Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:17] The more I read about some of the discoveries in biology, and the more I seriously can't understand why so many biologists and scientists continue to be evolutionists.
[00:00:39] I was reading some statistics somewhere where there are very few biologists that are creationists and even seem to be a higher level of atheists in that group, according to the particular study that was done. But this really amazes me when I look at the complexity of biological systems because it overwhelmingly points to a designer. I think one of the reasons possibly, is that we have the dating that is done by geologists and earth scientists that points to different structures being millions, hundreds of millions of years old, and the fossils and so forth. And people are taught these long ages. And I think we have this silo effect in science where the geologists and the biologists, they're fairly specialist fields, and people become, when they do their doctorates, become very specialized in a particular area. But when one looks at the big picture, steps back and look at the big picture. As I've mentioned in many of my talks, the evidence for a young Earth and young life on Earth and even young universe is just growing.
[00:02:11] The more accurate data we get, the more we learn about the planets in our solar system, the more we analyze light from distant parts in the universe. All these sort of things are indicating major problems with the long age theories that are being taught to our young people, to our future scientists. But many scientists obviously believe, because that's what they've been taught, it's been drummed into them. But one of the areas that really, to me, points to the evidence for a creator, a super intelligence mind that has created living organisms, and indeed our universe is our immune system. Now, I was recently reading an article by a scientist who'd worked in some cancer research for a while.
[00:03:19] And when he wrote an article on the immune system, which he titled your ingenious immune system, cleverly configured to devour, deactivate and destroy. And he starts off by saying that, imagine a country that wanted to protect itself from terrorist attacks, for example.
[00:03:54] In order to do this, it sets up martial law with capital punishment for foreign invaders or rogue citizens. And then there are specialist centers for essential education and training and detention centers and waste disposal facilities and efficient transport systems. And he says, this particular country ensures its own survival by ruthlessly policing its borders and neutralizing any menace. And it does this by using surveillance and security checks.
[00:04:35] It has a sophisticated personal identification system that lets it detect and eliminate terrorists while protecting innocent citizens.
[00:04:47] Individual skills with particular levels, trained to elite levels, and become its police, soldiers and special operatives.
[00:04:59] And then there's high level communication to ensure coordinated responses to any attack.
[00:05:08] There's preemptive strategies are in place to efficiently counter dangerous incursions. And if you think about this, and we can imagine this sort of organized, this being set up within a country, it require a lot of intelligence where you would have intelligent politicians and military people and medical people and all this sort of thing, coordinating all the different systems, policing people. So a lot of minds would be involved to make this work and set up the different systems. Now, what this scientist, Philip Bell points out is that all this has parallels this description that he uses, he said, parallels our body's ingenious immune system.
[00:06:01] And it works in so many different ways. It resolves faults arising in our own cells or tissues, which would otherwise compromise the operation of our body. It protects our body against external environmental perils.
[00:06:19] And also our immune system deals decisively with anything that breaches our outer defenses, the idea being to prevent it from causing havoc inside the body.
[00:06:33] And of course, we know that there are many disease organisms around. I mean, just yesterday our neighbor phoned us to say that they had Covid and were isolating for a week and a bit. And so again, we know things like these viruses are around.
[00:07:01] But of course, all these things we know viruses, for example, can play an important role too. In many ways. They regulate bacteria and so forth.
[00:07:12] We know originally, of course, all these things, bacteria, viruses and so forth, created harmless. And of course, most are still benign. But since the curse of sin, things have changed. And as evil came in, obviously it affected the. And the Bible explains this, how it affected the organisms that inhabit our planet, including us, because we all have a tendency that way towards selfishness. And in order to protect our selfishness, we can resort to lying or stealing and all sorts of things. We know that has come in now. But it's interesting. Just as we've changed as a result of sin over the years, a vast variety of bacteria, viruses, fungi, single cell protoza and multicell parasites have also developed. But without an immune system, even burns and scalds could easily be life threatening. And small cuts could definitely prove fatal. I can remember my doctor explaining to me after I got a small cut in between my toes that became infected while bushwalking.
[00:08:46] The doctor explained to me that these small infections take out more healthy men than, you know, most other causes, because men can tend to ignore small cuts and not treat them properly to prevent infection.
[00:09:04] So when we look at our body. The way we're constructed, there are major types of defense or immunity.
[00:09:15] The one type is one that we're born with. And these are called the innate immune system.
[00:09:23] They're not aimed at any individual threat, such as specific disease, whereas the second takes longer to set up and get up to speed and is adaptive, and that is it responds to specific invaders and this sort of thing. So we have these two types of immune systems set up. One that we're just born with, which is our innate immunity. And one our adapted or acquired immunity, which deals with specific issues. So initially, we're born with a range of defense mechanisms. We've got lymph nodes, we've got our bone marrow system, we've got our spleen, we've got our appendix payers patches. We've got our skin, we've got the thymus and mucous membranes, and of course, our tonsils. And so this innate immune system that is set up in our body does not change with repeat attacks. But it has a number of forms of defenses. Mechanical, chemical, and cellular defenses, which are each genetically programmed to immediately deal with a host of potential nasties. And, for example, unbroken skin is our first line of defense. It's an impermeable barrier between our body and the outside world.
