Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Welcome to Faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:16] Just recently, I was alerted to a study by the Barna group, spelled Barna, and this is a research organization in the United States that in particular studies from a social point of view, the interaction of science and religion, and also other social impacts on spirituality and so forth, it's used as a source often. Their statistics and their studies, their surveys that they do are used by major news networks and so forth. And in 2019, one of the studies that they did revealed that science is one of the main reasons why young adults, 18 to 35 years old, doubt things of the spiritual things.
[00:01:26] And when they drilled down into this, only about 12% of professing christian teens believed that the Bible was inspired and infallible and true and the authority of word of God.
[00:01:45] In an earlier study, apparently back in a year earlier, in 2018, the Barna group found that the two biggest excuses why millennials, so they're young people born between 1980 and 1999, reject the christian faith, essentially boiled down to their belief that science refutes the Bible. And also they didn't want to believe in fairy tales.
[00:02:19] And this resulted, of course, from a lot of people, these young people, thinking, well, the account of Noah's flood and the ark and the animals going into the ark, this sort of thing is sort of like a fairy tale. But what people don't realize is that the major theories that are talked about, that they're taught at school to explain how we are here, such as theory of evolution and the Big Bang, are really fairy tales, because they're actually not substantiated by science.
[00:03:04] Just recently, I was reading a report on some results from the international research team examining images from the James Webb Webb telescope. And this was an article that was reported in Science Daily on ScienceDaily.com on the 22 February in 2023.
[00:03:33] Essentially, the title of the article was University of Colorado at Boulder. James Webb spots super old massive galaxies that shouldn't exist. So it was a press release by the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the title was James Webb, which is the telescope spots super old massive galaxies that shouldn't exist. And essentially was that. The research team examining the images from the James Webb telescope reported finding six galaxies as big as our Milky Way galaxy. But this was on the way in the very, very distant reaches of our galaxy, because according to their theory, these images should have formed only 500 to 700 million years after the alleged Big Bang, which is too early for the theory, because they appear remarkably modern. In other words, they appear, they're fully developed and so forth.
[00:04:48] According to the Big Bang theory, all these gas and everything formed from energy. Little particles formed, and then they clustered together. And it should have taken them a long time to form the star structures and galaxies like our Milky Way. And so when the stars, the most distant from us, should represent the youngest ones and therefore closest to the big Bang, just after the supposed Big Bang happened, yet here they are, formed as if, you know, developed like ours.
[00:05:27] And the paper that reported this in nature, Erica Nelson was the author, said, you don't expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form. And so, again, there's so much evidence that refutes, for example, the Big Bang theory. And I've talked about this in other programs, major article that was in scientific american in February 2017 called popcorn the universe, where top astrophysicists again said the big Bang theory, and particularly inflation theory, which underpins the big Bang theory, isn't even scientific.
[00:06:15] And so there's so much misinformation. Most people don't realize that the one way speed of light has never been measured and in actual fact, can't be measured.
[00:06:26] There's things like this. And when we come to the theory of evolution itself, we know now from our biochemistry that it's absolutely impossible. And one of the fascinating things that there's just so much evidence around, and much of it is about everyday things. And that's what I'd like to talk about today, the. Our nervous system.
[00:06:54] And one of the things that really concerns me when I read these statistics is, as I said, the number of young people that are rejecting the Bible. We have so much evidence that supports the Bible account, too. So science refutes evolution and the Big Bang theory. Really, those theories are only still taught in education systems because they don't want to have to teach about creation, that there was a God. And that's the only other explanation that we have. We have so much evidence for creation. We also have overwhelming evidence for the historical accuracy. As far as we can go back and have comparative secular records, they all confirm the accuracy of the Bible in detail.
[00:07:51] In fact, the Bible in many cases, has had records that and accounts of things that were discovered only in recent times and verified to be correct. In other words, archaeologists hadn't realized some of the detail that the Bible gave and doubted it. But then, subsequently, it's all been proved and verified. And then, of course, we have the outstanding prophecies of the Bible, and there's hundreds of prophecies that have been recorded and then fulfilled on time exactly as God revealed would happen. And so when you look, as well as, of course, the personal testimony of people that gave their lives to testify that the Bible was true, and the massive attempts to wipe out the christian faith, particularly early on in the roman empire, the terrible cruelty that christians experienced, and yet it survived. Why? Because the people knew it was true. They'd seen the miracles.
[00:09:01] The early people had seen the miracles of Jesus. There were people that had had relatives that were healed by Jesus. These stories spread. They underpinned the faith of those people. They knew the accounts were real. And of course, we have the historical accounts that have been preserved in the Bible, recorded particularly in the New Testament about Jesus.
[00:09:27] And so this is why, one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about these programs like faith and science, and I would like to encourage listeners to tell your friends about these programs. If you go on to and Google three ABN Australia, which is one word, au, click on the radio button and then click on the. Listen. As you scroll down, there's over 100 talks that I've given there that cover a whole range of topics and answer a whole lot of questions.
