Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
The other day, I met up with a friend I'd known quite some years ago who was a medical doctor, and he confided in me how reading. After reading my book, Evolution Impossible, it really confirmed the evidence for him that evolution was impossible. That complexity of the biochemical systems in nature, in living things.
And in particular, he'd seen some recent research that was done on cells and the complexity of cells, the mechanisms, the micro machines in cells, and the amazing construction of all these machines and sort of biochemical mechanisms that operate in cells. And not only have these got to be there, but when a cell is forming, there's got to be programmes within the dna that regulate the assembly of these things so that you put together, it's all right to make all the parts, but then you've got to assemble all the parts and then also you've got to start them up and get them working. And he mentioned how he had been raised in a christian home.
He believed in creation and the biblical account. But going to uni, studying at uni, there were some issues there that had come up that, well, maybe there was long term, long age, theistic type evolution, but after reading evolution impossible, it really clinched him. I thought, it's interesting that the same year that I put out evolution impossible, the book by Richard Dawkins was published.
So my book came out in July 2012, and in September 2012, Richard Dawkins, the well known evolutionist, published a book, the Magic of Reality, how we know what's really true. I thought this is quite a provocative title, of course, and it's a book aimed, I guess, for younger readers, but really, in a way, it seems to be indoctrinating them towards atheist metal. Got a lot of really interesting information in it, but it doesn't necessarily fulfil the whole picture.
And in many ways, I think Dawkins commits in some areas, for example, a type of what appears to be a logical fallacy sometimes called, I've heard people refer to it as a politician's logic. And an example could be, for example, you make the statement, all cats have four legs, right? All cats have four legs, except, of course, for an injured cat or a mutant cat, but all cats have four legs. And then you say, my dog has four legs, therefore my dog is a cat.
And of course we know that's not true, but the reason why we know that's not true is because we already know that there are many other animals that have four legs. But if you didn't know that then you could jump to the conclusion, oh, okay, well, this animal that I have that I thought was a dog is actually a cat. And so this applies in a number of different areas.
And so it's a type of fallacy, a type of way of thinking. It's interesting that Dawkins published this book on what we know is true. I mean, I had a background of many years of studying in the area of both physics and mathematics and then chemistry, doing research degrees in chemistry.
But later on I realised the importance of understanding how we can know. And that's why I went back to uni and read also for a doctorate in the area of epistemology, theories of knowledge. And of course, it was related to areas that I was working with biomedical scientists and also environmental scientists.
So looking at ways that we can know in this area. And actually I was awarded a university prize for my research. And much of it was later published in the book form the perils of progress by University of New South Wales Press, and later z books, a number of university presses around the world, University of Cape Town Press and so forth.
So I was very interested that Dawkins actually wrote in this area how we can know what's really true. The other thing is that in the COVID of the book, a sort of promotion of the book, was written by Lawrence Krauss. Now, Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist, sort of physicist.
He wrote the book a universe from nothing. And he's a very, very strong proponent of inflation theory, which underpins the big bang theory. So inflation theory is where very early in the onset of the universe, matter and so forth accelerated faster than the speed of light.
The problem with these sort of statements is that they can't be proved. And it was very interesting that in Scientific American, I think it was, in 2017, there was an article published, pop ghost universe, I've spoken about before, in which some Harvard and Princeton fiscal point out that the sort of inflation theory doesn't even really qualify as a scientific theory. And so even though a whole lot of scientists like Stephen Hawkin and many of the others and Lawrence Krauss support this or write papers on it, it actually isn't a scientific theory because it can't be proved.
We can never actually know. And this is an important point. And it's actually pointed out by another eminent physicist, George Ellis, who points out that Ellis is quoted in a Wikipedia article on Lawrence Krause, about Lawrence Krause's life, that in actual fact, what Krauss is talking about, Ellis points out, is not tested science, but philosophical speculation.
And this applies to a whole lot of the antitheist, the anti God dogma that is being put out in books, such as the magic of reality by Dawkins and a universe from nothing. And we really have to be on our toes to understand this. And I know the reason I'm talking about this is that this lack of understanding of what actually constitutes evidence is very important because many people sort of go to uni, they do these higher studies, and they've already been inculcated with a lot of evolutionary long age ideas through school, particularly through high school.
They see it reported in the media around and so forth. But they don't realise that so much of this is based on people making assertions on their basis of their particular worldview or worldview, that the world is very old, that it wasn't created recently by God. And of course, some of this is what we would call based on sort of antichristian fallacies.
And I noticed that in a recent edition of the Creation journal, there was an article by Jonathan Safferty and which I thought was very good. It talks about genetic fallacy and politicians'logic, logical fallacies and how to spot them and refute them. And he, for example, lists an anti christian genetic fallacy.
