Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Doctor John Ashton. One of the things that continues to frustrate me is that our young people are continuing to be taught the theory of evolution as the origin of life on earth.
And, of course, it's absolutely impossible that random, blind mutations to the DNA code could produce the complexity of the new bio, you know, of the new biochemistry that's required when you generate new body parts for some function, to create some new type of animal or plant or something species. One of the reasons that it continues, of course, to be taught is that it's now an official position in science. Evolution is now considered a fact of science.
And so the science academies have published statements to that effect. But it's interesting, when you look up these statements, for example, if you look up the statement on creation evolution, the Australian Academy of Sciences, they make these assertions, but they don't provide scientific evidence for it. It's not listed there.
So it's just a statement of faith, really. It's just a statement of faith. And similarly, when we look at the curriculums that our children have to be taught in school, they have to have an understanding of how evolutionary processes created all the different types of life.
And so, of course, this removes God from the picture. And it then seems that people are making decisions in our government, our politicians and so forth, just making a whole lot of decisions, ignoring the existence of God, a creator who revealed himself to people down through the ages. And of course, these revelations have been recorded in the Bible.
And this means that the Bible and Christianity, too, stands apart from most of the other faiths that are in the world, in that Christianity is very much an evidence based religion. It's not based on a tradition or a very narrow set of views. It's based on a collection of revelations from God that many different people had that fits together coherently and gives us an account of the history of the world from creation.
And one of the things, of course, that we take for granted is our mind and our thoughts. And of course, the Bible clearly states that, you know, wisdom comes from God. The ability for us to think logically comes from God.
And we know that our thoughts, again, are non material. And, of course, the theory of evolution has major problems in trying to explain the origin of consciousness. And this is, you know, very.
A very difficult thing. We. Our thoughts, which are not on material, you know, we can't weigh them.
We can weigh our brain, but we can't weigh our thoughts. And our thoughts enable us to make interesting choices. We have personalities.
And that really, of course, defines who we are as a sentinel being, as a being that has these thought processes. But I think from what I can see now, we're finding that as scientists and people growing up, they're making, beginning to make decisions that they think are right, but are ignoring the guidelines of God. And it seems that we're creating, particularly social environments that are not good for the long term stability of civilization.
And I've talked about some of these, the evidence in the past that once we start moving away from following the ten commandments, there's generally a decline in civilization stability, and that's taken over. And those civilizations then taken over by a stronger civilization that is operating closer to the guidelines of God. And it's fascinating when people are ignoring this and mocking perhaps the Bible and Christians.
And as I talk to people, even just general secular people, there's this general sense that, yes, we're moving into a space that isn't right, with a lot of ideas that people are just coming up with without evidence. It seems that truth is being decided by the vote, not on the basis of evidence. And one of the fascinating things, of course, underpinning this is where our thoughts are controlled by our brain.
And just in 2023, a major review was published in the science journal Nature of the human brain. Complexity that was the largest map of the human brain ever made was published in Nature, volume 622, or number 622, pages 679 to 680 was a review of this brain complexity study. And the nerve cells, or neurons, that make up the human brain.
They've discovered there are so many different types of them. So this major international study found that there are many, many different types of neurons and other cells in the brain. So there were 21 papers published simultaneously in various journals that revealed 461 types of brain cells, and that is broad categories of brain cells, 461 different types of brain cells with more than 3000 subtypes of brain cells.
And even the same gene that was found in a different part of the brain can behave differently. There was an example that a gene in a cell in the front of the brain was turned on by a different switch to the same gene in the cell at the back of the brain. And so what the researchers have found is a never before understood level of amazing complexity in the human brain.
Now, the human brain was already a perplexing puzzle, but of course, these findings indicate that scientists have a long, long way to go to understanding the human brain. And again, this is powerful evidence of a creator God. The complexity, as such, it could never evolve.
Now, further to this, there is another paper published in Nature in October 2023, and it was called a mind blowing IBM chip speeds up artificial intelligence. And what had happened was that the IBM have developed a new computer chip that was inspired by the design of the brain. So there's, with the development of this increase in artificial intelligence, if we're going to compete artificially with the brain, there's a huge demand for increasing computational power.
That is the speed at which computers can process information and increasing the ability of computers to deal with much larger domains of information so that they can gather the information from many sources and process them very, very quickly and make the different links. And so in response to this, researchers at IBM have looked in, they looked into the human brain to help them design a new chip. It's actually called North Pole, because, and this is another factor, the human brain is an exceptionally energy efficient and can process data extremely rapidly.
And one reason for this is that the brain does not need to continually transfer data between processing components that perform the calculations, which we call computer chips in a computer, and also, and between the chips, or in a analogy that would be in a computer that recall memory, which we call ram. And so this actual need to transfer in a physical computer with chips significantly slows down man made computers. But the new IBM's new North Pole chip copies the network designs of the white matter of the human brain's cortex to eliminate the need for data transfer between chips.