[00:10:08] And if you can point the, you know, direct people to these talks that are there, because the whole purpose of them is to help people become aware of the massive amount of scientific evidence that we have now that confirms creation.
[00:10:29] And if there is creation, there is a creator God, a super mind, the evidence we have of a super mind that designed and created the amazing living organisms that we observe on our planet and the amazing structures too in our universe that provide the environment for our planet and are so interesting.
[00:10:57] So I'd really like to encourage you to put the links up on Facebook, on your other social media pages. Talk to friends about so that people can have their doubts removed.
[00:11:14] Just a few days ago, I was invited to give some talks at a church and the program was advertised and a lot of people came. And I got so much positive feedback from the presentations as I presented on evidence for Noah's flood, evidence that the big Bang couldn't have happened, that the theory doesn't fit the observed observations and evidence why evolution is impossible. And this can help encourage young people that they can believe the Bible is true, because really it's a matter of eternal life and death.
[00:11:59] When you think about it, if the Bible account is true, that there is a loving God that wants to put an end to evil and recreate us as again, in a perfect world, bring us back to life again if we've died, or translate us if we're still alive when Jesus returns, and for a brand new created world that he'll have that will be populated by people that love God, that choose him and choose that way, this will be a really, really wonderful place. And people that reject him turn away, give up on life and give up on God, rather, they're going to miss out. And this is why I'm so passionate about this. This is so important. God loves every one of us, and I see it as our role as those of us who believe, to encourage others to believe.
[00:12:58] There's tremendous hope here. There is a future for everyone that God has planned, a wonderful future.
[00:13:06] And so getting back to the nervous system, the nervous system is so complex that it powerfully refutes the whole notion that it could have arisen by blind. And remember, I'm emphasizing blind, random mutations to the chemical, some primitive chemical dna structure.
[00:13:32] Remember, we need to remember that when mutations occur, they don't know what mutations are needed, mutations, when they occur to the DNA molecule in a living organism. And a sensitive theory of evolution says that somehow the first living organism arose. They don't know how it arose, but they say that when that living organism arose, there were mutations and natural selection that ended up producing all the variety of different living organisms that we observe on planet earth. And we know we have the DNA code that essentially is made up of a whole lot of what we call chemical bases or chemical compounds that we abbreviate, act, and g for simplicity. And these chemical compounds are like letters in an Alphabet that can be read and give instructions.
[00:14:35] And, of course, those instructions are read by a very complex machine, the ribosome. Over 300,000 atoms make up this molecular machine that reads the code and assembles the food components, such as amino acids, assemble those fragments of food that have been broken down in the organism and assemble or in the cell and assembles them to make the new parts of the cell as required. And so the code to construct the cell is made up of these letters, act and g. And so you can have structures like AAACT, CGCT, GCTGTC, and so forth, and goes on. Millions of these codes, in actual fact, regulate, and they're read by the machine. And as a result of that code, all the different parts of us are assembled. Nerve cells are assembled. All the different parts of nerve cells are assembled. And the important point is that we can change. Some of those letters in the code can be changed by the effect of environmental factors, ultraviolet light, extreme heat, chemical compounds that can attack the code, disrupt it, and this sort of thing. And there can be errors in the duplication of the code, so that errors get letters get out of place and so forth. But we need to understand that these environmental and copying things are random.
[00:16:21] They're very random. They've got nothing to do with the needs of the organism. They've got nothing to do. Once you make a mutation, it's just blind and it's random. And when we look at the probability of these random changes producing something meaningful, it's absolutely impossible. It's mathematically impossible. It's just like if you didn't know the latvian language. So you were, say, born in a country where you spoke English, and someone asked you to write out a recipe to bake a cherry pie and gather and mix the ingredients and so forth in Latvian, you'd have a whole lot of difficulty typing away on the typewriter and so forth in letters that somebody with the latvian language could read, or Persian language or chinese language or japanese language.
[00:17:22] You know that in a lifetime you'd probably never, by just randomly typing letters, type the instructions in those languages if you didn't know those languages. And in biology, the nervous system is a highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting the signals to and from the different parts of its body.
[00:17:48] And if that doesn't work properly, the body doesn't work properly. But the structure of the nervous system, according to theory, evolution, arose by these chance random mutations. But if it's not working properly, then the sensory information isn't going to be correct, it isn't going to be normal, and it's know. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at University of Oxford and well known mathematician, heard that. He talks to his unbelieving atheist friends and says, look, if your brain, if your nervous system arose by random chance mutations or any machine like that, would you trust it? Would you trust it to be reliable? And he said, it's interesting that all of them, without exception, say, no, I wouldn't trust it. So we've got this major problem there. And it's interesting, the nervous system is there. It detects the environmental changes that impact the body and then works in tandem with the endocrine system to respond to such events. And so I'll talk about the endocrine system another time. It's interesting that invertebrates like us, it consists of two main parts, the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. So the central nervous system is the brain and the spinal cord, whereas the peripheral nervous system actually consists of all these nerves that go out to all our fingertips to all over our skin and so forth. And these nerves are enclosed bundles of long fiber like things that I talked about in another recent program on the brain called axons, that connect the central nervous system to every other part of the body, just about. And of course, there are some things where we can't feel but ourself. But that doesn't mean that there aren't nerves there. The nerves that transmit the signals from the brain are called motor nerves. And those nerves that transmit information from the body to the central nervous system, of course, are called the sensory nerves.
