Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton. One of the things that really concerns me, sadly, is the growth of secularism, particularly in our western countries, where we've had a christian history and the gospel has been preached and people are turning away from the gospel. And I think there's probably many reasons for this. It's multifactorial. But I think one of the main contributing reasons has certainly been this whole concept of long ages for the earth, long ages for the universe. The universe has always been here, and that the biblical account is sort of just not relevant anymore. It's a myth, these sort of things. But when we really look at the documents that we have for the Bible, the books that were written and preserved, the scrolls, the history, in terms of history, the Old Testament aligns up with secular historical records very well, particularly from about 600 bc onwards, where we have quite accurate, reasonably accurate historical records. And when we look at the account of Jesus, who articulated quite clearly that he was God incarnate and performed miracles to prove this, raising the dead, healing blind people, healing crippled people, and these were public healings. They were recorded, they were witnessed, they were sort of very clear. These miracles that he performed were very clear.
[00:02:18] His crucifixion was a public event. And Romans were very efficient in killing people at that. They had a lot of experience doing that. We know that Jesus was physically nailed to the cross after being scourged, whipped and bleeding, suffered terrific torture that way. And the Romans then confirmed that he was dead by piercing his side with a spear. There was no way Jesus could have been alive.
[00:02:51] And yet he appeared afterwards to his disciples, who then went off and changed the world. But he also appeared to other people, such as Paul later on as well. Now again, we have this whole concept of how can a material person appear here and appear there? But when we look to understand the reality that we live in, and I've explained this before, that we are largely energy fields, the amount of matter, actual physical, dense matter in us, is very small. And I think this is illustrated if we look at your classical chemistry textbook examples of. If we look at the nucleus of an atom, if we had the nucleus of an atom, the solid matter of the atom was the size of a golf ball, the outer electrons, the outer diameter of the atom is about 4 km away. And so all this is empty space. If you can imagine, matter is these golf balls that are sort of eight to 10 km apart with bonding, maybe six to 10 km apart and more. There's a huge amount of empty space and matter and we're energy fields. Then the other issue that we have is that.
[00:04:18] And just going back to that point, and yet we perceive everything as being solid. So I'm in this recording studio here. I'm sitting there as a desk, there's solid. I can't push my hand through the desk. And that's because the interaction of these force fields and it appears to us to be solid because again, we visualize things as a result of photons, which are pieces of electromagnetic radiation, parcels of these that enter our eyes and interact with our mind. And in our mind we see things and we have this visual picture.
[00:04:56] And I'm choosing to talk, to say these things. Now, I don't believe that I've been programmed to do this. I've made a decision what I'm going to talk about. I've thought about things and this is in my mind. And while we can weigh my brain, I can't weigh my thoughts. My thoughts are non material. And this is a whole challenge to thought, to science. What are thoughts, this non material world, which again, is this spiritual connection. And that's what God said, you know, he is spirit. And Jesus talked about how he existed before the world was made and so forth. Now people, well, you know, this is all sort of religious stuff, but the evidence is there that people witness this, people witness Jesus'miracles. People witnessed Jesus'death. People witnessed Jesus'resurrection. And the people he appeared to after me. And those people, as a result of that, went off and changed the world. They preached the gospel, and the gospel is a very important message that was preached, and that is that we were meant to live eternally, that God made us in his image to interact. So the creator of the universe, the creator of these amazing living systems that I've talked about many times, and the components of plants and animals, the structure of the universe. And there's so much evidence of an intelligent design behind just the laws of physics themselves, the laws of mathematics, logic, the whole concept of language, the whole concept of the dna coding in the structures and the code reading machines, the ribosome. There's so much evidence for intelligent design everywhere we look. The feedback cycles that keep the earth's temperature roughly constant, all these sort of things in our biological systems, our immune system, the way our immune system works, our blood clotting system, all these things point to amazing intelligent design, not random processes.
[00:07:16] We see what random processes do. Random processes wreck computer programs. They wreck machines. Corrosion doesn't help build new machines. Corrosion, for example, it's a random process, sort of wrecks machines. And so the evidence for a super mind that designed all these things is there. And what the Bible tells us is the super mind made us to interact with the supermind. And there are so many testimonies around the world. There are probably millions of testimonies of people who have prayed to God and had interaction with God and answers to prayer, being led, being led to do things, that have helped people make discoveries and so forth.
