Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
You know, the other day I was in a church and there were only half a dozen members there, and there were all older people, say 60 plus years of age. And then I met some other people and they talked about several other churches where the main congregation were older people. And we were talking about that, why younger people aren't coming along to church and so interested in faith so much.
And one of the conclusions was that the effect of the teaching of evolution in our schools and particularly long ages, that the earth is millions of years old or billions of years old, they teach, don't they? And life on earth is certainly, or similarly, they say, several billion years old, possibly according to their calculations. So these claims, the claims of evolution, the claims of long ages seem to contradict the Bible. But that's what we're being taught, that's what the media is, the general secular media is pushing all the time. And we even see billboards about some national park item or gorge or something, and they'll refer to millions of years.
So really, our whole western culture, and it probably extends worldwide, really, is steeped in this whole view of life on earth being very old. And so I think really, this is possibly one of the main reasons that people have, many people have given up on faith in God, or else they think, well, maybe there's something out there.
But really, over the years, and I suppose it's been more than 50 years now that I've been studying the Bible. I mean, I was baptised and accepted Jesus, my saviour, in 1971. So, for more than 50 years now, I've been studying the Bible and looking at it from a scientist perspective.
So looking at the evidence for the prophecies, looking at the historical evidence, looking at archaeology and the archaeological evidence for the Bible and so forth. And indeed, I've authored or edited a number of books in this area. And just recently I was talking to a senior professor in the biological sciences at a large Australian university, and he was interested, for example, in the book that I published, “The God Factor: 50 Scientists and Academics Explain Why They Believe in God”.
And of course, that book is still available under the title, “On the Seventh Day: 40 Scientists and Academics Explain Why They Believe in God”. So if you look that up on the Internet, you can buy it through Amazon or Koorong or all the online booksellers.
And similarly, of course, many times I've discussed the other book, “In Six Days” 50 scientists explain why they choose to believe in creation and a young earth and the biblical account of the history of the earth. And all those scientists have doctorates. As I said, all the scientists have contributed to the book “On the Seventh Day”, they have been educated in secular universities and taught in secular universities.
I’ve also edited a book called, “The Big Argument: Does God Exist?” where a number of leading academics in their field present again the evidence that supports the Bible.
So this is something I've been looking at for a long time. And I think the evidence is now overwhelming that the biblical account is an accurate account. And we now have mounting evidence even for a young earth.
And I think one of the very strong evidences for creation and so forth, again, is the impossibility of a biogenesis. In other words, it's absolutely impossible for nonliving molecules to somehow form a living organism. And there was a number of short lecture videos have been presented, and there's a very good site, if you Google “Discovery Science News”, Discovery Science News, if you just run them all together and do Google search on that, you'll come up to with the Discovery Institute, which is an institute that supports intelligent design.
And again, if you just entered into your search engine, YouTube.com user discoverysciencenews. Search. Or you wouldn't even have to add search on the end. So that's.
Www.YouTube.com user discoverysciencenews. All one word.
There will be a number of presentations come up there, but there's a four-part series which is very good on the origin of life and how the origin of life is absolutely impossible. It's presented by a guy with a PhD and it's been reviewed by five other guys, also with doctorates in related areas. And again, it explains why you can have put all your molecules together, you can even put your DNA and your cell membrane and everything together, but it's not going to make it alive.
And they point out that in this section, one of the important things is that you have to have energy to make it alive. And to get energy, you've got to have a gradient, and you've got to also have machines that can convert the energy stored in that gradient into the energy requirements for the cell. And that requires very complex machines, huge amount of design features in a living cell.
But one of the other things that I think is really coming to light now, again, is the evidence for young ages, that life on earth is young. And in the journal National Science Review that was published one of the issues in 2020, it's Volume 7, Issue 4, pages 815 to 822. An article by AM Bailleul and others was titled the “Evidence of proteins, chromosomes, and chemical markers of DNA in exceptionally preserved dinosaur cartilage”.
And this is where, essentially, the research team found evidence of proteins, chromosomes and other chemical markers of dinosaur DNA in the remains of a duck billed dinosaur. And it was interesting there was one of the dinosaurs discovered dozens of fragments of the remains of baby dinosaurs in the two medicine formation in northern Montana back in the 1980s. And when they just more recently examined one of the skulls, the two research team identified cartilage cells and other structures resembling nuclei and chromosomes.
