Evidence

A recent study by The Washington Post has revealed a startling number of cases where innocent people have been accused or arrested for crimes because they were identified through a faulty deployment of AI-driven facial recognition software.

Katie Kinsey is chief of staff for the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law. According to Kinsey, such software is often used to analyze low-quality, grainy surveillance photos or images, and as a result perform demonstrably worse in real-world situations compared to laboratory tests involving crystal-clear, high-resolution images.

Additionally, police often succumb to a phenomenon known as “automation bias,” where people tend to believe that machines or computers are less biased and more trustworthy. This phenomenon, combined with other identification techniques with limited efficacy like witness testimony, often create scenarios where officers hastily jump to conclusions without doing their due diligence. Sometimes officers fail to account for the possibility that innocent citizens might bear physical similarities to criminal suspects. Other times, they rely on the facial recognition hit without using other forensic evidence for confirmation.

For example, a medical entrepreneur named Jason Vernau spent three days behind bars after being arrested for check fraud after police used facial recognition to ID him as a bank customer. In this case, the software was correct; Vernau had been in the Miami bank where the fraudulent check was deposited, but he was there to deposit a legitimate check. Had officers done even a cursory examination of his financial documents, or the time stamps in the security footage, they would’ve ruled him out as a suspect.

“This is your investigative work?” That’s what Vernau asked the detectives who questioned him. “You have a picture of me at a bank and that’s your proof? I said, ‘where’s my fingerprints on the check? Where’s my signature?’”

After Vernau was released, prosecutors later dropped the case, but Vernau said he is still working to get the charges removed from his record.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This story highlights several themes that resonate with biblical narratives, particularly concerning justice, false accusations, and the dangers of relying on flawed systems or human biases.

When Galileo introduced the telescope as a tool to peer into the galaxies, his contemporaries did not believe him. Scoffing, they refused to even look through the device. Galileo sat alone with his telescope. He was the sole observer of the vastness of the cosmos. A single witness of galaxies beyond anything anyone had seen or imagined. Galileo had the stars to himself.

Undermining Aristotle’s previous explanations of the universe, Galileo published his own findings based on what he’d seen through the telescope. He painted a picture for the entire world through words, a display of the heavens scratched across bound pages. He wrote about mountains and craters on the moon, spots upon the sun, satellites orbiting Jupiter, and multitudes of stars never known to exist.

These were monumental discoveries that would shape future space explorations, but they fell on ears refusing to hear and eyes refusing to see. Galileo’s peers mocked him and his toy. Strictly adhering to Aristotle’s descriptions of the universe, they refused to believe anything contrary to what they had held to for so long.

In an issue of CT magazine, author Jordan Monge shares her journey from atheism to faith in Christ. She writes:

I don’t know when I first became a skeptic. It must have been around age 4, when my mother found me arguing with another child at a birthday party: “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” By age 11, my atheism was widely known in my middle school and my Christian friends in high school avoided talking to me about religion because they anticipated that I would tear down their poorly constructed arguments. And I did.

Jordan arrived at Harvard in 2008 where she met another student, Joseph Porter, who wrote an essay for Harvard’s Christian journal defending God’s existence. Jordan critiqued the article and began a series of arguments with him. She had never met a Christian who could respond to her most basic questions, such as, “How does one understand the Bible’s contradictions?”

Joseph didn’t take the easy way out by replying “It takes faith.” Instead, he prodded Jordan on how inconsistent she was as an atheist who nonetheless believed in right and wrong as objective, universal categories.

Finding herself defenseless, Jordan took a seminar on metaphysics. By God’s providence her atheist professor assigned a paper by C. S. Lewis that resolved the Euthyphro dilemma, declaring, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.”

A Catholic friend gave her J. Budziszewski’s book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that “love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person.” The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love.

At the same time, Jordan had begun to read through the Bible and was confronted by her sin. She writes:

I was painfully arrogant, prone to fits of rage, unforgiving, unwaveringly selfish, and I had passed sexual boundaries that I’d promised I wouldn’t …. Yet I could do nothing to right these wrongs. The Cross looked like the answer to an incurable need. When I read the Crucifixion scene in the Book of John for the first time, I wept.

So, she plunged headlong into devouring books from many perspectives, but nothing compared to the rich tradition of Christian intellect. As she read the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and Lewis, she knew that the only reasonable course of action was to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If I wanted to continue forward in this investigation, I couldn’t let it be just an intellectual journey. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). I could know the truth only if I pursued obedience first.” I then committed my life to Christ by being baptized on Easter Sunday, 2009.