[00:08:05] And when we think about these things and this growth of secularism, turning away from God, it really concerns me, because the same Bible and those same people that had those rich experiences with Jesus and with God point to the fact that there's going to be a resurrection from the dead. This life isn't all there is. Some people have their lives cut off short. We have children that are dying from cancer or in terrible accidents and so forth. We weren't meant to die. And there's going to be a resurrection. But the interesting thing is that there's a resurrection of those who believe in God, accepted Jesus, their savior, for all the wrongdoing that they've done, and have accepted God's forgiveness for their wrongdoing that they've done. And there's those that have ignored it, rebelled against God. They're going to be resurrected as well, to see that in actual fact, there was a God, and God work was trying to work in their lives. And that's why I have this program to get this message out there that it's so important now, while we're alive, to make this decision to come back to God, to come back to the creator of the universe of life on earth and get to know his love. And the Bible is powerful historical evidence, out of all the different religious books that they're around, that the biblical account best fits the reality that we live in. And the reliability of the witnesses, in my opinion, is far superior to all the other religious texts that we have available to us to this day. And so, again, this rise in secularism seems to parallel this rise in science. And we need to understand that, again, science is based on observations by humans. But one of the things that we really need to understand, and I spoke about this recently, is that this whole idea that the earth is very old, and this whole idea that science has established that the earth is very old. For example, the widely accepted age of the universe at the moment is about 13.77 billion years. It's interesting how they pin it down to that sort of order of accuracy, and that the solar system, including Earth, is about 4.53 billion years but what we need to understand is that no scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe. And in actual fact, there's growing evidence that the universe and the earth is very young.
[00:10:58] And when we realize this, this again focuses in on the biblical account of the earth and the universe being about 6000 years old. And people in their mind tend to scoff at that and they say, well, hang on, the universe is billions of light years across. How could it be that young? But when we look at the science, when we actually measure the science and look at the evidence that we actually can measure and know now everything is pointing that those long ages just don't work.
[00:11:30] I've spoken in previous programs when we look at the evidence for the Big Bang and that's touted around and obviously the big Bang calculations are behind this age of the universe calculation. But we need to understand that there's actually no evidence to support the Big Bang theory. And people say, well, hang on, there's all these papers and so forth. Well, it's a very interesting article and I've referred to a previously that was published in Scientific American a few years ago that points out that, hang on, all the supposed evidence that has been put up has been where people have actually tweaked the figures to get the results that they needed to get. When we actually use the data to make some new prediction, it doesn't.
[00:12:20] And of course, when that paper came out in Scientific American, and as I said, I've spoken about this in previous episodes, a lot of people, including Stephen Hawkin before he died, objected to it. But the problem is they didn't have any evidence. They objected to it, but they didn't have any evidence to base their objections.
[00:12:43] And I was just reminded recently that over 100 years ago, Lord Kelvin, who was a christian calculate that if the earth was formed by a molten blob, it should cool to its present temperature in less than 100 million years.
[00:13:04] If it was really as old as people want to claim, then the earth should be much cooler.
[00:13:13] And of course, when they discovered radioactivity, they sort of, okay, well, we can correct those figures, but even using the heat generated by radioactivity, we still don't get to the earth's temperature. It would have cooled much earlier. And so there's a massive paradox that when we look at the evidence just around us that we can measure just basic evidence, all points to a young earth. And an article that caught my attention just recently was entitled exploding stars point to a young universe. Where are all the supernova remnants and it was written by Dr. Jonathan Safferty.
[00:14:11] Now, of course, the supernova is a violently exploding star. And it's one of the most brilliant objects that we see in the vast cosmos that God's created. Now, when we look at the data that we have out there, on average, in a galaxy like our Milky Way galaxy produce about one supernova every 25 years.
[00:14:37] And so when a star like this explodes in this way, there's a huge expanding cloud of debris formed that is called a supernova remnant. And a classic example of this is the crab nuclear nebula, rather, in the constellation of Taurus. And this nebula was actually produced by a supernova that was so bright that actually it was observed during the daytime for a few weeks back in the year 1054. And by applying the laws of physics using our best computers, astronomers can predict what should happen to this cloud. And according to their model, the supernova remnant should reach a diameter of about 300 light years after 120,000 years. So if our galaxy was billions of years old, we should be able to observe many supernova remnants this size. But if our galaxy is only about 6000 to 10,000 years old, no supernova remnants would have had time to have reached this size. So the number of observed supernova remnants of a particular size is an excellent test of whether the galaxy is old or young. In fact, the results that we actually observe are consistent with the universe only being thousands of years old.
[00:16:11] But they're actually a major puzzle and a problem if the universe has existed for billions of years. And so, for example, if the universe was billions of years old, we predict that we should see somewhere in the order of about 7000 or 7250, actually, by calculation, 7260, rather by calculation, supernova remnants. But the actual number of supernova remnants, if it was only 7000 years old, would be about 125, 127, something like that. And it's actually interesting that the actual number of supernova remnants that we actually observe is about just over 200. So the actual number that we observe is very close to the number that we would predict if the universe was only about 6000 years old and a long way short of what we would predict if it was billions of years old.
[00:17:32] But it's interesting not only that, predictions for the Milky Way satellite galaxy and the large magellic Cloud are also consistent with the young universe. So theory predicts about 340 observable supernova remnants if the large Magellic cloud were billions of years old and 24 if it was 7000 years old. And the actual number of observed supernova remnants is 29.
