Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:17] Our personal worldview affects aspects of how we particularly interpret information that we receive. And from my perspective, it's quite concerning how the secularization of society, that is, that society has sort of removed God from our thinking and the existence of God, and in particularly the God of the Bible. When I refer to God, I'm meaning the God who's described in the Bible. And one of the reasons for this is that I think the Bible account is the most credible and historically verified and archaeologically verified accounts of man's interaction with a supreme being. And it's interesting, of course, that the history there, not only that's recorded in the Bible has been consistently verified by current observations and archaeological observations, but also the principles outlined in the Bible of a supernatural creator god outside. Space and time that's non material fits in with our understanding also of consciousness. In that our consciousness and our thoughts are non material as well. And the whole concept described in the Bible that we can pray and communicate with this power, and of course, that our mind and how we affect and what the things we believe, how we interpret observations. And for me, this is worrying because what's happened is we've got current theories that are being taught to young people and indeed have been taught for a couple of generations now include the Big Bang theory and the theory of evolution. Now, the theory of evolution is underpinned by this notion that life on Earth is billions of years old and has solely evolved over that time, becoming extremely complex about 600 million years ago. And we have all these radiometric dating scenarios that appear to support this. But what happens is when people begin talking about these dates and this sort of thing, they don't realize that these dates have not actually been verified independently. So the methods that we used to calculate these dates haven't actually been validated for the date range that they relate to. And we get all these different varying answers.
[00:03:35] So for know, at the moment we talk about dating, for example, here in Australia aboriginal sites, carbon 14 dating, say 25, 28,000 years with carbon 14 dating.
[00:03:54] And yet if we date dinosaur remains, we get the same sort of ages. If we date rocks that maybe have some wood trapped in them, we might get an age of, again, 25, 30,000 years for the carbon 14 dating, for the carbon material, and yet millions or tens of millions of years for the age of the rock, and yet they must be the same age. So we've got these massive inconsistencies. And then when people use these ages for 25, 30,000 years, we don't actually know what the carbon 14 content was at that time. And of course, if it was very low at that time due to the fact that there was greater dilution effect, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, lower cosmic ray flux reaching the Earth because cosmic rays produce the carbon 14, all these variables. And when we look at what we know it's likely to have been much lower in the past because the Earth's magnetic field was stronger in the past and so forth, as I've talked about previously. And hence that would have repelled cosmic rays and the resulting consequences. So what happens is we've got so much uncertainty. There now another area where we've got uncertainty is the Big Bang theory. But what happens is that when people are taught these mindsets they begin to interpret things in this worldview that, yes, the Earth is extremely old. Life on Earth is very old.
[00:05:33] Therefore, the Bible account can't be correct and therefore we don't have to worry about the guidelines for living and for caring for our environment for caring for each other the rules of morality that the Bible outlines. And yet, of course, the Bible has been written by people who experienced God firsthand in a very powerful way. And they recorded that message. It was written down. And people knew that they had had these experiences and they record the history. And we think, for example, the Bible records when the Israelites entered the Promised Land the Jordan River was miraculously stopped from flowing. The water actually piled up and the people were able to walk across and to remember that Joshua had a can of rocks put there as a reminder that this was a miracle that occurred. So we didn't forget. So we have these accounts that have been accurately preserved but they're all being dismissed these days as sort know, miracles don't happen and so forth. But when we look and drill down into these situations if we look, for example, at the theory of evolution I've talked about many examples of amazing complex design structures within living organisms. Amazing biochemistry is extremely complex. Amazing molecular machines that are also completely complex that have to be biologically assembled in a particular order in order for them to work.
[00:07:21] And all this order has to be programmed. And of course, the whole theory assumes that all the processes that enable the molecular biomolecular construction of these machines that are essential for the everyday processes that we take for granted in not only ourselves but in all living organisms plants and animals arose by random, chance blind mutations. Their mutations are just chemical reactions that have gone out of place as a result of environmental factors ultraviolet light, excess heat chemicals, stray chemicals and so forth in the environment. And we know it's absolutely impossible. It can't happen.
[00:08:13] But yet this whole concept is being clung to very recently. Of course, there's more. If we look at the Big Bang theory which is still taught as the origin of the universe there's just consistently more and more evidence pointing to the fact that it can't have happened that way.