So isn't this, we evolutionists have to believe that random, chance, blind mutations over millions of years produce this complexity, right? But it's amazing design. And all this is encoded for in the DNA. And remember, the DNA code for the cells in the brain looks nothing like brain cells, right? It's just a code written with chemicals.
And those chemicals, we give them letters, a, c, t, and g to abbreviate their names. And the combination of those particular four chemicals is a code that enables a ribosome to assemble and build the cells that become the brain. And all this whole process to, you know, to build a brain that works like ours is so complex in design that we can do mathematically the chance of it happening.
And it's absolutely impossible. You know, I mean, even if there were, you know, as many units, as many atoms in as many universes as there are atoms in the universe, the probability of finding one specific atom in that many atoms is still less than the probability of all these functions occurring by random transmutations when we do the maths. And this is something I think, again, that the human mind finds it very, very hard to understand the amazing complexity of these machines and the human brain as a machine.
So it's very interesting that this, they've designed this network based on the design in the human brain, and yet we're teaching our kids that this whole amazing human brain evolved, right? There was no God in it. And obviously, this is powerful evidence for the creator God described in the Bible. And it's interesting.
The north Pole processor, or chip, uses one fifth of the energy of the current state of the art artificial intelligence chips and computes rather much faster. And of course, they're now looking to make further improvements that may make it possibly even 25 times more efficient than it currently is. And so they're saying, you know, this will help with artificial intelligence.
Of course, when you think about it, you know, just ordinary people off the street couldn't design a chip like this. It takes quite clever, you know, scientists to electrical engineers to design these chips. And of course, you know, IBM had a team of engineers, computer engineers, working to design this.
And yet, again, as I said, we continue to teach our children that our amazing brain, which is faster and is a far more advanced design, just arose by chance and ignores God. And it's just so sad. But of course, that's not, you know, the only machine that is in the human body, ATP synthase, is another amazing molecular machine that, again, has amazing properties.
Now, recently I talked about the amazing electric motor that propels the flagella in a simple bacteria and how this amazing electric motor that runs on protons rather than electrons for its power source and a proton gradient, and it has bearings, it has gears, rotator shafts, and this sort of thing, but not only that associated with it has to be the amazing logic system to assemble those proteins that make up all the different components of the bearings, the axles, the seals, the gearing and so forth, has to be assembled the right way, or again, it's not going to work. So this is also part of the code. So the code, DNA code, not only has to make the components, but it also has to make code that can be read by the ribosome to assemble the proteins in the right order.
And even once it has a motor, there's no point just having a motor unless you can direct it and steer it. And of course, that's done with the gearing mechanism. But if you're going to steer it, how are you going to control it? And of course, the steering is controlled by an amazing, again, analysis system that analyses and detects nutrient gradients in the surrounding material that the back in, so that the bacteria can swim towards food sources that they can then take in and absorb, transfer through the membrane and utilise to produce energy.
But again, so that's that amazing machine. But there's another very similar amazing machine called ATP synthase, which is an enzyme, but it's an enzyme. Now, enzymes are chemical molecules that speed up or facilitate chemical reactions that wouldn't otherwise occur.
And, of course, ATP synthase is, again, a molecular motor type enzyme. So the spinning action actually promotes the transfer and hydrogen transfer type reactions that are required in the synthesis. And it actually spins faster than turbine engines.
And, of course, again, this is absolutely amazing. When we look at this particular machine, it's an enzyme, and it's made up of a whole set of individual proteins that are assembled and manufactured for the energy storage substance that powers our body, which is ATP adenosine triphosphate. So adenotine triphosphate, we'll just call it ATP.
Now, this is sort of like the gasoline or petrol or diesel that you'd put that powers your car or truck motorbike. We need fuel, and we put petrol in our car engines. That petrol is burnt and that heat energy then operates an engine.
Well, the ATP is a chemical that, again, provides the energy for the chemical processes that make us alive and give us energy so that we can actually contract our muscles and move and have movement, have blood circulation and all this sort of thing. And right down from bacteria, through plants, animals, insects, all have this requirement of energy, and the fuel that they burn is ATP. And so the ATP synthase enzyme works like a tiny electric motor, and it makes the ATP fuel molecule by molecule, by adding a phosphate group to another molecule called adenosine diphosphate.
And so this little motor is involved in adding that phosphate group. There the ATP has and adenosine diphosphate as ADP. So we've got ATP, that's the fuel, and ADP is the molecule that is required to actually make the fuel and put it in the higher energy form so that it can then be burned to generate energy.
So ATP has higher energy content than ADP. So the conversion requires energy. And this stored energy within ATP, when needed, can be released to fuel the various biological processes.