God revealed himself through Scripture, prayer, friendships, and the Christian tradition whenever I pursued him faithfully. I cannot say for certain where the journey ends, but I have committed to follow the way of Christ wherever it may lead. When confronted with the overwhelming body of evidence I encountered, when facing down the living God, it was the only rational course of action.

Editor’s Note: Jordan Monge is a writer, philosopher, and tutor. She is also a regular contributor to the magazine Fare Forward and for Christianity Today.

An ATM heist in Florida came unraveled when the masterminds apparently forgot the hefty machine would leave drag marks in the pavement. The result was a trail of bread crumbs that led police to a bucket truck conspicuously dragging an ATM on a North Florida highway, about 60 miles west of Jacksonville.

In their investigation of the theft, police in Lake City, Florida were led to a bucket truck on U.S. highway 90. The truck was unoccupied, but there were two major signs connecting the truck to the theft. The first, most obvious clue was the sight of the missing ATM itself. But the second clue was almost as obvious.

“Drag marks could be seen on the asphalt leading through the Lake City Mall parking lot heading in a northeasterly direction,” police said in a subsequent report. “On-scene officers relayed the information to other responding officers. An officer observed a white utility truck traveling north, dragging an ATM.”

Because ATMs are notoriously heavy, often weighing nearly 2,000 pounds, the truck was unable to travel very fast or far. It only made it about a half-mile up the highway before its occupants left it on the side of the road. They apparently heard the sound of approaching sirens, and fled to a nearby wooded area. Despite support from nearby drones and other air units, the suspects were neither identified nor located.

A team of archaeologists with the Archaeological Studies Institute believes it has found a tablet dating back to 1400 BC. Institute Director, Scott Stripling, says the tablet pre-dates the commonly held belief about when the Bible was written by as much as 800 years. If true, this would dispel the theory that the Bible was written around 600 years after the occurrence of some of the first events it describes. This means that the events were written as a firsthand account rather than after the fact.

Stripling continued, “Some scholars believe in something called the ‘documentary hypothesis,’ which states that the Bible was composed hundreds of years apart in different sections, and then later redacted. The tablet is a problem for that theory and the idea that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch. ... This type of writing is more characteristic of the very beginning of the Late Bronze Era II horizon around 1400 B.C. For those who want to push the Exodus date way off into the future, this is really problematic for them.”

Houston Baptist University Professor, Craig Evans, said; “This tablet contains the oldest text that we know of so far. It also correlates with two passages in the book of Deuteronomy where it talks about going up on Mount Ebal, building an altar and cursing the enemies of Yahweh in Israel … The skepticism that nobody could write Hebrew that far back—is just an unwarranted skepticism."

The tablet has major religious and historical implications. If the peer review of Stripling’s discovery confirms his claims, it could dispel the liberal idea that the Old Testament was written in 600 BC.

There was no archaeological evidence for the existence of the biblical King David. That is, until 1993, when surveyor Gila Cook noticed a basalt stone inscription by an Aramaic-speaking king celebrating a military victory over “the House of David.”

To date, archaeological evidence has confirmed the historical existence of about 50 Old Testament figures, most of them kings. Archaeologists have also found records of a few other names, such as Balaam, which may or may not be the biblical prophet of the same name.

Biblical people named in the archaeological record:

Foreign kings: 26

Israelite kings: 8

Judean kings: 6

Israelite priests: 3

Israelite scribes: 1

Possible Preaching Angle:

Once again, archaeology confirms that the Bible record is true and accurate and it has a historical framework. “All your words are true” (Ps. 119:160).

For decades, scientist Sir Fred Hoyle pioneered research in astrophysics. He started his scientific career as a staunch atheist who saw no evidence of design in the universe. In his early years, he said, “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.”

But as his career went on, he discovered something that would rock his atheism—physicists call it “fine tuning.” Fine tuning refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life, or for any life at all. Hoyle’s contribution to the discovery of fine tuning began in the 1950s.

Eventually, Hoyle became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature, to make the universe life permitting. He was overwhelmed by what he called “Cosmic coincidences.” As he put it in 1981:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces we're speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion, almost beyond question.”

