Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Over 20 years ago, back in the late 1990s, I wrote to scientists around the world that I'd heard were creationists and asked them why they chose to believe in a literal six day creation only thousands of years ago. And that book, of course, has been published since the late 1990s under the title “In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation”. And it's a bestseller, it's been a bestseller for all these times in the area of creation, that is.
And one of the contributors to that book was Dr. Andy McIntosh. Now, Dr. McIntosh is an emeritus professor of thermodynamics at the University of Leeds, and he'd worked there for quite some time. He'd done a lot of research in the area of combustion theory and aerodynamics, and his speciality, of course, is mathematics. And in particular, he did a lot of work on the bombardier beetle, which fires this explosive charge.
And his work actually inspired a patented novel, spray technology. And he's also done quite a bit of work investigating the fundamental link between thermodynamics and information. And he publishes and writes quite a lot.
Dr. Andy McIntosh, and as I said, he holds not only a PhD, but also a DSc, a doctor of science as well.
And it's interesting that one of the things as he began writing, like, he contributed to my book then 24 years ago, or nearly 25 years ago, and he has published his own book, a couple of books on the scientific evidence for creation. And as I said, Dr. Andy Macintosh, it's worth looking up. Google him on the Internet and you can get a lot of information about him. Very, very learned mathematician and a very, very strong creationist, who's really good at summarising the evidence for creation. And I noticed that when he started doing this, there was a lot of opposition at the uni and with other staff, as a matter of fact, they want to sort of close him down, I think, at one stage, and deprive him of his position at the uni and all this sort of thing.
And it's very interesting, I think we all need to become aware that there's this growing movement out there that if you disagree with someone, it's sort of hate speech or something like that. So it's very difficult to voice an opinion now on particularly issues that people deem as being controversial, such as creation versus evolution. And there are other issues as well, that if you disagree with the most popular view, then you must be in the wrong.
And so it's interesting that truth is almost being decided on by popular vote, in a way. But a lot of this popular vote is being influenced by the media, which again, has been shown in some of the research articles on this. When we look at the media and the way the Internet works, the idea is to get you to keep going back to sites on the Internet.
So there seems to be growing this sort of evidence. A lot of these sites are designed to feed you the information that you want to hear. And this makes it more and more challenging to, in actual fact, spread the growing evidence that we have that evolution is absolutely impossible and didn't occur.
The evidence that we were created is overwhelming, and also the evidence that the earth is very young. There's so much prima facie evidence, just the rate of population growth—and the earth's—and the population that we have running back again fits with the earth only being thousands of years old. Erosion rates, all these sort of things that we can measure.
There's so many obvious things that fit the Bible account. Now, I was reading an account just the other day, too, of evidence from ice cores and this sort of thing around Mount Kilimanjaro that suggested that, again, there was a major drought in Africa. I forget exactly where the ice cores were, but there was some evidence there, that Africa had had this massive drought about the time of Joseph and pharaoh there.
So that was interesting. I'm still following up the research and the actual evidence for that. But historically, when we look at the books of Luke, for example, in the Bible, the dates and the places and the people that they talk about, all verified by secular historical records.
And so much of the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, where we have the old manuscripts, copies of old manuscripts that have been preserved, they have the prophecies that were fulfilled. So all the time we're just finding more and more evidence to support the historical accuracy of the Bible and to support evidence for supernatural creation. But it seems that there is so much of a delay in getting this information out into the mainstream and certainly into the popular media.
I was reading just recently, too, the story of Mary Slessor. This young woman from, I think she was from Scotland, from somewhere in England, anyway, that went to the Congo or that part of, to Africa there. It might have been Nigeria as well. As a single woman back in the 1800s and converted the cannibal tribes that were there, and a number of missionaries, male missionaries, had been killed beforehand. But her life and answers to prayer, as she talks about these things, we see so much evidence for the benefit that Christianity has brought to the world, in many ways, the hospitals, and so forth.
And yet there's this growing evidence of a pressure in our education system, to forget all the amazing benefits of Christianity and perhaps look at some of the negative things where people who were called christians or call themselves Christians did bad things. And we need to know that, of course, that doesn't fit in with the message that Jesus gave for us to love one another, to feed the hungry, to help the poor, to be fair, to be just, to support justice.
These were all the principles of Christianity, of course, that led to western civilization and led to the abolition of slavery and cannibalism and all these sort of things. One of the things that Mary Slessor put an end to were child sacrifices. It was thought that if a mother had twins, one was a devil child, must have been fathered by an evil spirit. And so the twins were put to death. So practises like this, Christians played a major role in ending these terrible practises, and yet we're forgetting the role that Christianity, and people that were inspired by the Holy Spirit, the influences that they've had on the world.
And one of the things I want to talk about, this was just recently, too, I read an article on the year by Dr. Andy McIntosh, and he brings out some points that I wasn't aware of, I have researched and on the year before. But his article, which he called “Our Created Ear”, was published back in 2020 in the Creation magazine. And it's interesting.