[00:20:09] Again, this system is very, very complex. If we look at the peripheral nervous system, it's divided into three subsystems called the somatic, the autonomic and the enterix nervous system. And the somatic nerves, they essentially control voluntary movement. That's the movement that we can control moving your arm and so forth. The autonomic nervous system is further divided into sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So you've got, your sympathetic nervous system is sort of something that comes into action in emergencies and it mobilizes energy. I can remember jogging along a track through this beautiful rainforest area, and suddenly, as I'm running along a nose, right in front of me is this snake lying across the path. And before I could think of it, I realized I was flying through the air. My body just suddenly gave a great big leap. I didn't think about it. My body just did it for me.
[00:21:22] So I leapt right over the snake and I thought, yeah, I was really amazed. Wow.
[00:21:33] And that's sort of the sympathetic nervous system, whereas the parasitic nervous system is activated actually when we're in a relaxed state.
[00:21:46] And of course, the enteric nervous system controls, for example, the gastrointestinal system and the autonomic. And the enteric nervous systems function involuntary. So we can see that these systems, we wouldn't survive if we didn't have those nervous systems in place. Now, you read the standard account, and it says that the primitive organisms began to have simple nervous systems that evolved and all this sort of thing. So what you've got to have is right as your little organism and your first little worm evolves and this sort of thing and has a different shape. It's got a mouth and an anus, and it's got a reproductive system, a digestive system and all this sort of thing. The nerves that control that, all those systems, the anus vector, the mouth part, the reproductive part, the digestive parts, all the different muscles and so forth to move food through the body, are all controlled by nerves, right? And connected to the nervous system, they respond to different impulses and so forth. They all have to arise at exactly the same time as these physical structures are arising.
[00:23:13] They have to arise by blind, random mutations to the code.
[00:23:18] And I think we can see that. And you don't have to be a brilliant mathematician to realize that the probability of those structures forming by blind, random mutations that just happen to match perfectly and connect to perfectly those structures that are forming also that are formed by blind, random mutations, we're all going to work and be quartered together.
[00:23:49] It's just so obvious it isn't going to happen. And I think one of the things that, when I read the accounts of evolution in different articles on the Internet and in different textbooks and so forth, people are describing these physical structures, and one looks similar to the other, and so it changes into the other and so forth. But what they don't realize is that the codes are vastly different. As long as if you've just changed one or two letters to produce these simple change, you've got to change thousands of letters in such a way that it all still perfectly coordinates.
[00:24:31] When we look at the nervous system and its function, and, of course, the cells in the system, I've described some of them before, the neurons, they have special structures that allow them to send signals rapidly and precisely to the other cells. They send these signals in the form of electrochemical impulses that travel along the thin fiber parts of those neurons called axons, and they can be directly transmitted then to other cells through the electrical synapses and all this sort of thing. It's extremely complex chemistry that's also involved, and the complexity is huge. And even sort of animals like jellyfish have nervous systems.
[00:25:28] Corals they do, and all these, they have a very primitive nervous system.
[00:25:38] Once we get to the more complex animals, from more or less worms upwards, they have a brain, and they have huge numbers.
[00:25:53] When they get in the simplest worms, their brains involve hundreds of cells. We have about 86 billion cells, and african elephants have about 300 billion cells in their brain. And again, all these cells are all different types of cells that are involved. They vary hugely in the role and the structures that they play.
[00:26:27] When we think about that and that all these things have to be produced by the code, in my view, it provides powerful evidence that refutes evolution, that it couldn't arise. We need to understand, the theory of evolution was developed before people knew about things like neurons. Perhaps it's difficult now to believe that it wasn't until about 1900 that it was known that neurons are the basic units of the brain and chemical transmission in the brain was not known till about 1930.
[00:27:13] It was in the the 1950s that we began to understand the electrical structure. And it wasn't till the 1960s that we became aware of how basic neuronal networks work.
[00:27:25] So to have a system that complex that it's taken so long for scientists to work out, in my view again, is again powerful evidence of a supreme supernatural creator that made us and designed our brain so that we can communicate with him and get to know him and love him. And of course, that's the account in the Bible you've been listening to faith and science.
[00:28:04] Remember, if you want to relisten to these programs, just Google three abnastralia.org au and click on the radio button and look for faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:19] You, you've been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio.