In the early hours of June 24, 2021, part of a slab from a high-rise condo building in Surfside, Florida dropped into the parking garage below. Within minutes, the east wing of the 13-story tower collapsed, killing 98 people in a disaster without modern precedent in the US.

Designed in the late 1970s, the 136-unit Champlain Towers South was completed in 1981 and marketed as luxury living. Officials are still investigating why the tower fell. Engineers point to some key decisions during construction, that while legal at the time, compromised the buildings foundation and integrity.

For instance, a Wall Street Journal report concluded:

[The original builders] skipped waterproofing in areas where saltwater could seep into concrete, the available evidence indicates. They put the building’s structural slabs on thin columns without the support of beams in some places. They installed too few of the special heavy walls that help keep buildings from toppling, engineers say, features that could have limited the extent of the collapse. And they appeared to have put too little concrete over rebar in some places and not enough rebar in others, design plans and photos of the rubble indicate.

Tragically, the construction flaws could have been repaired. The report continued:

Engineers say some issues would have been fixable, had the property’s condo board done more extensive repairs sooner. By 1996, the slab started showing cracks, and pieces of concrete had fallen off the garage ceiling, unusual so soon after construction. Workers patched cracks and waterproofed the pool deck, but that too eventually failed.

But the condo board failed to act. Roof work began weeks before the collapse, but repairs to the steel-reinforced concrete hadn’t yet started.

Poet Amy B Hunter writes:

Five years ago I had emergency surgery. My sister, a professor with final exams to give, was getting married in less than a week. Yet she drove from New York City to Massachusetts in a snowstorm to see me in the hospital. No phone call would reassure her that I was alive. She had to see me with her own eyes.

Sometimes the demand to see is not doubt. Sometimes it is even love.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Thomas wanted proof of the resurrected Christ. Thomas’ words, “My Lord and my God!” is the high point of John’s Gospel. No one else has offered such devotion or named Jesus as God. Thomas held out for a personal experience of Jesus on his own terms.

Author Russell Moore writes:

A few years ago, I stood at the grave of Thomas Jefferson, and I was prompted to give thanks for his life and legacy. After all, if it weren’t for Jefferson and his majestic Declaration of Independence, there might not even be a United States of America, and certainly not a country quite like it is now.

But standing at Jefferson’s grave prompted me to realize that Jefferson is, well, in a grave. Jefferson’s anti-supernaturalism is seen in visual form in his famous Bible, with the miraculous parts cut out, most significantly the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I love Jefferson for standing up against King George, but not for standing up against King Jesus.

And yet, two hundred years later, belief in the resurrection of Jesus persists. Just days after I was at this hero’s grave, Christians from all over the world, despite all this science and all this progress and all this technology, confessed what the earliest believers in the catacombs of Rome cried out: “Christ is risen indeed.”

Thomas Jefferson is still dead. I thank God for him, but standing at his grave reminds me how limited even his legacy can be in the grand scheme of trillions of years of cosmic time. It also reminds me of the contrast with (the One) whose monument isn’t a house or…even a simple grave-marker. It’s instead a borrowed tomb that isn’t filled anymore.

That empty tomb is, itself, a declaration of independence. By raising Jesus from the dead, God declared him (and all who are in him) to be free from death, free from the curse, free from Satan’s accusation. I suppose you could say that Jesus was endowed by his Father with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness … except that these blessings don’t end in a graveyard.

The radio program, This American Life, tells the story about the late writer David Rakoff, who had a hard time believing what was right in front of his eyes. In 1986, Rakoff’s company in Tokyo was working on a computer program that would allow expats like himself to write short little messages to one another after logging on to the network.

David was not impressed. He thought, “What kind of loser would log onto a computer [just to] talk to someone?” And in a moment of decisiveness, he went into work and quit. “Sayonara, suckers! Good luck with your ‘network’!” Of course, we can all guess what that network became. It was the beginning of a little thing called the internet.

David has other stories too. Earlier in the 1980s, he went to a dance club and heard a young blonde singer from Michigan and thought, “Boy, is she lousy!” That singer was later known by the name, “Madonna.” Again, working in publishing, he was handed a manuscript and passed it off as “subliterate drivel” and an “easy pass.” That turned out to be a book called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which went on to sell 15 million copies as one of the best-selling works of the 1990s.

Apparently, seeing isn’t always believing--even when it’s right in front of your eyes.