[00:18:02] And so it's interesting that some evolutionary evolutionist believing astronomers say, why have the large number of expected remnants not been detectors? And so they published a paper and referred to it as the mystery of the missing remnants. So here again, when we look at the astronomical data that we actually can go out and measure today, our best astronomical data points to a young universe on a biblical timescale.
[00:18:43] And, again, this is something that just isn't getting out to our young people.
[00:18:50] Another thing that really is astounding, I think, and points very much to a young universe is that we observe changes in stars. In these giant stars that are happening on our timescale. They're happening as if in the lifetime of human observers.
[00:19:12] They're happening on our timescale. They're not happening over millions of years. For example, the Sakuri object in Sagittarius. In 1994, this star was most likely a white dwarf in the center of a planetary nebula. But by 1997, just three years later, it had grown to a bright yellow giant about 80 times wider than the sun. And that was reported in astronomy and Astrophysics volume 321 l 17 in 1997. In 1998, it had expanded even further, to a red supergiant 150 times wider than the sun.
[00:20:00] But then it shrank just as quickly, so that by 2002, the star itself was invisible even to the most powerful optical telescopes, even though it was detectable in the infrared. And there was an interesting article about that published in new scientists back in two, three page volume one seven seven, issue two three, number 2384, pages 28 to 31. So, again, the fact that these are changing in our sort of timescale so that we can observe it on these scales and huge changes in size, they're happening on our timescale.
[00:20:57] There's also the faint young sun paradox. So, again, according to stellular evolution, as the sun's core transforms from hydrogen to helium by means of nuclear fusion, the mean molecular weight increases, which would compress the sun's core due to gravitational attraction, increasing fusion rate. The upshot is that over several billion years, the sun ought to have brightened 40% since its formation and 25% since the appearance of life on Earth.
[00:21:29] That means that this translates into a 16 to 18 degrees temperature increase on the earth. Now, the current temperature is 15 degrees average temperature on Earth. And so the earth ought to have had a minus two or minus three or so temperature when life appeared. And so that means the earth would have been frozen. So you got major problems.
[00:21:59] In April 210, there was an article published on this in Nature and remains a problem. Have a look at the volume of nature, 464, pages 687 to 689 nine on the 1 April 210. So this faint issue of the faint young sun remains a major problem.
[00:22:26] So again, when we look at these issues, it all points to the creation of the earth as we understand it. Another major problem for understanding the age of the universe is that when we look at the most distant star clusters and galaxies, we would expect them to show the galaxies forming. But instead we find developed spiral structures, for example.
[00:23:08] So if these way distant objects, which are billions of light years old, and therefore they're supposed to have formed just after the Big Bang, how are they so well developed? How are they so already have these structures? And so this is a major, major problem again for the Big Bang model. So we have all these evidences when we even look at the universe, for these very young age for the universe, and that was created as a functioning system already there, functioning, fully formed.
[00:23:55] Other powerful evidence that the Earth is really quite young, only thousands of years old, is the decay of the earth's magnetic field.
[00:24:06] And I have talked about this before, and there's a really excellent article on this on the creation.com website. So if you just google creation.com and enter in the search engine. Decay of the earth's magnetic field. Another really excellent article again by, I think it's by Jonathan Sarthati, but talks about the, we've got very accurate measurements of the decay of the earth's magnetic field, but we also have discovered that there are very rapid reversals of the earth's magnetic field have occur and they've occurred over a very short period of time, like weeks.
[00:25:02] And this has been a major problem for geologists, but it powerfully fits the flood model for the destruction of the surface of the Earth. And with the movement of the continent, subduction of plates causing a change in cooling patterns within the molten core, which is believed to be responsible for the earth's magnetic field and the change in the cooling areas causing reversals. There's a model that has been put up by Dr. Russell Humphries that fits very well, a creationist model that fits very well the observations, and we've got very good data. Of course, now that the earth's magnetic field is following exponential decay with a time constant of 1611 years, plus or minus ten.
[00:26:06] And of course, there's also the Earth's magnetic field, or, sorry, the magnetic fields in other planets in our solar system also points to the fact that these planets are young.
[00:26:19] And also fascinating discovery that the moon once had a very, very strong magnetic field too, stronger than that on earth. So these evidences all point to the young earth creation model.
[00:26:37] And so when we consider the overall evidence from science that fits the biblical account, we need to bear in mind that while we're being all the time getting all these messages about old earth and old universe and all this sort of thing in the popular media, in our science and education system, when we look at the real data, it points to a young earth that was created as a vibrant, functioning system for us to enjoy and for us and to be inhabited by us.
[00:27:15] You've been listening to faith and science and you want to relisten to these programs.
[00:27:22] Remember, you can google ThreeABN Australia, that's all one word, au, and click on the radio button and on the listen button. Remember also too, there's the creation website creation.com, which has some excellent articles that you can use in the search engine. And there's also my book in six days, why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation, which is readily available in bookshops and libraries as well.
[00:28:00] I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:19] You've been listening to a production of three ABN Australia Radio.