And they were able to apply chemical stains to these that react, for example, with DNA. And they were also able to confirm double stranded DNA with a minimum length of six base pairs present in the cells. And one of the interesting things is that research has been done looking at how long DNA would last under ideal conditions, remember. And because these duck billed dinosaurs were in strata that was dated at 75 million years old. Right. What we typically hear.
But DNA would be, according to studies that were done, of the chemistry of DNA, totally fragmented to at least one base pair after about less than 7 million years, even if frozen at minus five degrees. But if it was stored warm 15 degrees, it would only last about 10,000 years. And so, it's interesting that DNA stored at 15 degrees for a long period of time, the degradation would have perhaps broken down to about 13 base pairs. So again, at 10,000 years. So, again, the fact that they're finding these fragments fits again with this short time period.
So, at 15 degrees C, the DNA would last about 10,000 years. And so the fact that we're finding this DNA in these dinosaurs again points them to only thousands of years old.
But other very strong evidence, again, for young Earth is coming out in the discovery of a number of fossils preserved in amber.
Now, amber is the fossilised tree resin, and usually from conifer type trees. Resin is actually part of the tree's defence system. And so when a tree is damaged by animals or insects, it releases this sticky resin.
And I'm sure many people have seen this sort of sticky resin type material on the side, particularly of a pine tree, like a radiata pine, something like that. And this essentially plugs the wound and seals and sterilises it. And it prevents insects and fungi then getting into the tree through the damage section.
For the resin to become amber, it first needs to be buried where it begins to harden. And it's then called copel. And as more heat and pressure is applied, chemical transformations occur to the structure and it turns into this hard resin like material.
Now, it's regularly claimed by evolutionists that amber takes millions of years to form. However, that's just a claim. They're really not sure how long the processes actually take.
But one of the things is that we find some there have been some really well preserved specimens of ancient life preserved in amber. One of these was a caterpillar that was preserved in some Baltic amber from the Baltic area. And it's actually preserved in a looping motion. So in this case, as a classic case of, obviously, it would appear to be rapid preservation. There are five well preserved beetle species have been found in Myanmar amber, amber from Myanmar, and they were assigned a species.
Now, they allege that the beetles were 99 million years old, but these were beetles that were in currently living genera, and so the beetles, when they were studied, were extremely morphologically close to their living counterparts. In other words, there hadn't been any evolution, any evolutionary changes, so that genera had changed very little, even over that really long period of time.
Evolution, of course, is supposed to be about change, and over long periods of time, things are supposed to be changing.
So it's quite clear that there hadn't been change in these beetles. The caterpillar that was found in Baltic amber and reported relatively recently in 2019, was from its family, Geometridi. It's only very small caterpillar, about five millimetres long.
And these caterpillars move in a very special manner called looping. So they push their rear legs towards the front ones and the middle of the body loops upward and then stretch their bodies out again. And so this specimen became preserved in that looping position, which is quite fascinating.
Again, it was dated at about 44 million years. But again, what we can see is that it's exactly the same as the modern caterpillar, and its type of motion is the same. It hasn't changed.
There hasn't been those changes. Another one were two species of very well preserved cockroaches. These were a type of cave dwelling cockroaches that live in cave environments. They were also found in the Myanmar amber. And again, the amber was dated at 99 million years old, meaning, of course, in terms of evolutionary theory, that would make them the oldest cave dwelling animals ever preserved. Again, they're fairly tiny little creature, again, only about five millimetres long, but they shared the same typical features with modern cave dwelling cockroaches, such as small eyes, extremely long antenna, paler pigmentation, reduced wing size, all these sort of things.
Now, it's fascinating that these specimens were found amongst more than 100 tonnes of amber removed from a mine. Now, how would you get 100 tonnes of amber material again, together. And it's interesting that trees aren't found inside caves.
And so, again, how is it likely that these creatures became trapped in this amber?
Another really fascinating one was the case of amber encased insect attached to a dinosaur jaw. Now, that's a special one. And this was discovered in Alberta, Canada, in the dinosaur provincial park. And a seven centimetre wide chunk of amber containing an aphid, which was a sap sucking insect, was stuck to the jawbone from a hadrosaur dinosaur. And the researchers hypothesised that the jawbone and the fresh, sticky resin in which the insect had been trapped both just happened to be washed into a river at the same time where they came in contact. So, of course, this is an incredibly unlikely chain of events.
But another one, a sensational other find in amber was that of a hummingbird sized dinosaur being found. And in reality, of course, it actually turned out to be a bird skull. So they thought it was a little hummingbird sized dinosaur piece that had been found, but in actual fact, it turned out to be a bird skull. And this tiny little bird had a little skull about one and a half centimetres long. And so now it's thought to be the bee hummingbird, or similar to the bee hummingbird and one of the smallest known birds.