As part of a grand jury inquest, two Orange County sheriffs testified that they didn’t know it was against the law to falsify police reports. To virtually no one’s surprise but their own, these deputies were fired and prosecuted.

Bryce Richmond Simpson and Joseph Anthony Atkinson Jr. were caught up in a department-wide evidence scandal that was unearthed in 2019. The two were asked to account for discrepancies in their daily police reports; their reports showed them submitting evidence, when in reality they’d failed to do so.

These two were part of a group of 17 deputies investigated for failing to adhere to proper chain of custody protocols regarding evidence collection. The investigation was sparked by an internal audit, which revealed that over a two-year period, 27% of the deputies were found to have delayed evidence submissions by at least 31 days.

Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Carrie Braun told reporters that the investigation has prompted new requirements and more robust testing protocols. Braun wrote, “Evidence booking protocols now require deputies to include confirmation of the booked evidence in their report, which is then reviewed by a supervisor before being signed off. The Department also conducts randomized spot checks every month … to ensure evidence is booked as documented.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians ought to be known for a commitment to honesty and integrity, especially if we occupy positions of power; otherwise, our witness is compromised.

Douglas Murray is a prolific humanist writer and social critic who has authored two bestselling books. He finds himself in the odd position of being a self-professed non-believer who nevertheless has great respect for Christianity and the positive role it has played in building Western civilization--to the point of calling himself a “Christian atheist.”

On an episode of the Unbelievable podcast, Murray was asked, “Why don’t you just believe in God?” His response has always been that he genuinely finds it difficult to accept certain aspects of the Christian argument. Belief in God, he noted, cannot be faked or forced.

Esther O’Reilly, also a guest on the program, noted that if men are rational animals, then God must deal with them as such. Therefore, there can be evidence that fully satisfies man’s search for these truths, both intellectually and spiritually, as opposed to requiring a blind leap of faith. The historical reliability of the New Testament, for instance, is one such piece of evidence, since it attests to the truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This evidence is available to all who wish to judge it, point by point.

The host of the program, Justin Brierley, asked Murray what it would take for him to make a return to faith in God and Christianity. Murray said “I think I’d need to hear a voice.” Brierley asked “Literally a voice from beyond?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “I mean it literally.”

He admitted to being fascinated by the lack of such experiences in the West when compared to places like the Middle East or Africa. He also cited the utter incredulity with which Christians in the West treat individuals who claim to have had such experiences. He said, “this has historically been one of the ways in which religion has thrived, in visions.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God has given us evidence for belief in him through creation (Psa. 19:1-6; Rom 1:4), through fulfilled prophecy (Isa. 7:14; Micah 5:2), and through the resurrection of Christ (John 20:1-9; Rom. 1:4) to name a few. But there are many who simply choose not to believe.

Mary Jo Sharp writes in her book, Why I Still Believe, “There’s something else going on here. Humans don’t always ‘believe it when they see it.’” She then offers the example of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was careful to document his visit to a concentration camp during the Second World War.

In an April 1945 letter to George C. Marshall, he wrote this about his visit to a concentration camp in Germany: “The things I saw beggar description … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick … I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

Eisenhower ordered the collection of documentation of the Holocaust, resulting in 80,000 feet of film footage, which was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. Eisenhower also collected numerous photos, including ones of himself at concentration camps to provide evidence of first-hand witness.

Yet it didn’t take long for Holocaust deniers to appear. These deniers are people who have access to an abundance of testimony and evidence of the existence of the Holocaust. Somehow, with all the evidence available, the Holocaust deniers remain unconvinced of this horrific event in human history.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Apologetics; Resurrection of Christ; Unbelief – So also many deny the resurrection of Jesus, in spite of “many convincing proofs that He was alive” (Acts 1:3) and hundreds of eyewitnesses (1 Cor. 15:6).

God’s creative ability truly is more wondrous than anything man can conceive. For example, the spider and its web elicit considerably more astonishment than the man-made intricate world wide web. The 48,000 known species of the spider were given an awe-filled treatment by the magazine New Scientist.

Weighing between 50 and 80 milligrams most spiders know how to plan ahead. They alter the size and structure of their webs according to the remaining silk reserves in their glands, ensuring that they don’t run out midway. They are also sensitive to the weather. In low temperatures, they make simpler structures with bigger gaps between the spirals to avoid spending too much time exposed to the cold.

