Good morning,

I always end each week with a reflection on life, liberty, or my experiences. This week’s reflection, inspired by a conversation with Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, might upset some folks… You’ve been warned.

But first, here is the Texas Minute for Friday, August 19, 2022.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Majority Of Republicans Want To Repeal In-State Tuition For Illegals

• New statewide polling finds 75 percent of Texas Republicans want to repeal a law giving in-state tuition to illegal aliens. The law has been on the books for two decades. Sydnie Henry has the story.
      
• Last year, State Rep. Jeff Cason (R-Bedford) filed legislation to end in-state tuition for anyone “not authorized under federal statute to be present in the United States.” The measure was killed by the GOP leadership in the Texas House.
      
• “In-state tuition pricing, subsidized by Texas taxpayers, is one of the few privileges afforded to Texas residents attending a state school in Texas. Students from the remaining forty-nine states must pay out-of-state fees – often 3x more expensive – if they wish to reap the benefits of attending one of Texas’s prestigious colleges or universities,” explained Cason at the time. “Why then, are illegal immigrants allowed to enjoy this privilege denied to millions of U.S. citizens?” 
      
• The Texas GOP platform specifically opposes “in-state tuition and financial aid for illegal aliens.”

TODAY: Lake Talks Border Security On The Headline

• At 12 noon today, join Brandon Waltens on The Headline for an exclusive interview with Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake.
      
• Among other things, Lake explains how Florida’s Ron DeSantis has already offered to send his state’s National Guard troops to Arizona to help repel the invasion once she is sworn in and makes the declaration. She then dropped a major bombshell.
   
• Here’s a quick teaser…

POLL: Texas Republicans Want Teachers Held Accountable

• A new statewide poll of Republican primary voters finds 88 percent believe Texas teachers who intentionally expose children to pornographic material should have their teaching license permanently revoked.
     
• Katy Drollinger has more details about the poll, which was commissioned by the Defend Texas Liberty PAC.
      
• The fight over public school curricula has intensified since virtual schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed parents more access to materials assigned to their children. They soon discovered sexually explicit books like “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” available in high school and middle school libraries across the state. Although some districts removed the obscene materials, others continue exposing children to explicit books.
      
• When asked in this latest poll if teachers should be “required to affirm that there are only two genders before they are allowed to teach Texas children,” 74 percent of respondents agreed, 17 percent disagreed, and 9 percent were unsure.

Do you like Texas Scorecard? Of course you do! So, how about forwarding the Texas Minute to your friends and encouraging them to subscribe?

Another Drag Show Targeting Kids

• The Anderson Distillery and Grill in Roanoke has announced their “Barrel Babes Drag Brunch” on August 28 in an advertisement that emphatically notes, “All Ages Welcome!” Brandon Waltens has the story.
         
• The event is hosted by Trisha Delish, the season one winner of The Queer Off, a “live 12-week elimination style competition, showcasing the talents of the Dallas queer community.”
      
• Nothing says ‘family friendly’ like the winner of Queer Off…
      
• The Texas Family Project has called on citizens to contact the restaurant and ask them to place an age limitation on the show.

School District Strands Students

• A week into the new school year, students in Prosper Independent School District are being stranded as buses fail to show up on schedule. Parents in the affluent district north of Dallas-Fort Worth are fuming, reports Erin Anderson.
     

• One Prosper mom called it “a gigantic failure of epic proportions. … I’ve never seen anything like it.”
     

• On the sixth day of the new school year, Prosper ISD parents finally received an apologetic email from Superintendent Holly Ferguson, explaining the situation. Ferguson cited several issues that led to the bus failure: an enrollment of over 1,000 students more than the district expected; a national bus driver shortage; and a “computer software programming malfunction” between the bus routing system and the app that monitors buses’ locations, now reportedly fixed.
    
• The district is still 36 drivers short but is in the process of hiring more drivers and has raised the starting pay to $25 an hour.
     
• How is your local school district handling the start of the school year?

Friday Reflection: Heaven And Earth, Indeed…

It requires a great deal of faith to be an atheist these days, with scientists uncovering unimaginably complex evidence almost daily of a nature finely tuned to produce life. From the structure of the cosmos to new revelations about DNA, modern science leaves little room for anything but the view of creation as a product of divine intelligence.

Those who follow these reflections know that with some regularity I write about how the science of archeology is almost daily revealing the historical accuracy of Scripture. But, I have come to find the rest of science is in on the gig as well, demonstrating how nature itself points undeniably to the reality of God.

First, though, consider poor Charles Darwin. His theories and those of his followers were based only on what they could see – and it was often an unbelievable mess. He himself described it as "absurd" that the eye could have resulted simply from evolution. 

Knowledge of the importance of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was nearly a century in the future. A single strand of human DNA can hold 215 million gigabytes (or 215 petabytes) of information. In comparison, all the data in the Library of Congress amounts to just 15 terabytes of data. What do those numbers mean? One strand of DNA contains more than 16,000 times the data of the Library of Congress. 

As it turns out, Psalm 139 wasn’t just poetry: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” [Emphasis mine.]

For evolution to make sense, one must also assume the individual sub-components of the world’s most advanced supercomputer could be set in a box, shaken, and emerge not only fully operational but able to produce all of your favorite music and books. Good luck!

But, at least Darwin had the humility to admit his own theory – which in the last century has been elevated to a religion – didn’t mesh with the complexity even he could see in nature. The complexity he couldn’t see would have driven him mad.

Darwin’s successors are endlessly rewriting evolution, and often simply dismissing inconvenient facts with a wave of their neoprene-gloved hands. They have an irrational faith that, someday, science will validate their disbelief in a creator. They are destined to wait unhappily for eternity.

No matter how hard they try to sand the corners, the square peg of their theory for life doesn’t fit in the God-rounded hole of reality.

Biology is bad for those who reject God, but cosmology is worse.

At one point, the God-deniers clung to the view that the Bible was wrong because the universe had always existed. That was the indisputable “#science” position for centuries. But, as our ability to view the universe went from looking through crude telescopes to parsing through data derived out of the far reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum, that idea collapsed.

To keep God out, cosmologists now retreat into obscure (and unprovable in the real world) realms of mathematical models to describe multiverses in a vain attempt to explain the complexity of existence. Some go so far as to seriously suggest we are but simulations in a Matrix-like computer game created by some other randomly created being in a universe we cannot see… all to avoid God. 

Talk about faith!

The words of Psalm 19 are found to be more true every day: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

From the operations of subatomic particles to the location of the Earth in the Milky Way galaxy, every single detail of the universe had to be just right, or we simply could not exist. If any of this interests you as much as it does me, I encourage you to check out the work of Stephen Meyer at the Discovery Institute.

What we do know absolutely is that this universe had a definite beginning. From that beginning, this universe has been finely tuned not only to produce us, but for us to be able to discover the wonders of creation. 

God spoke, and the universe sprang into being. His living words are literally encoded within us, and etched in the stars. Heaven and earth are full of His glory!