Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
When we read the Genesis account in the Bible, it describes in Genesis chapter one what happened on the fifth day of creation. And as I read it there, it said, and God said, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth, across the firmament of the heavens. So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind.
And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning.
A fifth day. Now, I must admit that I haven't spent much time underwater in the seas. I've been snorkelling up on the Great Barrier Reef, out on a coral atoll that was about 30 kilometres offshore.
And I know that I was fascinated by the variety of sea creatures that were swimming there at the time. And I can remember, I think, out of the group of people that were on the snorkelling tour that I was on, I was in the water the longest of anyone there. But just recently, while holidaying with some friends, we watched the movie called my octopus teacher.
And my friends were quite enamoured with this movie and they had seen it and wanted to share it with us. And so they were able to look it up on the Internet and show it. It's a very interesting film, I think.
And it made me think about a number of issues related to creation. So the title of the film is called my Octopus Teacher. And essentially it's about a professional photographer by the name of Craig Foster, who was living in South Africa, and he'd been involved in a lot of nature filming and filming of peoples living in the desert, like the Kalahari desert man and so forth.
And one of the things that had impressed him as he was out filming these nature documentaries was the way that, for example, these tribesmen, who were living really very differently to how we live in modern countries, with all our technological devices, motor cars and concrete buildings and glass and mobile phones and cameras and so forth, and we go to the supermarkets and buy food. So these people still hunted for food, and they hunted for food in areas where there was a lot of desert, so there wasn't a lot of variety of food. And really they had to track down that food.
And what he was saying was that they became sort of connected, in a way with their environment. They could read the different signs in the environment and how there was a balance in the environment. In other words, there was sort of a cycle and a balance that, within reason, didn't get out of control.
Whereas, for example, we're learning now about, we mass produce plastics from oil, we then throw the plastic away and huge amounts of plastic are ending up in the sea. And not only are they killing sea creatures, but the particles of plastic are then getting into the food chain and they're getting into us and even getting into our freshwater supplies. Some studies that have been reported here in Australia, different university studies.
So the amount of plastics that researchers have been able to isolate from beaches and also from water and also from drinking water, including bottled water, which I was quite surprised. I don't think it's the same in spring water, so much so we can see that we're causing major disruptions to the ecosystem. Now, this man, Craig Foster, had developed some health issues, probably related to overwork, and he really needed to take a break.
And he took up swimming, swimming in the ocean. And what he wanted to do was he found it was very healing to go to this particular beautiful spot off the southern part of Africa and just swim. Now, the water was very cold.
Well, I call it very cold, I think he said it gets down to about eight degrees centigrade. So it was quite cold water. But in order to embrace nature, or sort of just experience nature, like, literally immerse himself in nature, in his surroundings, to appreciate nature, he would swim without a wetsuit.
He wore a helmet, of course, to keep warmth on his head, so he didn't lose too much heat energy through the head area, which is quite important. But otherwise he would just swim in a basic pair of bathers, with flippers, of course. And he began exploring the underwater world there just with the snorkel.
So he didn't want to use a scuba tank. He wanted to immerse himself in the environment as much as possible, just by snorkelling, like I had done many years earlier. And I'm afraid he could hold his breath much longer than I could hold my breath.
And maybe he trained at this, but he would dive down and hold his breath and spend a minute or two underwater just exploring the natural environment. And in this particular region, there were a lot of kelp forests. And he began to become aware of the amazing variety of creatures that were living in this kelp forest environment.
Now, among one of those creatures was an octopus. Now, how he discovered this octopus was he saw this collection of objects. They were different shells and little pieces of kelp and shell fragments, and they were arranged like a little structure. And he was curious about this structure. And as he swam over towards it, suddenly the structure collapsed and this octopus sped away very quickly. And he realised that the octopus had camouflaged itself by collecting [things]. It had seen him approach in the distance. It had gone to camouflage and hide itself by very quickly picking up objects on the ocean floor, bits of shell, bits of broken rock, bits of plant, and arranged those and built a little covering for itself so it looked anything but an octopus.
The octopus, of course, swam off, but he kept on returning to the same spot. And he made a, this was a very perhaps fortuitous decision that he made, in that he decided to go to the same spot every day and just explore this little grove within the kelp forest. Every day the same.
Now, I guess if it was me, I'd be looking for something different. I'd say, oh, well, I've explored that area. Let me move on and explore another area. But he decided to go back and just go to the same place every day and see what changes occurred. And he did this, and gradually, because he was there day after day, and the octopus saw him, day after day, gradually, well, he discovered the octopuses lair, the little cave where under some rocks where, or a little opening under some rocks where the octopus had made a home. And he would come closer and closer. And after a while, the octopus, I guess, began to learn that he wasn't, or it turned out to be a she, that she wasn't afraid of him, that he wasn't going to hurt her. And gradually, over time, the octopus extends well, after a while, it gets enough confidence, and you can see as he approaches and puts his hand just there, the octopus at first puts out just one tentacle and just goes out and just explores his hand and an arm while again remaining. The rest of her body is hidden and obviously hanging on quite securely with the other tentacles. And gradually from this, how she explores more and more of him, till eventually she comes out and explores him.