[00:08:38] Look, some of the world's top astronomers decades ago pointed out that the Big Bang theory just doesn't work. Herman Bondi at Cambridge. There was Hilton up at the Max Planck Institute. Thomas Gold at Cornell. These were top astronomers. The leading astronomers in the world pointed out that the Big Bang theory doesn't work. And then back in February 2017, some of the top astrophysicists in the world from Harvard and Princeton pointed out that, again, the cosmic inflation, this rapid expansion that is supposed to underpin the Big Bang theory faces really serious challenges as a result of the latest astronomical data that had been received back then in 2017. And there was an enormous debate over their article Pop Goes the Universe that was published in February 2017 in Scientific American because scientists wanted to cling to this outdated Big Bang theory. And a number of scientists, about 40 scientists, I think, wrote in to Scientific Americans saying, well, this article essentially shouldn't have been published, and there's all these other papers supporting the Big Bang theory and this sort of thing. And then, as those astrophysicists from Princeton, Harvard pointed out, you don't arrive at truth by counting noses by the vote. But this is what's happening in science today, especially in areas such as archaeology, when we're measuring ages of things evolution. What is deemed as true is being arrived at as a result of how many people believe this. But these people that are voting, for example, for a particular view of science in most cases, my intuition is that in most cases, these people have not actually checked the data personally for themselves. They've not gone back to the fundamental issues involved. For example, there was a case just recently here in Australia where some politician pointed out that the claims that indigenous people have, that their history goes back 65,000 years or so, said it's very hard to validate these ages. What's the independent evidence for this?
[00:11:43] And it was interesting. There's a fact check group from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, RMIT University, and I'm an adjunct professor there in the area of applied science. But it's interesting. This group here had said, well, look, we've talked to these leading anthropologists and archaeologists, and their view is that this data is correct. And I thought, that's very interesting. So they've gone for the vote. They've gone for, okay, we can find so and so at Australian National University or wherever it was, and so and so at this other university, and they believe in these ages. But have we actually verified the optical stimulated Luminescence dating method? Have we actually validated the dating methods that were used to arrive at those particular dates? Where's the independent analysis of the DNA analysis I remember reading a paper about DNA analysis of 100 year old indigenous person's hair and so forth, and other DNA evidence that they have. And again, from this, they correlated that the material data back to these earlier material. But we are yet to see and really hone in on the interpretation of the DNA analysis because we know we've had lots of claims, for example, over the years, well, hang on, humans have 99% DNA, the same as chimpanzees and all these sort of things, or 96%, whatever the amount was.
[00:13:41] And again, when we drill into these things, we find, hang on, there's more to this story. It's not as clear cut as this. And the particular interpretations that people be placing when they're doing the analysis of the DNA and so forth is governed by their worldview.
[00:14:00] There was another classic example of this published recently in an article, cambush Food survive in Space on the 15 March 2023, which was a press release and so forth, from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Victoria. And it's interesting, the article was about how certain bush foods could be ideal for use in space travel because of certain particular properties that they have growing in the arid areas of Australia would enable them to be grown in artificial gardens in space and so forth. It was interesting that this long age evolutionary stand was being promoted.
[00:15:00] And so for a long time we'd heard that indigenous people had been living astray for 30,000 years. Then it became 40,000 years, and then later 50,000 years, and of course, nowadays 60,000 years. And it's interesting that this progression, one author has noted, is based more on a bandwagon effect than on any change in data.
[00:15:22] And so we could eventually expect to reach 100,000 years. But it's interesting in that the Royal Botanical Gardens, Victoria had this press release where it said that particular plant murnon had been used as a staple food for aboriginals for millions of years.
[00:15:45] And so again, this is published in something from the Royal Botanical Gardens. Victoria's royal Botanical Gardens.
[00:15:54] And the press release also displayed La Trobe University and so forth, and NASA.
[00:16:05] But after some weeks online, however, eventually the document was corrected to now read thousands of years. But what this points out is that people jump to conclusions without the proper scientific evidence needed to actually underpin that that is a scientific fact.
[00:16:31] Thomas Gold is professor of Astronomy at Cornell. I mean, he's dead now, he died a few years ago, but he was one of the top astronomers in the world. Fairly controversial character. But he points out, I remember in one of the articles I read some years ago that back in the early 19 hundreds there was an astronomical conference, or a conference for astronomers. And at this conference it was presented, the concept was presented that the Earth had a nine core. Now, by the end of the conference, people were so enamored by this idea, the scientists attending, that at the end of the conference people were talking about the Earth's sign core as if it had been established and of course, a lot of data. Now, we know that the Earth doesn't have a purine core at all. But the point that Thomas gole was making was that this whole idea really appealed to these scientists at the time. And without waiting to do further research to validate this hypothesis, people began talking about it so frequently that eventually it became accepted.
[00:17:47] A similar situation has arisen, for example, with the area in the area of evolution.