And he points out that anti christians often commit a genetic fallacy. They could say something like, you only believe Christianity because your parents and culture indoctrinated you. If you had come from a hindu family in India, you'd be a Hindu.
Again, he points out, this is irrelevant to the question of whether Christianity is true. And so the fact that Christianity is true is based on evidence, evidence that we can observe and see and know and have through the senses, which Dawkins claims is one of the ways that we can know. And that's true.
It's one we can know. One of the ways we can know it's real. What happens is that the evidence for Christianity is true is that Jesus physically rose from the dead.
Founders of other religions, died and rotted away in their graves. And so this is based on the fact. Another related fallacy is trying to disprove Christianity by pointing to alleged pagan parallels.
For example, some anti Christians compare Jesus'resurrection to the alleged egyptian myths about Orisis'resurrection. But again, we need to look at the evidence. And Dr.
Safati points out, even if some Christians believed in Jesus resurrection because of Orisis claimed resurrection would not change the fact. The evidence, the empty tomb, the physical appearance of Jesus to 500 people at once, would still stand. But also when we drill down into this other claimed evidence, for example, when we do investigations into the pagan parallels, it turns out to be nothing of a kind.
For example, Osiris never rose again, but was a dead God who stayed in the underworld of Lord of the dead. So we can see that there's all these sort of claims that are made and it's santa. These false claims, these logical fallacies have influenced some quite influential people.
Obviously people like Dawkins, like Krauss that are writing these books that are getting huge reviews. A book that similarly came out, I think was published two six by Ronald numbers. Now it's called the Creationists.
And it was a book subtitle from scientific creationism to intelligent design. Now, it's interesting that on page 13, numbers, Dr. Ronald numbers talks about how he was raised in a seven day Aventus family.
I think there are a lot of ministers, seven day aventus pastors in his family, and he was taught creation and so forth. But when he went to uni and studied science in the 1960s at the University of California at Berkeley, he attended a lecture on the famous sequence of fossils in Yellowstone National park. And this is a sequence of fossils where there are a number of petrified trees at Specimen Creek in the Yellowstone National park.
There's another one nearby too, where there's another place close by where there's all these petrified trees, but the most spectacular ones are at specimen Creek in the Yellowstone National park. And he goes up to say, stayed up much night with a biologist friend of his, sort of thinking about that. And then he accepted the claim that, well, the earth can't be just 6000 years old, it's got to be at least 30,000 years old, because that was the time that geologists, secular geologists, had calculated for the formation of these particular fossils, petrified trees.
And so again, he ended up becoming a agnostic. And it's interesting that Dr. Ronald numbers, he was on the basis of this one piece of evidence without actually checking it out.
And because he'd had this lecture that claimed that these trees were deposited over a long period of time, he didn't actually cheque out the evidence. And the basis for this. And what happens is we have these observations, but the interpretation of what these observations mean can depend on a person's worldview, but also their ability to actually have all the information available.
So if they only have part of the information available, they can jump to a conclusion. For example, if you have this evidence that all cats have four legs, and then you come to this animal that has four legs and you assume that is a cat without realising, well, hang on, there might be other animals that have four legs that haven't been discovered yet. And so this is the problem that we have when we jump to some of these interpretations and we discard, as I said earlier, we have this overwhelming evidence that the Bible is true.
We have archaeological evidence that has confirmed people names like Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar, the different assyrian kings and histories there. History, events that occurred right down. We have this evidence.
We have the evidence of a global catastrophic flood around the world. It's very clear there. There's no other explanation for these massive areas of flat mountains that haven't sort of eroded significantly.
The only way these deposits could have been laid down then sheared off like that. Massive catastrophic type water movements. Well, not necessarily violent catastrophes, but huge amounts of water flowing off this end and levelling it out.
I really enjoy four wheel driving. Now back Australia, and if you drive across, for example, the Simpson desert, these areas up the Canningstock route, you see these areas, these huge areas where the long mountain range is just flat on top over huge areas. And these examples are all around the world.
And from many different aspects. We have evidence of the flood. And then, of course, we have the miracles, the testimony of the people that saw the parting of the Red Sea that were there, the thousands of people, maybe million, that saw the.
Were fed by manna in the wilderness. These were events that were witnessed by many, many people and written down and kept and preserved. The records were kept and preserved.
And so we have this evidence for scripture. We have this evidence that there is a supernatural world that is operating outside our current spacetime system. And it's really disappointing that people like numbers that went on to write a number of books that perhaps anticreation, or attempting to point out the weaknesses of the creationist view.