He quotes Proverbs 20 verse 12 which says, “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both”. And looking at the ear and how it works, becomes aware straight away, when you look at the physical structure of the ear, that there's a very intricate process underlying our auditory sense. So auditory sense is one of our senses, which is able to take sounds, which are mechanical vibrations, they are air vibrating air molecules, and convert them into signals in our brain.
And one of the reasons why McIntosh can talk as an authority in this area is that he has done a lot of work in mathematics as applied to acoustic engineering, and where he performed actual primary research on the role of pressure waves with combustion. And that included his research, very small variations in pressure called acoustic waves.
And these waves, of course, are typical of speech, and although small, they can even affect standing flames. And so he did a lot of work on jet engines, and working on the safety of jet engines, which again, can, under certain conditions, which are called resonance, where one object vibrates in sympathy with another, can amplify acoustic waves such that the vibrations actually grow and can even destroy the fan blades in the rotor of a jet engine.
But this resonance is actually very important in hearing in the human ear, and particularly in hearing the human voice. So sound is, as I said, vibrating air molecules that cause changes in pressure. So these vibrations or movement of the air cause very small pressure changes.
And these pulse, and these little pulses travel through the air and they enter the opening in our ear and they reach the eardrum. And so the result of these really small vibrations of the eardrum are then transferred through three tiny bones called ossicles, which are in the middle ear cavity, into the cochlear, which is in the inner ear. And Macintosh writes that each stage of this system is staggering in its complexity.
And all mammals have a system where the basic features are similar to the human ear. But there's large differences between the mammals, even in the shape of the ear canal. And this is interesting because the canal amplifies the transmitting sound.
And so the design of the ear canal is shaped to amplify the sound frequencies that are very relevant to that particular species. And so the frequencies at which sound resonates depend on the length, shape and volume of the ear canal.
You can think about this, for example, if you think about a flute. A flute vibrates as different frequencies as we change the length of the opening using the different points. And so we can see, just by changing the length that the sound wave is travelling, then can change the amplification of the frequencies. And the human ear canal is about 20 millimetres long.
It's interesting, while cats and dogs have much longer canals, and theirs is bent at right angles to give them a horizontal and vertical component. So their ears are actually designed. Cats and dogs are designed to amplify quite different frequencies from ours.
The human ear, of course, we can hear over a wide range of sounds, from about 20 cycles per second to nearly 20,000 cycles per second, whereas dogs hear from, say, 65 cycles per second to 44,000 cycles per second, so much, much higher, more than double the frequency. Cats, of course, have a much wider range. They can hear sounds from about 55 cycles per second up to 77,000 cycles per second.
So it's about three and a half times our maximum frequency. And it's interesting, of course, as we age, we lose the ability to hear these higher sounds. Matter of fact, even in our early 20s, we begin to lose the capability of hearing very high frequencies.
So they are frequencies above about 12,000 cycles per second. Human voice, the frequencies when we're speaking, like me speaking now is typically between 125 and 400 cycles per second. And so the harmonics of the human voice are quite important between 2,000 and 5,000 cycles per second, since this is the region where different vowel sounds are actually distinguished.
And the higher frequencies, of course, enrich the quality of sounds like music. And so the ear canal is just the right length and shape to resonate with speech frequencies that we typically use and sound of song and so forth. One little thing that he points out in his article, that I wasn't aware of, was that there's another fascinating fact, he says, that's emerged in recent research.
And it's been shown that all sounds from water are produced by the popping of tiny little bubbles of air trapped in the water. And each bubble vibrates at a frequency that depends on the size of the bubble. So flowing water produces a range of audible frequencies.
So the sound of a babbling brook, for example, or waterfall or crashing waves are made by billions of tiny little bubbles. And those bubbles all have slightly different frequencies, but they all lie exactly in the range that the human ear amplifies by acoustic resonance. I thought that was really interesting.
And he quotes another verse from the Bible, Psalms 29:3, where he says, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord over many waters” which is, yeah, interesting. But from the research point of view, if anyone's interested in looking that up, that was an article that was published back in 2015 in the “Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics”, volume 24, article 070006. And it was by T. Leighton.
And it was called “The Acoustics Bubble: Oceanic Bubble Acoustics and Ultrasonic Cleaning”. But that was one of the things that came out with that. The acoustic signal that we get though, so that vibrating sound, once it's gone down the ear canal, causes the eardrum to vibrate.
And this pushes on the malleus, or a little hammer that's attached behind which itself pushes on the incus or anvil bone, which then moves the stapes or stirrup horizontally. And the first two of these bones are only about five millimetres long with the stapes. The smallest bone in our body is, in fact, a little bit smaller.
So these are tiny little bones. And it's interesting. Another interesting thing I didn't know before was that these are the only bones in the body that do not grow in size after birth.
So again, everything is just finely tuned so little babies can hear quite well. And it's fascinating that those bones that are involved in amplification of the sound don't grow, whereas, of course, our other bones do. And of course, believers in evolution try to argue that the upper and lower parts of the jawbones of a reptile move to become the malleus and incus bones.