[00:17:55] If you go online and Google the Australian Academy of Sciences statement on creation, Evolution or Evolution and Creation from the Australian Academy of Sciences, you'll see that they make a number of assertions essentially that scientists now accept evolution as a fact, but it's just based on assertions. There's no reference there that this is now a scientific fact underpinned by research published in Nature by so and so and so and so, and also published in Science by another so and so and so and so that have corroborated the research findings. No, it's not like that at all. It's just a vote on worldview. And one of the things that frustrates me again is that where this isn't getting out into the curriculum. The people just talk about these long ages and millions of years as if they've been really thoroughly established, without realizing that the methods that are used to calculate these things and the theories underpinning them in many cases haven't actually been validated and haven't been verified. And the classic one, of course, is the Big Bang theory. And one of the reasons that looking at this is that in February 22 2023, on 22 February 2023, in the top science journal, Nature, volume six one six, pages two six six to two six nine, there was an article titled a Population of Red Candidate massive Galaxies 600 Million Years after the Big Bang. And these galaxies had stellar masses as high as 100 billion times our sun's mass.
[00:20:02] And it's interesting that this was an article reporting findings from the James Webb telescope. So there was a number of articles published in that volume of nature that came out.
[00:20:21] The journal actually came out on the 23 February. The article published online 22 February.
[00:20:31] And it's interesting because this data from the James Webb telescope was able to see much further than anything previously out into the universe. And the earliest images right now, those from the furthest way they should be in terms of the Big Bang theory, the youngest images. And it's interesting that in the Big Bang theory, gravity should not have had time to assemble matter into galaxies. And so galaxies, these spiral galaxies that were formed, fully mature spiral galaxies were found right at this early stage. And also the galaxies were much more massive than estimated that the big bang could form. And so these are massive problems for the big Bang theory.
[00:21:36] And there was another article that was published online by I think it was Physics Today. It was called the James Webb Space Telescope discovers enormous distance galaxies that should not exist. And it says and this was published just immediately after the Nature article. It says, these giant mature galaxies seem to have filled the universe shortly after the Big Bang. And astronomers are puzzled. And there were some pictures of six galaxies. And it says the heading underneath was, these six galaxies may force astronomers to rewrite cosmology books. Nobody expected them. They were not supposed to be there. And now nobody can explain how they had formed. And this is a very important aspect to realize that not only is there no currently no scientific observations that support the claims for the Big Bang theory itself, the Big Bang theory now really can't explain what we observe as well. So we have this major problem and we can see, as I said, it falls into two categories. The first category is the Big Bang theory with all its claims and timelines of 13 billion years ago and so forth. And this massive exposure or expansion of space itself into a fourth dimension, three dimensional space expanding fourth dimension with angio matter and so forth. And energy condensing into matter and the matter condensing into the stars and so forth.
[00:23:41] Not only is there no scientific observations that verify the claims of the Big Bang, but we now find that the Big Bang theory itself can't explain the structures that we observe in the timelines that we observe. And so this is as this article titled the James Webb Telescope Discovers Enormous Distant Galaxies That Should Not Exist. It was by Teresa Putervova pultarova. And if you Google that, you can see that there's another article that you could look up to. The James Webb Space Telescope's first year in space has blown astronomers away.
[00:24:37] And so one of the things that came out, one of the conclusions came out that was reported in this article was that only a little more than six months after the Webb team released the first observations from this grand observatory, scientists are already challenged to rewrite their theories about the early universe.
[00:25:01] And it's interesting. They quote one of the lead authors who's in Penn University in the US. And he says, we looked into the very early universe for the first time. We had no idea what we were going to find. But it turns out we found something so unexpected that it actually creates problems for science. And that was a statement coming from one of the authors of the original paper published in Nature. And he goes on to say, it calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question when we look at it. Science has no explanation for the origin of the universe apart from supernatural creation. And there's a lot more that could be said, too, about the situation that we find.
[00:26:04] We find that the solar system is remarkably stable.
[00:26:09] Another paper that was published in the Monthly Gnosis of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2022, volume 515, number four, pages 5594-5942 and following it was on the long term stability of the solar system in the presence of weak perturbation from stellar flybys. And again, what we're finding is that this growing astronomical evidence about the amazing stability of the solar system another article I was reading recently is that there's still no known explanation for comets. The comets were supposed to come from different areas in the solar system they proposed, but of course, they haven't been seen coming from these places. And the age of comets points very heavily to the fact that our solar system must be very young, only thousands of years old, impossible to be millions of years old. So when we look at this amazing evidence, it fits very strongly, fits the picture of creation that we read in the Bible, in Genesis.
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