Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:16] This morning on one of the newsfeeds, I think it was one of the bing news feeds the that I get there was just one of the ads that came up was about the science confirms the Bible accuracy.
[00:00:42] And essentially it was just a series of little points that had been put together where the Bible had been shown subsequently to be quite scientific in terms of thoughts talked about how the Bible said the earth was round. How Isaiah describes the cycle of the earth and so forth, and went through a number of points, essentially making and demonstrating that the way the Bible was written. Although it's not a science textbook, it's not meant to explain science. The statements that it makes that obviously aren't poetry are actually quite realistic.
[00:01:35] They're scientifically realistic statements that are being made.
[00:01:40] And I found this quite an interesting one point that was made that I wasn't aware of was that students at the University of Leicester in England, students in physics class there, had calculated that Noah's Ark was actually quite stable and could carry millions of animals. Matter of fact, they calculated that it could fit two and a half million sheep, for example.
[00:02:16] And so they felt that it could quite easily accommodate the estimated number of species of different types of land breathing animals, of breathing animals that breathe have breath of life in them at that time.
[00:02:39] So I thought, you know, this is really interesting. And these days, you know, the Bible is often relegated into the myth category and that it's just another story. But really, of course, the Bible claims to be a record of the history of Earth since creation, since the miraculous, supernatural creation of our planet. And of course, as we remember, there's really no scientific explanation for our universe, for our solar system that actually fits the data. And I've talked about this in a number of programs prior to this.
[00:03:29] It's a major challenge for science to explain our origin in terms of known scientific processes that occur and the way the known laws of physics work. And that's why, for example, they claim Big Bang theory has inflation theory. And of course, we actually don't have any evidence for inflation theory.
[00:03:52] And even in our solar system, we've got the faint young sun paradox when we look at the age of the sun and the temperature of the Earth and this sort of thing. So there's so many aspects that point to the fact that the Earth must be young, but yet at the same time, when we look down through history, we have these whole concepts of humans being on Earth, well, millions of years, it's claimed, and civilizations going back thousands of many thousands of years, far beyond the Bible timeline. We often hear talks about the different ages, for example, the Stone Age, and we talk about people living in the Stone Age or people living in the and then there was the Bronze Age, and then there was the Iron Age. And it seems to create this whole idea that generally there was this growth in intelligence and people moved from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age and so forth. And of course, now we talk about the Space Age, but it's quite interesting, actually, that the Bible refutes this and provides evidence, subtle evidence, that humans were highly intelligent right from the beginning and that there hasn't been this gradual progression in intelligence that's often claimed. And of course this then backfires when we look at cultures today that are still living primitively, the claim is, well, obviously are those people that just haven't developed into intellectually. But according to the biblical picture, then all people are essentially as humans, we are intellectually developed all the same.
[00:06:01] But I guess looking at this, I mean, we all know what stone is, but what is bronze? And of course, bronze is an alloy between copper and tin.
[00:06:14] It's about ten or 12% tin that is added. And of course, copper occurs naturally, just the metal, copper in places, but it's reasonably soft metal. But when it was alloyed with tins, then you got bronze. And this was a relatively lighter, strong alloy that could be poured and hammered into many shapes.
[00:06:43] So that's how bronze developed. And then later, of course, we had, following on from that, according to the age theory, is the Iron Age, and iron, of course, could be made quite hard.
[00:07:08] It's interesting that pure iron is not as hard as bronze, but when you mix in the extra carbon and you form steel, it's harder and stronger than bronze.
[00:07:22] It's interesting, of course, that most of the history and when we're talking about the Bible, we were talking about in the Middle East there.
[00:07:32] And we know that a lot of control of that area, for example, by King. David, who stockpiled tremendous amounts of bronze, according to one Chronicles 22 and later, King Solomon, who had his craftsmen fashion the huge bulls and a giant basin and pillars of bronze that were placed in the temple that we can read about in First Kings, chapter seven of Seven.
[00:08:04] But of course, David and Solomon from a time point of view lived in the Iron Age.
[00:08:13] It's interesting though, of course, that when we talk about these ages, the way it's represented is that these ages followed one another and there was development because they come at different stages in different parts of the world. And it's interesting in China, for example, they developed bronze too, but the early bronze, that they alloyed arsenic with it until later they began using tin.
[00:08:47] But when we look at the way archaeologists divide up time into these different ages, it sort of reinforces the idea of vast periods of time, because an age isn't just a few decades, it's sort of a longer period of time, generally speaking, particularly in archaeological terms.
[00:09:14] And when the archaeologists divide these time periods again, it makes people think that these were worldwide periods of development, which was not the case, and of course, particularly the Stone Age.