But they quietly ignore that. One of the biggest hurdles of such story is that the jaws of reptiles never stop growing. So you can see that people are coming up with all these articles and trying to solve the evolution via evolution.
The major problem of trying to explain how these things can evolve, and they push forward these explanations when there's obvious evidence that they're absolutely impossible. And this is a classic example. We are born with bones, they don't grow, but in the evolutionary model, they say that these bones evolve from bones that actually do grow and increase in size all through life.
And again, it really, really frustrates me that the evidence, the overwhelming evidence for creation that is everywhere, is not being pointed out to our young people as they're learning science and particularly biology. Anyway, getting back to the structure of the ear, the ossicle bones need to amplify the signal, because it's now going to pass into a liquid medium in the inner ear, which is incompressible, because liquid is an impediment to sound. And so it's particular incompressible liquid, and each of the three specially shaped to form a lever mechanism, such as the stapes attached to the membrane, called the oval window in the cochlear, moves approximately three times the distance travelled by the malleus.
So there's an amplification there. There is also a tenfold smaller area being vibrated in the oval window compared to the tympanic membrane of the eardrum, so that the energy transfer involved is almost 100%. So ears are super efficient in transmitting that audible energy.
So the stapes acts like a little pump on the oval window of the membrane, and the membrane of the round window expands to compensate for the movement of the liquid inside the cochlear. And so if we were to unwind the cochlear, we'd see a membrane which tapers for higher frequencies inside the cochlear, rather like a xylophone. And so the combined frequencies that come from the oval window vibration are immediately split up into their component frequencies, each causing different parts of the basillar membrane to vibrate.
And so this is, in effect, an instantaneous frequency analyzer, which would make any design engineer marvel. So it's an amazing system that immediately splits the frequencies up. So you can imagine you've got all these combined pressure waves entering the ear.
But this is an amazing little machine that then splits those frequencies up into their individual frequencies instantly. Matter of fact, he draws the analogy. He says it's rather like having a miniature gremlin with concert pianist skills playing the keyboard in your inner ear.
And a final part of the hearing system involves an organ called the Corti, which runs along the top of this basilar membrane, remember? So it's the membrane that spits all the frequencies up into and separates them all. And this has tiny little hairs called stereocilia on it, which send an electrical signal to each frequency, or according to each frequency, excited by the incoming signal. So it's amazing that each tiny hair called a psyllium, which is 250,000,000 of a millimetre thick, right? 250,000,000 of a millimetre thick, or a quarter of a thousandth of a millimetre thick.
So they're less than one 70th of the thickness of the thinnest human hair. And so these tiny little hairs, when disturbed by a special membrane called the tectorial membrane, which touches the cilia above, causes the operation of literally a mechanical spring attached to the top of one hair. And this tiny little spring is only a few nanometers thick and stretches about 100 nm long.
And so again, a nanometer is a millionth of a millimetre. And so we're getting down towards the molecular scale. The other end pulls on a tiny trap door at the side of an adjacent psyllium, one of the smallest examples of mechanical springs.
This open trap door then allows charged ions in the fluid filled cochlear to excite ganglion nerves to send the signal to different parts of the cerebral cortex in the brain, depending on whether it is music or speech. For low frequencies, there's one nerve for each change in hertz. So there's a separate nerve for each different cycle per second.
In the upper range, there's one nerve for every two to three cycles per second. So there'd be the one nerve for say, 12,000, 12,000 and 112 thousand and two cycles per second, or 12,050, 112 thousand and 50, 212 thousand and 53. Those individual frequency frequencies.
So the human ear splits frequencies up into individual frequencies. When you think about this amazing coordinated design, and it's all encoded in the DNA, evolutionists have to believe, right, that random mutations to the DNA produce this amazing complex system. Random blind mutations to the DNA produce this amazing coordinated system and the mechanisms for building it as the human embryo develops, or any mammal embryo.
And so we can see the evidence is overwhelming for supernatural creation of this amazing machine. Random blind mutations aren't going to be used. A complex machine like that works, let alone complex machines for the other 5000 plus mammals that there are in the world, plus all the other reptiles and birds and all their individual hearing as well, that all suits them.
We have overwhelming evidence for a supernatural creator designer that we call God. And it really frustrates me that young people aren't being taught this information, this evidence are being pointed out to them in the way that points to the creator. And that's why I would like to encourage everyone listening to these programmes.
Or if you come across a really good book explaining the evidence for creation, and my book in six days, why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation, you can download it free on creation.com. Just do a search for the book and it'll come up there. You can read all the individual chapters by all the scientists.
And this information needs to get out. And I would like to really encourage people to put it up on your Facebook pages, on Twitter pages, tell people about it, that there is evidence out there that there is a creator God. And of course, details of that creator God are found in the Bible too, as we accumulate evidence all the time for the historical accuracy of the Bible.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
And remember, if you want to relisten to these programmes, just Google 3ABNaustralia.org.au all one word Click on the radio button and listen to the Faith and Science programme. Have a great day.
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