Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith in science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just the other day I watched a movie with my wife. It was called Sabina, and it was on about the store story of the couple that founded voice of the martyrs. Sabina's husband, Richard, had been an atheist and, well, actually they were both atheists, but they became christians as a result of some quite impressive answers to prayer, actually, and challenging God.
And they learnt to witness for God and the Bible. And initially, their initial work was during the. And their conversion was during the second World War, but they continued on after the war, witnessing in communist countries, and they suffered a lot of persecution.
I think the husband, Richard, was jailed for 14 years and including three years of solitary confinement in the communist countries. And the wife too was put into prison, the Sabina. But one of the interesting things, of course, was that these communist regimes denied the existence of God.
There was no God. And today there are many governments that the official position is that there's no God. And unfortunately, in many western countries, while it's not the official position, this is becoming a default position via education, as we have our secular education pushes the whole idea that science can explain everything.
And where's the evidence for God? Well, of course the evidence for God is there in amazing answers to prayer and miracles that are still happening. One of the things that impressed me in the film, which is a true story, it was actually made by voice of the martyrs, that it's a biographical film, um, of this couple that founded the organisation to sort of reach particularly people who were missionaries in communist countries where they were facing fierce persecution often. And in the film it portrayed that the guy was in a TB hospital, a TB sanatorium in the mountains in Europe, trying to recover from the disease tuberculosis, and saw people dying.
And as he was there contemplating, and he'd lived a very affluent, worldly lifestyle prior to this, that was there a purpose in life? Was there a creator? Did all this amazing scenery and beautiful plants and flowers and this sort of thing. How did that come? Was there a creator? And he had an experience while visiting a cemetery. Once he got a little bit better and was allowed to go for walks.
And he walked and was sitting in a cemetery contemplating that all these people, they had lived, but now they're dead. What was going to happen to them? Was there a future for these people? Or was death the end? Were they just going to rot away? And so one day he challenged God. He prayed a prayer and said, God, if you're real, reveal yourself to me.
If you really exist, reveal yourself to me because I don't believe you do exist. And just then there was a man passing by, or a few moments later, a man was passing by and started talking to him and then recognised that Richard was a jew. So originally they were secular Jews.
They didn't practise Judaism, but they know Jews by descent. And Richard answered, well, yeah, he's a non practising Jew. And the man said, my wife and I have been praying for you.
And this really stunned him. And he said, I brought along this Bible to give to you. And the guy was taken aback because he'd just prayed this prayer, challenging God to reveal himself.
And the man said, look, we have been praying for some time that we would be able to witness about Christianity to a Jewish person. And so Richard took the Bible and that began his journey in finding God. As he followed up, began reading it, started going to an anglican church, and then later went on to become a lutheran pastor.
And it's quite powerful. It was certainly a powerful film and an amazing witness to the lives and what they achieved through faith. So we have this overwhelming evidence just in the daily lives of christians, of answers to prayer, providential care and so forth, and leading in the lives of christians.
But we also have scientific evidence, we have really powerful scientific evidence now for the existence of a creator. And it's such a shame that this, again, isn't being emphasised, and, of course, it's not being taught in communist countries. And now, how foolishly, in western countries where we have the freedom to read the Bible, people are being taught science in such a way that they're being given the impression that you don't have to believe in the Bible.
Young people are taught evolution. Evolution is absolutely impossible. It can't happen.
And one of the reasons is the chemical DNA that we'll talk about. And one of the articles that I came across on this is in the book Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature, which was published by Andrews University just this in 2021. And a doctor, Sven Ostring, contributes. And he has a PhD in the area related to sort of electrical engineering and programming. And he writes that back in 1869, the swiss doctor Frederick Mishna was working at the University of Tubingen, and he was studying the chemical composition of cells in surgical bandages, in the pus of surgical bandages that he received from after hospital operations. And he discovered a substance there that didn't seem to be either a protein or a fat.
And he found this in the nucleus of the cells that he was studying in the pus from these bandages. And he called it nucleon. But it was really another 75 years later before Francis Crick and James Watson received recognition for their role in studying the x ray structure.
Using x rays to study the structure of these compounds. And they were studying the coiled strands of nucleon and they figured out the structure, the double helix structure of the molecule, which then, once they knew, the structure, was renamed DNA, which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. So deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, a lot easier to say DNA.
And of course, while the structure is pretty exciting, DNA literally contains the codes for all the different life forms on earth. And it reveals, as Dr. Ostring points out, that life is not just physics and chemistry, but also includes information.