[00:09:36] And so we know the standard evolutionary theory promoted by people that don't believe the Bible is that for millions of years man solely evolved from some ape like creature, was not smart enough to make anything except the crude stone tools.
[00:09:58] But as one researcher pointed out, many of these stone tools exhibited sophisticated flaking techniques. And the arrows and spears tell us that they understood principles of aerodynamics. And of course, one of the other challenges is if these people were so intellectually underdeveloped from some of the DNA that we found, they seem to be identical to modern man, some of these supposed Stone Age specimens that they found.
[00:10:37] So it's interesting that it seems that the Stone Age lasted longer in places that were further away from the Babel dispersion. And it seems that probably cultures have lost some of the ancient knowledge as they moved across the I think, you know, that explains why there was a lack of development. For example, in Australia. The indigenous people in Australia had very little technology. They didn't build buildings or the weapons and hunting tools that they had were mainly out of wood and fairly, in my view, not, well, sophisticated, had some fish traps and this sort of thing.
[00:11:35] They were definitely hunter gatherer types. But I think this is, again, that they had moved and Lou moved into the isolated area of Australia where it's fairly hard to get food really. You've got to hunt for food.
[00:11:50] Kangaroos, Guyanas, there's not a lot of bush tucker and native fruit.
[00:11:59] The fruits that are native to Australia are often very small berries and often very tart, like the Davidson plum and so forth. And so I think, again, as people moved further from Babel and the knowledge of the early techniques was lost.
[00:12:25] And it's interesting that the ages that are proposed really are not that long because according to secular history, the Israelites would have left Egypt during the Bronze Age.
[00:12:44] Most of the weapons and this sort of thing that were used back in that time, certainly the ancient, you know, in the Greek city states, they used bronze.
[00:12:58] But if the exodus happened in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age was already underway during the time of King David, then these ages, in actual fact back then must have been quite short.
[00:13:16] But I think one of the things that we forget is that right back before Babel, long before even before the Flood and long before Babel, the Bible records that Tubal Cain, the son of Lamech and Zilla, was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. And that's in Genesis chapter 422. And so this quite clearly, the Bible quite clearly records a period before the Flood or the development of iron and bronze before the flood.
[00:14:03] And so I find this quite interesting. And also we need to remember that when Alexander the Great conquered Babylon, he was handled, took the city of Babylon, he was handed astronomical calculations that dated back to the founding of Babylon about 1900 years earlier. And so we know that these people had quite advanced knowledge of mathematics as well. And of course, when we look at the Great Pyramid there being aligned astronomically and very accurate, so we can see that even back then knowledge had progressed very rapidly. And of course, Josephus recorded that Abraham took the knowledge of mathematics and astronomy to Egypt. And the time of Abraham seems to fit around the time of the building of the Great Pyramid of Khufu there. And it's interesting, Khufu was about ten generations from the flood, it would seem, from some of the pharaoh lists and Abraham as well. So that places them contemporary.
[00:15:30] And again, because as the peoples moved away from Babel there, when we look at China, if we want to try and equate an Iron Age in China and equate to the Iron Age in Israel, they're sort of out of phase. So it took time for the knowledge and that to spread from these areas across.
[00:16:04] So I think this is interesting when we think the whole idea of these ages from my perspective is to try and generate these long timelines. But when we look at the Bible account and we look at the genealogies, we can't get away from the fact that the flood would have been about four and a half thousand years ago.
[00:16:31] And sure, there's going to be a little bit of area in that, but that's roughly the age, and similarly with the age of the Earth, about 6000 years. And this comes from the biblical timelines and we can calculate the ages from the begat ages, the patriarchs, the age that they were when they had their first child, and the age that child was, and so forth. And while there are some archaeological dates that we don't have, quite precisely like, we can tie these ages back fairly accurately up to the time that Solomon built the temple. We're not sure what that date was, but we're not going to be more than 100 years out there. So again, this gives us we know that these dates are going to be accurate within 100 years or so. So not the multiple ages that are claimed. And the whole concept of intellectual development from Stone Age through to Bronze Age due to Iron Age and so forth, again, is refuted by the Bible in that this knowledge was pre flood. And what has happened is with different civilizations such where they haven't developed the use of metals and these sort of things, it's not because they're less intelligent or anything like that, it's just that that knowledge was lost as people migrated, moved to other areas, and probably more time was spent gathering food and just surviving.
[00:18:28] So there was no time, really, to develop civilizations and building and these sort of things. And, of course, so the knowledge was lost. Just like if you talk to most people today, they wouldn't know how to make steel, they wouldn't know how to make the different metals and alloys. Today, they'd have to go and look it up on Google or somewhere or go to the library and look up an old metallurgy textbook. And so this is the way it goes, just with knowledge.
