Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
It is disappointing, I guess, to learn the seems to be an increasing number of people, particularly in western countries, just reject the notion of a creator God. I'm sure many of these people think, well, maybe there's something out there. But they don't consider that there is a Creator God and therefore we have a moral responsibility to a creator.
That if there is a creator God, that he has a plan for us, that there are specific moral values that we should live to, there are specific things that we should do. And of course, from a Christian perspective, those things are summarised in the Ten Commandments that talks about not worshipping another God, having no other gods in our life, that there's just the one creator God, to not try and make images of that God and bow and worship them, or take the Lord's name in vain. And in particular to remember the 7th day, every 7th day, which according to the Jewish records occurs with our Saturday, to remember that God created us, that we were made by God, this creator God.
And then it goes on with other laws to respect and honour our parents and not to commit adultery. That marriage is special and sanctified between a man and a woman, and not to kill or steal or lie or covet. So these are basic laws there.
And of course, when Jesus came and lived among us, and the records say that God himself, the Creator, came in human form and lived among us, to actually teach us. And of course, Jesus'teachings were essentially to love God and to love our fellow man. In other words, care for our fellow man, look after our fellow man, our neighbour, and seek to do things that are good, that are going to be a blessing and positive.
Now of course, a lot of people don't accept that Jesus was God. Perhaps some people find it hard, the Bible talks about that Jesus came in human flesh, well, in the likeness of human flesh actually. And we know that Jesus died, was put to death by people.
But it's amazing, his teachings and of course the Bible accounts, records the account of many witnesses that saw supernatural events take place. They saw the healing of people from diseases such as leprosy. They saw cripples healed, they saw blind people receive their sight and they even saw dead people raised to life.
And particularly the account of Lazarus that had been dead for several days. And of course, people back in those days were very familiar with death because it occurred just there, it was just in their homes and around them. It wasn't so insulated in hospitals and so forth as it is today in many places.
And so they were quite familiar with the situation. And was Lazarus being raised three days after he had been buried or put in the tomb in the cave. So there were a lot of examples here and a lot of evidence was recorded and people wrote about what had occurred.
And of course, this led to the power of Christianity in spreading the news that, yeah, Jesus himself, even though he'd been killed on the cross by Roman soldiers who were very professional at killing people, not only had been whipped extensively beforehand, but nailed to the cross and then speared. And yet the people saw him raised from the dead. His wounds had been healed, but the scars were still there and there were many, many witnesses to that.
And that, of course, became the reason why Christianity spread, because people saw these effects. People who had seen these effects wrote about them, they told others, they realised it was so real. And then, of course, there were many miracles followed with the early Christian workers and missionaries that went out at that particular time.
So there's this overwhelming evidence for the existence of God, for the existence of the supernatural. But within our education system, particularly in Western countries, we have diminished the exposure, particular in the secular schools, to the Bible people. I guess the curriculum has expanded to allow for all the modern technology and modern history, that people have become less familiar with this history.
And secondly, there's been the challenges, there's been the challenges to the archaeological evidence for the Bible, there's been challenges to the different historical accounts and so forth. But when we look at the overall balance, as I said, when we reexamine in many of the previous talks, when we look at the archaeological evidence, there's so much evidence that the Bible is a very accurate account. We have great scientists of the past, like Newton and so forth, spent more time studying the Bible or Newton's case, know, in science, and wrote commentaries on the books Daniel and Revelation.
Now. In particular, these books talk about prophecies, they talk about the future, particularly the book of Daniel. And, of course, sits accurately outlined the history of the world, particularly the history of Europe up till the present time, with the last account saying that the countries of Europe would never be united and Christ would return.
God would return. During the time when Europe was still a multitude of independent states, of course, that's preserved to this day. People have attempted to unite Europe, but not completely.
And that's exactly what the Bible described, that there'd be attempts, attempts through marriage, all sorts of ways, but it would never hold together. So it's very interesting, these concepts of prophecies. Now, just recently I was reading an article on Wikipedia about free will, and this is a very interesting article that some listeners may be interested in reading.
It's highly technical, uses a lot of philosophical definitions and so forth. But one of the interesting things that they talk about is this whole concept of fate or destiny that is part of one of the aspects of considering free will and particularly destiny. So destiny sort of allows for free will to a certain degree, but in the end there's a plan.
And in my view that sort of fits the Bible scenario. Now, again, many people, particularly professional people and scientists, are rejecting this whole concept of God and the supernatural. And they don't want young people taught about the overwhelming evidence for creation that we see particularly in the biological aspects of living systems, the amazing biochemistry and codes that exist there, which is all pointing to this amazing, super intelligent mind.