Now, this is a super challenge for evolution, really, because if evolution just deals with physical things, information is a non physical thing. It's an abstract sort of thing. It's interesting that the atheist Richard Dawkins observed that after Watson and Crick, Dawkins points out that we now know because the discovery of Watson and Crick, that genes themselves are long strings of pure digital information.
And even Dawkins admits, and he writes, what is more, they are truly digital in the full and strong sense of computers and compact discs, not in the weak sense of the nervous system. The genetic code, and this is quote from Dawkins, the genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight level code as in some telephone systems, but a caternary code with four symbols. The machine codes of the genes is uncannily computer like.
And so Sven Ostring points out, Dr. Ostring points out that, in short, DNA functions as an information system that encodes, stores and retrieves the information needed for life itself. And this information system uses an Alphabet.
It uses an Alphabet code. It uses four nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, thiamine and guanine, which are represented by act and g. Australian Capital Territory is good.
That's an easy way to remember it. I do, anyway. And it's interesting that alphabets, and of course, some computer systems use binary alphabets, zeros and ones.
Of course, the english Alphabet has 26 letters. And he asks the questions. Ostring asks the question, why does it have four letters? Now the Hungarian theoretical evolutionary biologist, yours Zasmary, asked that very question.
And by understanding an information theoretic study of genetic information system, he was able to show that a four letter genetic Alphabet is optimal with respect to compromise between two factors. And so the two factors were copying fidelity and catalytic efficiency. So as the size of the genetic Alphabet increases, the catalytic efficiency increases.
However, as the Alphabet size increases, the copying fidelity decreases. And so Strasmeri proposed that the genetic Alphabet is a frozen evolutionary optimum for the hypothesised RNA world in which life was supposed to have originated. And it's reassuring to know, of course, that the Alphabet that encodes everything about us, together with advocs, bobcats, coyotes, and all the way down to zebras, is really optimal.
And so, of course, these scientists are studying it. I mean, Ostring is a creationist, but these other scientists, including Dawkins, of course, are studying it from an evolutionary point of view. But it's interesting, this finding that they're using a four letter system seems to be optimal in terms of its ability to just create meaning, but at the same time, preserve or reduce copying errors.
And it's interesting, in February 2019, Stephen Benner and a large team of researchers were able to expand the genetic Alphabet from four to eight by making small adjustments in the molecular structure of the standard nucleotides. They were able to create four new nucleotides, which they used the letters SBP and Z. So Banner's expanded genetic Alphabet shows that the standard genetic Alphabet is not the only one physical prophecy possible.
So where did it come from? So what these scientists showed, well, there could have been other possibilities that could have formed, but why just this one that seems so perfect? It's interesting. Ostring observes that there are four explanations for the origin of the genetic Alphabet. And he says, one, it's physically necessary for a genetic Alphabet to have four nucleotide letters.
The research work of Benner and his team in expanding the genetic Alphabet has demonstrated that this explanation is not true. So there doesn't have to be four letters. As they've shown, the genetic Alphabet contains four letters by chance.
So what he's looking at is, what's the explanation for the four letters? Is it physically necessary? Well, Banner said no. Could it arise by chance? So, the work of strasmerias demonstrate that the size of the genetic Alphabet is optimal, and the probability that the optimal four letter Alphabet would be landed on simply by chance is vanishingly small. Other explanations are therefore more likely to be true.
So what he's saying is the chances that it could form by chance is very close to impossible. Another explanation that's been put up is that the four letter genetic Alphabet evolved. The difficulty with this explanation, according to Ostring, is that there are no empirical evidence that the genetic Alphabet evolved.
Evolution requires a self replicating mechanism. But this requires an information system that is based on Alphabet. There is no evidence that any protogenetic Alphabet existed.
Therefore, for the genetic Alphabet to evolve, it would have required some form of chemical evolution process. And it must be emphasised, though, that we have no empirical evidence of this chemical evolution process. So it's fair to say that all chemical evolutionary explanations for the origin relays of life have reached an impasse.
And of course, he said, the last explanation is that the genetic Alphabet was intelligently designed, like every other Alphabet we know of, including the expansion of the genetic Alphabet that Benner and his colleagues have achieved. And notice they're quite intelligent designers. And it took a whole team of experts to design an alternative one, SPB and Z.
So what Ostring argues is that the evidence that we have that is powerfully supporting that DNA must have been created by a designer. It's not something that is a physical necessity. The chances of it arising by chance of vanishingly small, almost to impossible.
And the four letter genetic Alphabet, again would have, if it evolved somehow. There's no evidence of that, or no mechanism for that as well. So that's quite fascinating and a very important point.
And another scientist, Dr. Orlex Yllano, is a molecular biologist who earned his PhD in the University of the Philippines. He talks about some of the amazing properties of the DNA molecule.