And the film is about how he spends more and more time with this creature. And this creature begins to develop more and more confidence in him and likes to be around him. And it's quite amazing.
The octopus goes through a trauma where it's bitten by a shark as it's trying to escape. And it was interesting they were able to follow on camera some of the antics that the octopus went to, escaping from this little shark that normally preys on octopuses as part of its food. And the octopus was able to hide, but not hide in a big enough space.
And the shark was able to bite off one of its tentacles. And how seeing the tentacle grows back perfectly with exactly the same number of suckers. And there was a lot of interesting facts about the octopus presented, how apparently each of the suckers, and I think they said there were 82 suckers on each tentacle, and each sucker can be manipulated individually.
So it's quite a complex nervous system to be able to do that. One of the fascinating things that I learned as well was about their diet and their food, and that they can drill a little hole in another mollusk, in another little shellfish, a little sort of bivalve that they live on, a lot of little bivalve shells that live on the little creatures there. And what they can do is they can drill a little hole into the shell and they have these tiny little teeth near the salivary gland.
And I think they can emit an enzyme as well that slowly will help soften the calcium carbonate. And they shell and they drill this tiny little hole, only perhaps 0.6 of a millimetre in diameter.
And I've seen these shells with these tiny little holes in them. And apparently they then inject a nerve toxin, which almost instantaneously kills the little creature inside, which it then relaxes its muscles and it opens, and the octopus eats the insides for its food. And I didn't realise that.
I knew they ate crustaceans at the bottom, but I'd often wondered about that. How would they open the shells and this sort of thing? But this is curious. And a couple of things came out from the film.
Throughout the film, of course, Craig Foster refers to how the octopus evolved, how it developed these amazing skills to avoid predators and camouflage itself and this sort of thing. And I thought, well, hang on. How can blind evolution, which involves chemical changes to DNA, how can that result in mental skills that enable it to, in some way either instinctively be able to tear off pieces of kelp and wrap it around itself, or gather up other pieces of shell and arrange it over itself so that it appears to be an inanimate object? How can these sort of actions, how can the actions that it takes to capture prey, like crabs and this sort of thing, and they had film of it stalking a crab, how does these decisions to make, these sort of actions arise from chemical changes in a DNA? And I thought then about the same thing. What about spiders weaving webs? Where do the directions come from to enable it to weave a web of a particular design? We know that spiders of the same sort of species weave similar webs and they catch similar type of prey.
How can, over millions of years, chemical changes to the structure of a DNA molecule result in actions like that which involve some sort of thought processes? So it involves some sort of taking an information either in some sort of sensorial way and probably optically in the examples of the octopus escaping from a prey and grabbing some kelp or swimming up into kelp and arranging the leaves or the portions of the kelp, not sure they're called leaves, fronds around itself. Because really, if we think about our thoughts, as I've explained before, our thoughts are nonphysical operations. You can't weigh your thoughts. You can't measure your thoughts in a measuring cylinder. You can measure your brain. You can weigh your brain. You can weigh the brain of an octopus. But what about its thoughts? And where's the connection to how a chemical compound can affect a thought? It, to me, raises some very, very important issues.
And when people talk about these processes and these skills evolving, I think we run into some really, really major problems here. For a start, how can blind chemical reactions result in something that involves a very positive evasive action to a particular type of prey? And how many goes would it have to have, how many chemical changes would it have had to have had to enable the creature to survive? Otherwise, it would have been destroyed and eaten much more easily long ago. And we know that the oldest fossils of octopuses are found. I think they're conventionally dated about 300 million years at the beginning of the Cretaceous. So they're quite early on. And we know that other members of the cephalopod family, like nautiluses, are found right down in the Cambrian, which is where the very earliest fossils are found.
And so these, like nautiluses, which are a similar creature, and we know they're very highly intelligent, aggressive hunters with very complex systems. And they're right at the bottom of the fossil record, which should be the various earliest part of evolution. And if they're anywhere near as clever as the octopus, then we have serious situation here, because they're extremely complex animal.
When you think of the ink glands, all the different enzyme systems that they have in them, the enzyme systems produce a particular toxins, those particular toxins that have a particular reaction on the creatures to enable them to eat all these things, the structures of these toxins and these chemical reactions required to produce them, not to speak of the glands to produce them, the glands to hold them, the glands to inject them into their prey, the ability to that be coordinated with another mechanism to drill the hole so you can inject it into the prey. To me, just powerfully speaks of creation. You've got to have a coordinated system.