Spiders are so adept in the manufacture of their webs, that in most cases the prey has no chance. They tweak the tension of silk strands to boost the transmission of vibrations from a struggling insect, allowing the spider to respond more quickly. They can even learn from near misses. If their prey hits the web but then escapes, spiders will lay down more sticky silk to ensure this doesn’t happen in future.

Like humans, spiders have a fondness for travel. Spider silk--the envy of human engineers--is put to a huge range of uses. This includes using it for a sort of flight known as “ballooning,” in which a few threads, lifted by electrostatic forces in the atmosphere, carry them far and wide on nothing more than a light breeze. Spiderlings are known to survive without food while travelling in air currents of jet streams for 25 days or longer.

In an interview with AARP, comedian John Cleese was asked: What do you think is the meaning of life? He replied:

I believe that there’s an afterlife, although I can’t explain it. I think the evidence is too strong that there’s something going on there that contemporary science knows nothing about. If I have anything useful to do, apart from making people laugh now and then, it’s to persuade people that this stuff ought to be looked at – without making great assumptions about what it means or how it happens.

What happens when a CSI-style forensic detective goes to Calvary to investigate what transpired after Jesus' crucifixion? J. Warner Wallace is a forensic detective specializing in cold-case investigations. As an atheist Wallace became intrigued with the Gospels and their account of Jesus' resurrection because “the most important question I could ask about Christianity just so happened to fall within my area of expertise. Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” It would prove to be the ultimate cold-case forensic investigation because eyewitnesses and material evidence that could be used to prove or disprove what happened have been gone for nearly 2000 years. Wallace came away utterly convinced that it was true.

As an atheist, Wallace had always assumed that the resurrection was a lie, believing that the twelve apostles “concocted, executed, and maintained the most elaborate and influential conspiracy of all time.” When Wallace looked at the evidence and as an “unbeliever: he found four minimal facts to be substantiated “by both friends and foes” of Christianity:

1. Jesus died on the cross and was buried.

2. Jesus’ tomb was empty and no one ever produced his body.

3. Jesus’ disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead.

4. Jesus’ disciples were transformed following their alleged resurrection observations.

Wallace tells how he then used the kind of abductive reasoning he would use at a crime scene “inferring the most reasonable explanation” and came up with several hypotheses:

One: The disciples were mistaken about Jesus’s death. Jesus survived his crucifixion and appeared to disciples after he recovered. This theory fails to explain what the disciples saw when they brought Jesus down from the cross. Didn’t they check if he was breathing, if his body was cold, or if rigor mortis had set in? Is it reasonable to believe they would have not noticed any of these conditions common to dead bodies?

Two: The disciples stole the body and fabricated the story of the resurrection. While this explanation accounts for the empty tomb, it fails to account for the transformed lives of the apostles. The apostles, who had been cowards, were now suddenly as bold as a battleship because of the lies they themselves had concocted.

Three: The disciples were delusional. This fails to account for the empty tomb. More importantly, Wallace argues that he has never encountered large groups having identical hallucinations.

Four: An imposter tricked the disciples, convincing them that Jesus was alive. This theory fails to account for the empty tomb and requires an impersonator. The disciples were highly skeptical and the impersonator would have had to be adept at copying Jesus’ mannerisms. Above all, he would have needed to possess miraculous powers since the disciples’ report Jesus working miracles after the resurrection.

Five: The resurrection is a wildly exaggerated legend that grew exponentially over time. This theory clashes with the record of witnesses making claims about the resurrection from the earliest days of the Christian movement.

Wallace concludes: “The resurrection is reasonable. The answers are available; you don’t have to turn off your brain to be a believer.” Wallace joins a long line of intellectuals who are part of the “resurrection genre” of writers--sceptics who started out to disprove the resurrection and ended up believing that it is true.

In 2009, Marilyn Sewell, the retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland Oregon, interviewed Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the time. Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity or hell or a literal resurrection. Hitchens was an atheist and didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. Hitchens died of cancer in December 2011 but at the time of the interview he was riding a wave of popularity from his best-selling book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This interview is especially interesting because it’s between a very popular atheist and a liberal minister. At one point in the interview the liberal minister asked Hitchens if her Christianity was any different in his opinion:

Marilyn Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Preaching Angles: Although an atheist, Christopher Hitchens recognized that the resurrection, atonement, and other theological beliefs are necessary to conservative Christianity. Hitchens and Sewell also demonstrate a postmodern disbelief or denial of the resurrection.