molecular structure, so that the information contained within itself has the chance to become a new generation, changed and altered based on its survivability.

Lastly, life must catalyze reactions. It must affect its own environment, whether for movement, or to acquire or store energy, or grow new structures, or all the many wonderful activities that life does on a daily basis.

I remember listening to lectures about the origin of life by Dean Kenyon, Charles Thaxton, and Walter Bradley in my younger years. If I remember correctly, the minimal functions of a living system are capture energy, store information, and replicate. Sutter does a nice job of describing an even longer list.

So what’s the problem with appealing to chance and necessity to create all that? Well, in order to do all that, we need to have three components in place: DNA, RNA and molecular machines.

He writes:

Put exceedingly simply (for I would hate for you to mistake me for a biologist), life accomplishes these tasks with a triad of molecular tools.

One is the DNA, which through its genetic code stores information using combinations of just four molecules: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The raw ability of DNA to store massive amounts of information is nothing short of a miracle; our own digital system of 1’s and 0’s (invented because it’s much simpler to tell if a circuit is on or off than some stage in-between) is the closest comparison we can make to DNA’s information density. Natural languages don’t even earn a place on the chart.

The second component is RNA, which is intriguingly similar to DNA but with two subtle, but significant, differences: RNA swaps out thymine for uracil in its codebase, and contains the sugar ribose, which is one oxygen atom short of the deoxyribose of DNA. RNA also stores information but, again speaking only in generalities, has the main job of reading the chemical instructions stored in the DNA and using that to manufacture the last member of the triad, proteins.

“Proteins” is a generic catch-all term for the almost uncountable varieties of molecular machines that do stuff: they snip apart molecules, bind them back together, manufacture new ones, hold structures together, become structures themselves, move important molecules from one place to another, transform energy from one form to another, and so on.

Proteins have one additional function: they perform the job of unraveling DNA and making copies of it. Thus the triad completes all the functions of life: DNA stores information, RNA uses that information to manufacture proteins, and the proteins interact with the environment and perform the self-replication of DNA.

What’s the problem? The problem is that this all has to come together at the start, in order to have life. You can’t build up gradually, from one component, to two components, to three components. All three are needed at the start. This is what Michael Behe calls irreducible complexity, but others have described it as minimal complexity.

Sutter says:

The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand.

And just to be clear, he would have to provide some evidence of “primordial ooze”. As I’ve blogged about before, life appears almost instantaneously after the cooling of the Earth. He might like to appeal to “billions of years” to get that first replicator, but he doesn’t have billions of years. Molecular oxygen, which is poisonous to origin of life chemistry, was present right after the Earth cooled. And that’s not my opinion – that’s right out of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Evolution News notes:

A recent Nature publication reports a new technique for measuring the oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere some 4.4 billion years ago. The authors found that by studying cerium oxidation states in zircon, a compound formed from volcanic magma, they could ascertain the oxidation levels in the early earth. Their findings suggest that the early Earth’s oxygen levels were very close to current levels.

[…]Their findings not only showed that oxygen was present in the early Earth atmosphere, something that has been shown in other studies, but that oxygen was present as early as 4.4 billion years ago. This takes the window of time available for life to have begun, by an origin-of-life scenario like the RNA-first world, and reduces it to an incredibly short amount of time. Several factors need to coincide in order for nucleotides or amino acids to form from purely naturalistic circumstances (chance and chemistry). The specific conditions required already made purely naturalist origin-of-life scenarios highly unlikely. Drastically reducing the amount of time available, adding that to the other conditions needing to be fulfilled, makes the RNA world hypothesis or a Miller-Urey-like synthesis of amino acids simply impossible.

I understand that naturalists want to believe that nature is self-contained, and can do it’s own creating. That belief is practically required in order to have careers in academia. Scientists have to at least claim that “naturalism can do it” or they would draw the unwanted attention of the Darwin mob – the people who got people like William Dembski, Guillermo Gonzalez, Richard Sternberg, etc. fired. However, the scientific evidence doesn’t support naturalism. I wish more people would form their views based on scientific evidence, rather than on the religion of naturalism.

Rose and I are recording episode(s) for a Bible study of the book of James. I asked Twitter’s Grok AI what everyone needs to know about the author of the book, the book itself, as well as the apologetics significance of both. I’ve pasted what Grok had for us below, and you might recognize some of the scholars and authors. I thought it would be good prep for the podcast.