And that's exactly what the Bible talks about, talks about how God created things. A super intelligent mind created these fascinating creatures. Now, one of the interesting things that I think was really touching in the film was that this little octopus, and I suppose the body of the octopuses, I try to remember it now, is a little bit bigger than a man's fist.
So it wasn't a huge octopus, but in the end, that octopus, it suffered some tremor. And there were a couple of shocks one time when he dropped one of the lenses or a lens cover or something on the floor as the octopus was very close and the octopus took off. And of course, it didn't come near him for a little while after that, and another time, too, after it had been savaged by the shark and this sort of thing.
But what had happened was because he'd spent a long time with this octopus, and we're talking about a couple hundred days here, and he returned every day to the sea to this same spot, I think. Look, I'm just trying to recall it. If you watch the film, you see that something like 260 something days.
I think he visited this spot. And it was over this period of time that he had spent this time with this octopus. And you can see in the end, the octopus came out and would just nestle up to him and just rest on his chest and he could stroke and just gently stroke the octopus's body and it would just lie there.
And then, of course, when he had to go up to breathe, because remember, he's not using a scuba diving equipment, he's just holding his breath. He would sort of just gently unfold the octopus and just swim up. He developed this relationship and you could see from the actions of the octopus that had become like a pet.
There were also footage of the octopus appearing to play. And I know I've read articles where octopuses in captivity appear to play as well, and how they can escape from their tanks in search of food and this sort of thing. They're certainly fascinating creatures, but this, to me is really interesting, too, when I think, really, hang on.
They're members of the same sort of classification of animals as snails, but these are totally a soft body animal and they live down there under the sea, but yet it could have some sort of relationship with the human. Now, to me, this points to, again, to a creation scenario. And I know I've mentioned this before in debates with atheists and they'll draw up examples of really bad things, worms that burrow inside people and cause them to die and all this sort of thing.
But when I put this together with the stories of people have made pets out of lions and wolves and other wild animals, and to me it makes me again think, is this a remnant of a time when at once we were able to have these relationship ships with animals? And of course, there is the issue of the food chain. Well, all animals have to eat, and what did they eat originally? Were, did all the animals originally eat plants? There are questions that we can't answer that we don't know. But when I look at the evidence of what we do know, what we can see out there and what the claims of evolution are.
And obviously, Craig has been brought up in the environment where he's learned evolution, and he has this worldview that these amazing properties of the octopus have evolved over hundreds of millions of years and its ability, the little drill that it has and all this sort of thing has evolved. But really, when you look at it scientifically, when you look at it from the evidence that we have from science about how all these factors are controlled by the DNA, and how the DNA is controlled and limited by chemical reactions that occur in nature, and that a whole lot of those chemical reactions that will only occur in a living system, they can't occur in nature outside a living system. We have a couple of important issues here.
And the first one is that it's impossible for a living molecule, a living organism, to arise from nonliving molecules. That's the first thing that becomes very clear from the evidence. And if you produce some sort of living structure, you've also then got to somehow within that structure form a code.
That forms a giant code molecule, which we refer to as DNA, that actually encodes the system about it so that it can be reproduce itself and repair itself. And I mean, that's just not, it's absolutely impossible for that coincidence to occur and work and be the same. And it's pretty logical we can see that.
But then the amazing design structure that we see in living organisms, as illustrated by the structure, the interdependence and the technical nature and the functional nature of the different parts of these organisms, how they are so specific in nature, how they work together as coordinated functions to make an organism that can function and live, reproduce and so forth, this is all coordinated, and yet it's controlled by a chemical structure. And we have to believe that blind forces of nature could produce this chemical structure. I think that's going to work again.
We can see it's absolutely impossible. But then I think what came out to me in this film was that we also have this remnant, that creatures we were meant originally to get on together. The whole Bible position of an original indenic state fits the evidence.
It fits the evidence of what we observe. And in ways, people have been able to restore that identic state, often by working with wild animals and getting into a relationship with them. And it's interesting, in Isaiah 65, in verse 17, we read, and this was a prophecy that Isaiah made.
And Isaiah made so many prophecies that have been fulfilled. Exactly. He was a very devout man that lived about 700 bc.
And he wrote, and this in the vision he saw. For behold and talking. This is God talking to Isaiah says, for behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
And again, John writing as he wrote this last book there, and the revelation that Jesus revealed to him, and the vision that John the evangelist saw there. And he wrote in the Book of Revelation, chapter 21, the first verses. Then I saw a new heaven, a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and God had created this environment. And it says that God will dwell as soon, going on then to verse three, he will dwell with them and they shall be his people and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall be mourning or crying or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
That's a beautiful promise. And that's what gives us hope.
Evolution doesn't give us any hope, no hope for a future. But the Bible does. And the Bible fits the data so well, it fits the science so well. And that's why I'm a creationist, and that's why I believe in God, a creator God who loves us.
I see so much evidence for it in nature when I look there. And a film like my octopus teacher just reminds me of that.
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I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
There have been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
