The Lab, day 3

While looking around town in West Covina, CA yesterday, I saw this:

Hope you're not in a rush!

Anyway, today was the third and final day of Reasons To Believe's "The Lab" conference. Before arriving at the RTB office, my father and I went to Flappy Jack's Pancake House on Route 66. The plates of pancakes have an absolutely massive amount of food; I had to box more than half of my banana nut pancakes. Those, and their Hawaiian ones, are delicious.

A street sign for Route 66

The conference's day opened with advice on college life: being intentional about time. After that, we got into some more interactive apologetics training. We considered challenges from headlines/excerpts of scientific news, developing responses from both science and theology.

There was then an amazing talk about how environment affects cell behavior, i.e. how genes don't determine everything. It also covered some ways that the raw base pairs are controlled and interpreted, like packing and separators.

One of the conference's most impactful talks was on a four-part argument for design. That argument first needs to critique the evolutionary model, which is most effectively done by considering whether the model's predictions are fulfilled. Three positive arguments for design can then be applied. There are the "watchmaker" argument (design requires a designer), the empirical argument (humans built some life, but only with great intelligence and modern tooling), and the bio-inspiration argument (humans are making technological gains by examining nature's mechanisms).

After the conference ended with commissioning, we said our goodbyes to all the other attendees and speakers. My father and I will be flying back home tomorrow morning.