So it's interesting that these creatures, again, were found in this amber. It's interesting the researchers made no attempt to explain how a decomposed, decapitated bird skull came to be trapped in amber, along with a range of snail shells and plant material. But when we think about these examples of previous little animals, birds, bits of dinosaur, insects trapped in amber, how can we explain this in something that just oozes out of a tree? Well, the flood scenario, Noah's flood, really provides a very reasonable explanation.
As a matter of fact, all of those interesting amber encased fossils would perhaps be better explained with a global flood about four and a half thousand years ago. I guess when we think about it, the flood was a major catastrophic event. Forests would have been just ripped up. We know some of them form massive coal seams and so forth. But as these forests were travelling together in the water and smashed against one another under the turbulent situation, they would have released large quantities of resin. So these freshly uprooted trees being smashed together, and this sticky resin, of course, can float, and it would have trapped and encased other small items that were also floating in the water, such as wide range of insects, small animals, plant material.
So we know that the flood was a massive supernatural event, too. We mustn't forget that the flood was a massive supernatural event designed to destroy humankind on the earth because it become so wicked.
And, of course, most of the surface of the earth. And with the plan to repopulate it again. And when you think about the flood, is the only explanation that we have to explain these massive sedimentary deposits that are spread all over the world, like the Morrison formation that spreads from New Mexico to Canada. You've got massive amounts of material that are spread over huge areas. This is no little, small local event.
It's a massive worldwide event that could happen there and again explains why the insect was stuck to the dinosaur bone being swept along in floodwaters. Far more reasonable account. And large amounts of the resin were then buried rapidly under huge quantities of sediment, which provided the pressure and the heat required for the chemical transformation into amber.
So when we think about the flood scenario, which explains why we find amber in such large deposits, when you think about 100 tonne deposit, that's just one deposit of amber. We don't see today any natural processes that I'm aware of, anyway, that produce these sort of quantities of amber.
But we can see the flood scenario of, again, massive forests ripped out the trees, fresh trees smashed together. The amber oozing out everywhere, floating, then becoming conglomerated. And as they're floating around, things are being tossed around, different things are being trapped in them.
And it's amazing the number of fossils that they do find trapped in amber around the world. And the flood explains the coal deposits, too.
Near where I live, they have massive coal deposits. And there's a lot of open cup mining being done. And you can see the immense size of these deposits.
And talking to miners, too, they find the remnants of large trees, at times clearly evident in these coal structures that have been coalified and yet preserved, and things such as tree roots and these sort of things. So the circumstances in which amber is found and the inclusions inside certainly frustrate the evolutionary dogma of long ages, because slow deposits aren't going to form these amber deposits. Such finds also don't really point to tens of millions of years of evolutionary status, or droplets of resin falling from tree roots into a cave.
So the evolutionary explanations that are sometimes put for these things just really don't fit.
One article that was published by Philip Robinson. And he concludes that these fossil amber specimens are instead, like God's little time capsules testifying, he writes, testifying to a huge catastrophic event in which large amber deposits form, namely, the watery judgement that God sent upon the earth around four and a half thousand years ago.
And so again, it's just another piece of evidence that fits the young earth, global flood scenario. No evolutionary changes, because that's the way God created them and preserved them. And we need to remember too, that when these ages are dated, the radiometric dating need to remember, there are no reference rocks to actually validate the radiometric dating methods that are used.
And instead, when we do carbon 14 dating, of course, we find the carbon 14 is there in most specimens that are tested like this. And again, this points to them only being thousands of years old and it's a much more reliable and relevant method of dating these sort of things. So we're again accumulating more and more evidence for a young earth.
So you've been listening to Faith and Science. And remember, if you want to relisten to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au that's all, one word, and click on the radio button.
And then on the different programmes, Faith and Science.
And again, mention to your friends about the programme, put the links up on social media so that other people can look up these programmes. And of course, there have been many programmes in the past that cover a wide range of topics.
And again, I try to include the references so that when you go back and listen to these programmes, if you want to check out the data, if you want to check out the actual research papers and check for yourselves firsthand the sources that relate to these issues. That's why I put them there and I mentioned them there. So again, you can go back and listen and write down these references.
And remember too, the books “In Six Days” are widely available. And also websites such as Creation.com, which have a huge list of videos and articles that again confirm the biblical account of how we came to be here.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Radio.