And of course we have this major problem of evolutionary processes working on through chemical mutations. Our consciousness, our mind, it's non material, our thoughts are non material. They're separate from the atoms and molecules and chemical reactions associated with mutations.
It seems that our mind, our thoughts can affect chemical reactions, they can affect electrical voltages. So it works that way, but it doesn't seem to work the other way. And one of the reasons is of course the whole concept of free will and that's why this argument on Wikipedia titled Free Will is very interesting because it looks at whole range of philosophical arguments associated with the free will issue and the free will arguments that philosophers have.
And of course there's no definitive answer to this, but I think one of the things that we can explain and look at is that today people still experience, we experience dreams, we experience premonitions. And I think there's overwhelming evidence that these dreams and premonitions are examples of supernatural interactions with us. So one of the whole concepts, if we look at destiny is this whole concept that there is a creator God who has a definite plan for the universe, for this world, for life, on this world.
And that is outlined in the Bible. The Bible sets out the prophecies that one day Jesus will return, god will return and he will bring judgement on the earth, on the people who know not accepted God's offer of salvation, of redemption and have continued to do wrong things against their fellow man, against the environment and so forth. God is going to bring judgement on those people.
And that's why the gospel message that Jesus was God, that he's died in our place so that we don't have to die, so God can forgive us. Because God predicted that if man sins that he will die. But God didn't really want us to die.
So after we had made that mistake, he offered that way out. And that's why Christianity offers such a fantastic message to the world. And again, there were the prophecies associated with that.
And God explains that one of the reasons why we can believe that God is God is that he has set out certain things that will occur in the future. And a number of those, as I referred to earlier, are mentioned in the Book of Daniel. But there are many other prophecies in the bible as well and these can be looked up on the internet or a book on Bible prophecies.
Now, one of the other things that the Bible talks about is the role of dreams. So for example, it talks about in the Old Testament, joseph having a dream that one day his family would bow down to him. He interpreted a dream, a very vivid dream that one of his fellow prisoners had.
That point to the fact that there would be seven years of plenty of bountiful harvest followed by seven years of very severe drought. And as a result of that dream, joseph, who was able to convince the Pharaoh to store up grain and food supplies for the drought years, which they did. And so that all came to pass.
We also have other dreams where Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, received a dream and an angel warning them to flee as soon as the child was born, which they did. And of course then Herod, when he found out that a new king had been born or the spiritual king of Israel had been born, he ordered the killing of all the children under two years of age. And so Joseph had been warned in a dream to escape and to avoid that.
And of course, when we look at the secular accounts as well, there are many accounts, I think it's Josephus that writes one of the ancient historians writes about how Julius Caesars'wife had a dream warning him not to go to the Forum the morning that he was killed. And it's interesting, I guess as I've talked to many of my friends, they've had strong sort of premonitions of various things at times. I had one quite recently.
One of my children, one of my sons was invited to a friend's 40th birthday party and so he was going, getting ready to go and I had this really strong premonition of just concern. And so I spoke to my son about it and he was travelling for a way and he'd be travelling at night. I felt so concerned, I sent him a special text and I didn't know, I thought maybe something would go wrong at the party or something like that.
But he sent back and assured me that he was driving very carefully, he was resting every 2 hours at the time he'd received my CFD, just stopped for a meal. But then later I got a message the next day that that night he'd been in an accident, but praise the Lord, he he wasn't injured. And what had happened was a car had broken down on the highway in the fast lane and had been left in the fast lane on a dark night.
It was late at night, no moon black car and the lights hadn't been left on and had been left parked in the fast lane on the freeway and people had stopped and had their lights on on the side of the road. And my son had seen the people on the side of the road. And then as he'd deviated to give room because he'd been travelling in the slow lane, so that he was a distance away from the people standing on the side of the road, hadn't seen this car without lights on and had crashed into the side of it.
So I said, this car is repaired now. But it's interesting, I had this really strong premonition of concern and there are many, many examples of that. There are many accounts prior to the Titanic disaster of people really concerned and writing to their relatives about their concern about the trip.
Matter of fact, there was a book written called The Wreck of The Titan, which more or less described the same scenario happening that a ship would strike an iceberg and sink. And yet this, up until that time, was an almost unheard of event. And the book The Wreck of the Titan was published just before, about ten or 15 years before the Titanic sank.
The Aberfam Mine disaster in Wales years ago was another one where children came home and told their parents not to worry, that they would soon be with Jesus. And of course, large number of children were killed in that mine slip that buried the school in the town. Of course, one of the things that fascinates me is some of the dreams that have changed the course of history.