The Book of James and Apologetics Connections

Author:

• • James, the brother of Jesus, known as James the Just (Eusebius, Church History).
  • Leader in the Jerusalem church, not one of the Twelve Apostles (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews).
  • Authorship affirmed; polished Greek explained by education or scribal assistance (D.A. Carson).
  • Apologetics Connection: James’s transformation from skeptic to church leader (implied in early traditions) supports the resurrection’s impact. A family member’s conversion counters claims of Jesus as a mere teacher, as skeptics rarely die for a sibling’s myth (Gary Habermas).

Author’s Fate:

• • Martyred around AD 62 in Jerusalem.
  • Thrown from temple pinnacle and clubbed to death for refusing to deny Christ (Eusebius, quoting Hegesippus).
  • Death corroborated by non-Christian historian Josephus (Antiquities 20.9.1).
  • Apologetics Connection: Josephus’s mention of James’s execution by Jewish authorities provides external, non-Christian evidence for early Christian persecution, bolstering the historicity of the New Testament (Craig Blomberg). James’s martyrdom underscores the sincerity of his faith, a key apologetic for the truth of Christianity.

Audience:

• • Jewish Christians dispersed outside Judea due to early persecution.
  • Addressed as “the twelve tribes scattered among the nations” (F.F. Bruce).
  • Primarily for Jewish believers, with universal Christian application.
  • Apologetics Connection: The Jewish context refutes claims of Christianity as a later Gentile invention. The epistle’s focus on Jewish believers connects to Old Testament ethics, showing continuity between Judaism and Christianity, countering supersessionist critiques (Michael Brown).

Date:

• • Written between AD 45-50, among the earliest New Testament books.
  • Early date inferred from simple church structure and absence of Gentile controversy (Donald Guthrie).
  • Precedes Jerusalem Council (AD 49-50), reflecting James’s early influence.
  • Apologetics Connection: The early date places James close to Jesus’s ministry, minimizing legendary development. Its lack of later theological debates (e.g., Gnosticism) supports the reliability of early Christian documents, challenging late-dating theories (Daniel B. Wallace).

Purpose:

• • Instructs Jewish Christians on authentic faith amidst trials.
  • Stresses practical holiness: good works, controlled speech, wisdom, perseverance (John MacArthur).
  • Complements Pauline theology, showing faith produces action.
  • Apologetics Connection: James’s emphasis on works as evidence of faith resolves apparent contradictions with Paul, strengthening the Bible’s coherence (Norman Geisler). Its practical ethics align with Jesus’s teachings, reinforcing the moral credibility of Christianity against secular critiques.

Chain of Custody:

• • Part of the Jerusalem/Judean chain, centered in the Jerusalem church (Eusebius, Church History).
  • James oversaw transmission of Jesus’s teachings to Jewish Christian communities (F.F. Bruce).
  • Distinct from Peter/John (Antioch/Asia Minor) and Paul (Gentile mission) chains; focused on Jewish believers.
  • Preserved through Jerusalem networks, later canonized with attestation by Origen and Eusebius (D.A. Carson).
  • Apologetics Connection: The Jerusalem chain ties James to the apostolic hub, ensuring reliable transmission of Jesus’s teachings (Richard Bauckham). Early canonical acceptance in the Eastern church counters claims of late or forged texts, providing a traceable lineage for the epistle’s authenticity.

Cool Apologetics Highlights:

• • Non-Christian Corroboration: Josephus’s reference to James’s death (Antiquities 20.9.1) is one of the few non-Christian sources naming a New Testament figure, offering external validation (Josh McDowell).
  • Skeptic-to-Saint Arc: James’s shift from unbeliever to martyr mirrors other apostolic transformations, supporting the resurrection as a historical catalyst (Sean McDowell).
  • Archaeological Tie: The early Jerusalem church’s setting aligns with archaeological evidence of first-century Jewish Christian communities, like the Dominus Flevit ossuary, potentially linked to James’s era (Craig Evans).

Sources: Eusebius (Church History), Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews), conservative scholars (D.A. Carson, F.F. Bruce, Donald Guthrie, John MacArthur), apologetics scholars (Gary Habermas, Craig Blomberg, Norman Geisler, Daniel B. Wallace, Richard Bauckham, Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell, Craig Evans, Michael Brown).