Now, it's interesting that the Francis Collins, Dr. Francis Collins, who worked out, or headed the team that worked, originally worked out the structure of the human genome. In other words, the human DNA molecule believes that God must have created life.
And I think as they studied DNA, they recognised it had to be created, because DNA is an amazing molecule. If it was straightened out, the total DNA in a human cell would stretch about one and a half to three metres. So this is pointed out by Dr. Yllano in his article in the same book, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature. And he's written an article, DNA: A Magnificent Nanomolecule. And the human genome contains around 3 billion base pairs of 46 chromosomes in about ten to the power 13 cells in the body.
In other words, the total length of DNA in an adult human being is. This is amazing. Is two by ten to the 13 metres long.
So that's long enough to wrap around the earth 500,000 times. Now, all these cells, ten to the power 13 cells in the human body, each have this piece of DNA, if stretched out, which would be one and a half to three metres long, and that's the length of the molecule, if it was stretched out and when you add up all the lengths in all the cells, the total length of that molecule would be long enough to wrap around the earth half a million times, 500,000 times. Blows your mind, doesn't it? Now, when you think about how evolutionists require these molecules and large molecules like DNA, to form by chance, not only is it chemically impossible for them to form by chance, particularly in water, in aqueous solution, which they reckon life evolved in, but also for the chemistry to form the structure, and you've got to have millions of identical molecules, it just blows the mind the amazing structures that are in nature that we have no idea of.
And evolutionists have to believe that these structures form by chance. And thus this. Dr. Yllano points out, thus, DNA is considered one of the most extended molecules on earth. And he writes, in spite of this very long configuration, it's well designed to fit inside the nucleus of a cell without distorting the encoded information. It has a stunning coiling ability, too.
The folded and packed DNA molecule is approximately 10,000 times shorter than its linear form. So the way it's folded and coiled shrinks its length by 10,000. Again, this is just incredible.
And even though this nanomolecule is tightly packed, it can quickly unpacked when the right signal is recognised by the cell. Also, remarkably, the uncoiling of DNA requires accurate sequential actions of what they call topoisomerases, their enzymes, to unpack the DNA supercoils. And so, again, all these structures have to be there.
And I think what happens is students are presented with such a simplistic view initially that they become enamoured with evolution. And then, of course, when they get to university and learn about some of these amazing details, of course, they're so firmly fixed on evolution that it doesn't occur to them. Hang on, this is all impossible for this sort of structures to have arisen by chance.
Dr. Yllano goes on, approximately 99.5% of DNA is similar in all humans, but the way it functions can vary greatly.
In other words, although we all have almost similar DNA makeup, if these DNA sequences are differentially processed from each other, we end up having different faces, complexions, hair patterns and eye colour. This makes each person phenotypically and genotypically unique. The uniqueness of the DNA sequence between and among species is utilised in fingerprinting individuals to a high degree of accuracy.
And so when you think about these aspects of how DNA molecule is there, it's absolutely incredible. DNA has a system that if, when it's replicated if there's an error it provide it corrects replication errors along the way. In some instances where an incorrect base is added, an enzyme, DNA polymerase, proofreads the base that has just been added and correspondingly corrects and replaces it with the correct nucleotide base.
Where some errors are not corrected during replication, Mitch match repair enzymes recognise the incorrectly added nucleotide and excise it, remove it and then replace it with the correct one. These intricate delivery systems, an extraordinary degree of timing and accuracy of these processes are hallmarks of intelligent design. There's so much more that is a stand science.
And that's why eventually, I mean, some mutations do get through under severe conditions, but again, this whole process is against evolution. The whole process is set up to preserve the code, not let it evolve and create all sorts of new things. Thus we have from science as we understand the science of DNA, it's powerful evidence for a creator God, absolutely overwhelming evidence.
And of course, the DNA code is useless, as I mentioned before, unless we've got a ribosome, a code reader to read it and utilise the code. The evidence pointing to a creator outside our physical existence, outside our universe, outside space and time, that doesn't need a beginning, fits the evidence that we have. It's got to be a super intelligence that did this.
And it is such a shame that young people are not being taught this overwhelming evidence for an amazing creative designer. And of course, we know through the experiences, answers, prayers and the inspiration that God has preserved through the Bible, that God came as Jesus and lived among us to teach us what the kingdom of God is, right like, so that we can turn to him and believe. If you want more information about the amazing things of DNA, there's a lot of information on the website www.creation.com and of course, if you want to relisten to these programmes, like today's talk, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button. And remember, let your friends know.
Put up links on your social media so that other people can learn this important evidence that there is an amazing creator God and a God who loves us. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN, Australia Radio.