And, of course, good to know these, but needs to be in a balanced sense. And it's fascinating when we look, for example, taking this Yellowstone fossil forest situation at specimen Ridge, because there are multiple levels of apparent forests one on top of the other, but many of them have vertical tree trunks and multiple tree stumps at each level. And so the traditional secular geologists claim is that these trees grew in place, died, were covered up with volcanic debris, and were petrified in the vertical positions.
And then from this story, and this occurred over successive time events, the evolutionary geologists have estimated the amount of time that it took to form the layers and have worked it out that there's 65 levels of forest. So that's quite a lot of levels of forests that have been petrified at different times would need at least 32 and a half thousand years to form these successive layers. So obviously it's been used as a claim that the earth can't be 6000 years old because, look, you got 32,000 years just of deposition there at specimen Ridge.
And of course, this is the evidence that convinced numbers. But again, when we're looking at this, we really need to delve into the evidence and the data of what is happening. And it's interesting scientists have done this because this area in the Yellowstone National park is a fascinating area.
There's a huge amount of lava flowed into this area because these petrified trees are found in the absoroka volcanics of the Absoroka range of northern eastern Yellowstone National park. And this range of mountains is a thick series of volcanic lava flows that then have been broken up into pieces of lava. These outcrops are huge.
These volcanics cover more than 23,000 square kilometres and the thickness of the formation exceeds 1800 metres. The thickness of this formation alone is nearly as high as the highest mountain in Australia. And it would be very difficult for successive healthy forests to grow in such broken volcanic rock, although it can happen, but be difficult.
But when we look at this evidence further, and some geologists have done that, Michael Ord and Dr. Robert Carter, a couple of scientists that have looked at this in detail, and they find that there are major problems from the uniformitarian story that would spread it over thousands of years. So one of the problems is that there are no fossilised soils.
Our trees almost always grow in thick soil horizons, and yet the soil for the fossil forests are missing. Instead, we find a lot of organic layers associated with undecomposed leaves, twigs, needles, et cetera, that have become petrified. The other thing is that there's bark and branches are rare and the trunks show that branches as large as 25 centimetres or more sometimes have been broken off, but they're not preserved in this volcanic debris, so they're somehow separated.
The other fascinating thing is that many of the petrified trees have no roots at all, and some of them have broken roots. And so when we look at this in more detail, they essentially have the same appearance of the stumps that filled spirit lake after the explosion of Mount St Helens, where the trees were forcibly removed from the forest floor, ripped out of the ground, transported to the lake by a massive wave which sheared off the branches and roots and they were then deposited. So that's something that we have observed, and we observed they occurred very rapidly and formed these similar sort of layers there.
And so here what we have is a classic example that if we just look at the area specimen ridge and we don't look anywhere else, we might think, oh, yeah, okay, these have been deposited over a long period of time, but when we say, hang on, this exact thing occurred at the Mount St Helens eruption and was in a very short period of time, there's a better explanation also, when we dig into what is the evidence? Just stop not looking at trees. We find there are no animal fossils associated with the trees. There's no mammals, birds, insects or even earthworms.
And so fascinating things like this point to that. Hang on, something else is going. This wasn't a gradual process, otherwise we'd find the fossilisation of these other creatures.
The other fascinating thing is that the 200 species of trees that have been identified in the petrified specimens there at specimen ridge come from tropical to cool climate. There's tropical species including cinnamon, breadfruit and chinkapanan trees, which presently grow in southeast Asia, as well as the pine trees. And so again, the most credible explanation is the flood model, that these trees were put there by a catastrophic global flood, that that deposit wasn't formed over 32,000 years.
It was probably formed in minutes, if not hours, maybe days, but in a very, very short period of time. And so the basis, for example, for Dr. Numbers giving up his faith was based on incomplete evidence.
And so when we come to this question of how we can know, there's a number of areas we need to look at, it's not just doing the basic measurements at the time, it's looking at pattern recognition, it's looking at, is there a pattern of events that corroborate this? And we find that as we found that the similar formation was formed after St Helen's eruption, and the same thing occurs in the Bible, in that we have reports throughout the Bible of a consistent pattern of events that occurred. And so this can give us great confidence that what we are reading is true, that it is really true, that it is reality. And the Bible talks about this amazing reality of God, who is outside our physical reality.
He's non material, but he created this physical reality. And that God, the Bible explains, wants a relationship with us, that he physically transformed himself into a person, came and lived as Christ, Jesus Christ amongst us, and was resurrected to prove that he really was God. And the evidence was seen by the witnesses around.
So we have this amazing testimony that the Bible and Christianity is true. Is reality. You've been listening to faith and science.
And remember, if you want to re listen to these programmes, just Google or on your search engine, look for 3abnaustralia.org.au and then click on the radio button and the listener and you'll see the faith and science programme listed there. And remember to tell your friends about these programmes too.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
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