So this is done by the ATP. Fuel is burned. We were characterising by hydrolysing it, breaking it down with a water molecule back to ADP.
So the ATP hydrolyses to ADP. Much like our fuel, our gasoline reacts with oxygen and forms carbon dioxide and water. In this case, the ATP reacts with water and is broken down to ADP.
But this ADP can be recharged by the ATP synthase motor back to ATP. Now, ATP synthase motors, of course, are in every living thing. All cellular processes, they're all the biochemical processes in our cells are powered by ATP, this form of energy.
So in the case of some bacteria, well, I guess in the case of us, we burn carbohydrates and so forth, or there might be photosynthesis, implants, but the energy for all these cellular processes, when we burn the carbohydrates. So I guess to explain a little bit further, we eat carbohydrates. They produce, such as sugars and flour.
And, you know, the grains are good sources of carbohydrates. So these are burned, combined with oxygen. But in the cell, right, when that energy is released, it actually is released in this, converted and released as ATP, or is utilised as ATP in the cells and even bacteria, they use ATP.
Matter of fact, ATP was first discovered in. In e colobacteria for memory. So the amount of ATP needed to power an organism is huge.
And it's actually interesting. It's a fascinating thing that active people, when we're exercising, then use their own that we make, and then use our own body weight in ATP every day. Isn't that amazing? We actually make the equivalent of our body weight of ATP, this compound, every day.
Now that, you know, seems, you know, amazing to say that. But the reference for that, if someone's interested, this is a paper published in 2016 in Biophysical Chemistry, volume 219, pages 69 to 74, and it was titled the thermodynamic efficiency of ATP synthesis in oxidative phosphorylation. Phosphorylation.
So this is because cells need very large numbers, and so cells need very large numbers of these amazing machines. In bacteria, the ATP is mainly found in the cell membrane. In higher creatures like animals, plants and fungi, the ATP synthesis found within organelles, which are many organs inside each cells, and these are called mitochondria.
And in plants that, for example, use sunshine for growth, the ATP synthase is found not only in mitochondria, but also in other organelles called chloroplasts. So a 70 kilogramme man has about 3 trillion cells with mitochondria, not counting, of course, the gut bacteria, which has heaps of cells as well. But then, if we look at the 3 trillion cells, most of these cells can have hundreds, if not more of mitochondria per cell.
So we already have hundreds of trillions of mitochondria, each of which has thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of these machines in it, though not all are active at the same time. The number of ATP synthase machines in our body is in the order of hundreds of quadrillions. Now, that's amazing, isn't it? To think of it, hundreds of quadrillions.
And of course, a quadrillion is ten to the power, 15. So this is amazing biochemistry. Absolutely amazing biochemistry on a scale it's hard for the human mind to even understand.
Now, as I said, in bacteria, ATP synthase mostly found in the cell membrane. It's interesting that in 2005, the ATP synthase machine was isolated from a strain of bacteria and was studied, and it was studied that this little machine rotates at about 350 revolutions per second at body heat, 37 degrees, or 99 fahrenheit, but at 45 degrees, it revved. And of course, that's 21,000 revs per minute.
I mean, that's the speed of a jet engine, 21 revs, thousand revs per minute. At 45 degrees, it reached 39,000 revs per minute. That's how fast these little machines, they're staggering machines, really.
Absolutely staggering machines. And of course, if a car wheel was rotating at that speed, it would be travelling at about 2700 kilometres per hour. So that's at the body temperature speed.
If at 45 degrees, at that extra 39 revs per minute, it would be travelling at over 5000 kilometres per hour. So that's just an analogy. These are absolutely amazing molecular machines that, again, have to be assembled and they run and they're producing the compounds that we require.
And it's fascinating that each of the protein subunits that is made by this machine is manufactured from instructions encoded in the DNA. And of course, it's powered by this flow of protons, which causes the central components to spin like a turbine. And each rev is generated by ten protons and manufactures three ATP molecules.
So it actually makes converts, the three ADP molecules to three ATP molecules each revolution, and it's going through 350 revolutions per second or generate 700 new molecules per second in, as I said, you know, hundreds of billions of these machines, or would we calculate quadrillions? So it's amazing. Amazing to think that these molecular machines are operating in us and keeping us alive every second of the day that we live. And these amazing machines, it's absolutely impossible that they arose by chance.
They are machines made by an amazing creator, God, the God of the Bible, that we understand as Jesus Christ, who came and lived, the creator to again reveal himself to us because we have moved so far away from his laws. You've been listening to faith and science. And if you want to relisten to these programmes, just google 3ABN Australia.org.au and click on the radio and listen button.
And remember to tell your friends. Post the links up on social media so other people can learn about the amazing evidence that we have for our loving creator God. I'm Doctor John Ashton.
Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