[00:19:08] But one of the things that, again, highlights to me is that there are many things where in the past people have said, well, the Bible has got it wrong that have subsequently been historically proved as accurate. And an example I can remember my mother used to talk about was the Hittites.
[00:19:32] This is a group of people that's mentioned 47 times in the Bible.
[00:19:39] And, of course, one of King David's mighty men, the original husband of Bathsheba Uriah, was described as Uriah the Hittite. But it was interesting that up until 1906, there was actually no archaeological evidence for the Hittites and people just believed that this was just a made up thing in the Bible and that the Bible was wrong. However, as I said, in 1906, german explorers searching the ruins of an ancient city in Turkey uncovered five temples, magnificent sculptures, and over 10,000 clay tablets. And these gave a whole lot of details of the Hittites. And so another classic example, too, was the existence of Belshazza.
[00:20:44] He's the King of Babylon, named by Daniel in Daniel chapter five. And of course, many have heard of us, have heard the famous saying, the writings on the wall. And we remember that Belshazzar had bought the sacred vessels that had been captured from the temple and brought them in to his riotous debauched party that he was having at the time. And a hand just appeared and wrote into the plaster of the wall.
[00:21:19] And people were horrified. This was a supernatural event that was witnessed by many people. And of course, Daniel was called in to interpret what the hand was saying on the wall, what the words meant. The wise men were brought in. They didn't know what it meant. And Daniel was called in by the king. And of course, it said, today you've been weighed in the balances and found wanting. And of course, that night, Belshazzar was slain.
[00:21:56] When Cyrus as General Gobrius entered Babylon, they diverted the river upstream, and as the water level dropped, they were able to march their army in under the gates and take the city. And that's, according to the well, the biblical account, doesn't give all the details of how the city was taken, but it does recall what Belshazza was saying that night. And the city was captured that night. And it was some interesting that at that time, a lot of people there was no historical evidence found for a while of Belshazzar.
[00:22:43] And however, some tablets were shown that Belshazzar was Dabodius'son, who served as the Co region in Babylon. And this being the case, Belshazzar could only make to Daniel the offer of the third highest ruler in the kingdom. And that was the reward that he offered to Daniel for eating it. And it's interesting that the Nabonius chronicle now resides in the British Museum, but up till the discovery of that chronicle, there was no secular historical records of that king. And yet the Bible described that king in detail.
[00:23:34] There's a number of details, fine details of history that were questioned in the past, as you know, could not be the case.
[00:23:52] But as we've discovered more and more historical records, they have confirmed the accuracy of the Bible in so many ways, in so many details. And this is why I think we can have such confidence that the historical count of the Bible and particularly of God the Creator and the miracles of the Bible are so reliable. And this then provides compelling evidence for the Creator God. Not only has science not been able to explain our origins, science has no explanation for the origin of life, how nonliving molecules could form a living cell, nor how the evolution of more complex animal forms could occur. The codes are so complex, they can't arise by random chance. We know that the molecular machinery encodes in life is so complex even in simple single celled organisms such as I've talked about, the electric motors that drive little in, these little cells that drive the Fagella that propel bacteria along, and the sensing systems that enable them to detect the highest concentration of nutrients. And then the logic system that enables them to direct their propulsion towards that concentration.
[00:25:25] The machinery, the logic systems that are involved, the plant systems that capture sunlight, concentrate it and use it to split water into hydrogen so that it can be synthesized with carbon dioxide from the air that the plants take in to synthesize the cellulose, sugars and carbohydrates that constitute the plant.
[00:25:51] These concepts just couldn't arise by chance, random mutations to make these systems. So we have this overwhelming evidence from science and particularly confirmed in a historical sense, the historical record by archaeology. More and more there are increasing number of evidences accumulating, I've just mentioned a handful just now that can give us confidence that the God of the Bible is real. And this is so important because all of us are going to die sometime. But what the Bible says, death is not the end.
[00:26:33] We will sleep until the return of God, until the return of Jesus, when God will destroy this sinful planet, remake it perfect and remake us as well.
[00:26:46] And this is the amazing hope that we have. And God wants us to have that hope. God wants us to choose Him, to choose Him as our Savior, to choose the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior.
[00:27:03] As I said, there's overwhelming evidence for this.
[00:27:08] You've been listening to Faith and Science, and remember, if you want to relisten to these programs, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au Click on the Radio button, click on the Listen button and there's a whole series of programs there have provided a whole lot. Well, I've talked about the evidence we have, the overwhelming evidence that we have that we can trust and believe in the Bible. And remember, if you hear an interesting program or one of the interesting television programs on Three ABN, remember to send links on your social media page and tell your friends about them so other people can find out about this knowledge that can hopefully help them to believe in the loving God and Savior that we have. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:19] You've been listening to a production of Three ABN, Australia radio.