For example, the Indian lawyer Mahandas Gandhi had been seeking ways to free people from the colonial subjugation of the British in India at that time. Back in 1919, they actually introduced the Roll It Act, the British government, which was a way of imprisoning people suspected of sedition without a trial. And so it's interesting that Gandhi had just was thinking, how can he help his people be free from this? And he had a dream.
And in that dream he had the thought to get the people of India to suspend their business activities to 24 hours and devote time to fasting and prayer. And the resulting nonviolent mass strikes of 1919, which he organised, became a major turning point in India's efforts to achieve self determination. It's interesting too.
Emperor Constantine, I had a very interesting dream when he was going out to do battle with Maxentius and he had a vision that he was to put a cross on the shields, on the soldier's shields. And Maxentius was subsequently defeated in quite a remarkable manner at the famous battle at Milvian Bridge. And it's interesting that these visions were actually told by Constantine to Eusubus, who was a priest at the time.
And Constantine became a converted man at that time, became a very strong Christian. And during the last ten years of his reign, he became increasingly pious and devoted more and more time to reading and studying the scriptures, the Christian scriptures, listening to sermons and even delivering talks in church. And it's interesting that the effect of that vision had on him.
And of course, it led to the establishment of what then became the Holy Roman Empire and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion back then. It's interesting. Even the philosopher Descartes had an interesting dream.
He had a number of dreams and he puzzled over their interpretation. And as a result of one of the dreams, he developed the whole concept of combining Euclidean geometry and algebra, which became the cartesian coordinates that we use today in graphs. It's interesting too, the Indian mathematician Srinivya Rama Manjan, who did a lot of advances to number theory in the early 19 hundreds.
In a biographical article published in Scientific American back in 1948, he talked about how in his dreams he saw mathematical formula and he would get up and write these down after waking. And these were later. Godfrey H.
Hardy at Trendy College in Cambridge University, who was one of the world's leading mathematicians at the time, spent quite a bit of time and subsequently verified these equations that had been given to Ramamarjan at that time. And some of these examples, of course, were recorded in Paul Davies book The Mind of God. And I think we have another one, of course, was Dmitry Mendelev, who is professor of Chemistry at the Institute of St.
Petersburg in Russia. And he later wrote that he saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into places required awakening. He immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper and of course, that became the periodic table that we use.
The German chemist Kakuli Again, who was responsible for the structure, understanding the structure of organic molecules, again worked out the structure of benzene as a result of seeing the solution in a dream. And another case, of course, is back in 1921 when Frederick Banting was carrying out research on the cause of diabetes at the University of Toronto. He records that he awakened from sleep one night and wrote down the sentences which he'd seen in a dream.
He's impressed to take the pancreas of a dog and tie it up and wait till the glands shrivel up, then cut it, wash it out, philtre the precipitation. And this resulted in successfully isolating the hormone now known as insulin. I also think of the famous it information technologist professor Dr.
Werner Git, who writes his story. In the book I published, the God Factor 50 scientists and academics explain why they choose to be believing God. Professor Git writes that his father was captured.
He was a German soldier captured as a prisoner of war in the Second World War. And after the war, he had no idea where his family were. And the family had lived in East Germany.
And so most of them had been taken captive and taken into Russia. But Werner, who was a young boy, very young boy, and some cousins were able to successfully escape before the Russians arrived. But Werner's father had no idea where his son had been taken.
And in a dream after when the war ended, the prisoners were encouraged to write to their families, but he had no idea where to write. And then he had this dream where an uncle said to him, said to the father, you must come and visit us. And the father in the dream spoke to him, said, well, I don't know where you live.
And in his dream, he was given this address and he subsequently wrote to that address, which was in Denmark, and that's where his son Werner had been taken. And Werner was the only member of his family that he was able to be reunited with. And she understood the other members had probably died.
And so to me, this is clear indication for the existence of a supernatural mind that interacts with us. Just like the dreams that influenced Joseph, who was married to Mary, that influenced Joseph in Egypt, and many other dreams that are recorded in the Bible, the dreams that King Nebuchadnezzar had that were interpreted by Daniel, these all point to the existence of this supernatural God that the Bible describes, the Creator God. And so it behoves us, really, to learn more about him and to recognise that, yep, he does have a plan for our lives and one day he will be returning and there will be a judgement.
But he's a loving God and wants us to come to him and accept him as our Saviour. You've been listening to Faith And Science and remember, if you want to re listen to these programmes, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the radio button and the Listen button and you'll see the Faith and Science programme there.
I'm Dr John Ashton. Have a great day