[00:11:02] And that would be like our border control or the border control agents in a country.
[00:11:09] But every now and again, of course, we get cuts, and this leads to openings. And that's where we have to have a special immune system to deal with those breaches in our skin. Of course, there are actually openings in our body. We have our eyes, nose, mouth, anus, genital openings, urethra.
[00:11:34] And of course, our airways are at risk from dust particles, microfibers and et cetera.
[00:11:43] But all these openings in our body are lined with moist mucous membranes that trap foreign particles coming in.
[00:11:54] Coal dust, soil dust, and so forth. And little particles, nanoparticles, that are floating around as well as invading microorganisms, tend to be stuck to these membranes.
[00:12:11] And it's interesting, these membranes produce amazing chemicals. So our skin, they produce various excretions that actually immobilize and kill pathogenic organisms. The lining of our major airways in our lungs has mucus to trap alien debris. And little hair like cilia to sweep these out once they are trapped. And sweep these upwards towards the throat, which we then is aided by coughing.
[00:12:44] The oily sigm produced in our skin, sebaceous glands. Contains lactic acid and other fatty acids, which inhibit bacterial growth.
[00:12:57] And it's interesting. Lyosime this is an enzyme that's found in our tears, and it can inactivate certain bacteria to help prevent eye infections. And of course, in our stomach, we have acid, which of course, is important for digesting and breaking down food, but it also destroys many pathogens that would otherwise harm us.
[00:13:23] And by urinating, that flushes out the lining of our urinary tract and keeps that clean. And so there are many of these things. Now, one of the important things that need to point out, just even with these systems, is that these particular acids, these particular fatty acids, the structure of our skin, the mucous layers that are formed, these all involve specialist chemicals. They all have specialist chemical structures, and these chemical structures are all programmed in our dna, which is a code, which is a language. And as I've mentioned before, if I write the letter germ. Well, let's pick another one. Mucus membrane.
[00:14:19] The spelling of the word mucous membrane doesn't look anything like a mucous membrane. It's a code. And so similarly, the code to make these things via ribosome two and other processes in our body to assemble the proteins and structures is all in a code, a code that operates machines and tells machines what to do, how to assemble the components that we get from food. When we eat food, the food is broken down and that is assembled into these components. And of course, when we're conceived from our mother's egg and that egg grows, that egg contains the program to make all these specialized parts. Now, the theory of evolution, of course, has to say that this amazing system evolved by chance, but it's so complex. I mean, we've just started with our skin. But there are many specialized cells that serve important roles in our immune system. For example, there are our white blood cells, leukocytes, which make up about 1% of our blood volume.
[00:15:33] They develop in our bone marrow.
[00:15:36] They then are deployed into our blood.
[00:15:42] There's the lymph, and the colorless fluid in our lymph system also contains it in various tissue organs, for example, a spleen, thymus and lymph nodes. And so these also produce lymphocytes, and they're central to the adaptive immune response. And so all these different types of leukocytes are absolutely amazing.
[00:16:13] And there are those that are relevant to innate immunity, such as phagocytes, the cells that eat. They eat the baddie cells up.
[00:16:24] They can engulf and destroy foreign material in vulders.
[00:16:31] So there's lots of these different types of specialist cells. You've got the neutrophils that make up about 70% of leukocytes are like privates in an army. They're the first line of defense against maruting microbes. They engulf and digest any foreign body.
[00:16:54] Then you've got osinophils.
[00:16:59] These are specialist sort of cells. They dampen inflammation and are especially active against parasites. And then you got basophils.
[00:17:12] They're active against bacteria and parasites. They produce histamine, releasing it.
[00:17:19] If an allergen like pollen enters our body, it enables the fighting cells to get to infected areas more quickly. They're also responsible for the watering of your eyes and a runny nose. And so the immunity of the way these immune systems work is very complex. So I said, we've got the macrophages, the big eaters, the main body scavenger cells. They're like waste disposal workers.
[00:17:54] Then there's monocytes. They only make up about two to 8% of leukocytes, and they're equipped to recognize perils and really dangerous other cell types. They have, again, these really specialized roles within our body, particularly related to inflammation. Then there's the natural killer cells.
[00:18:21] These are special lymphocytes which know to avoid normal, healthy cells, but attack rogue cancer cells or cells infected with viruses. They can deal with these cells. So unlike innate immunity, of course, adaptive immunity is specific to a particular type of invader, and so it's ultimately more powerful. However, it's much slower to respond because, in a way, the cellular response has to be briefed and then deployed before carrying out its mission. And so the lymphocytes and operatives in the adaptive system include our b cells, the B lymphocytes, and t cells. And they're like police trained in various specialist areas of crime fighting.
[00:19:19] Some have short lived, some live for months or years, accounting for the ability to remember invading cells long time. The t cells are called because they're educated to maturity in your thymus gland, which is that gland overlying the heart.
[00:19:41] And some have an auxiliary function. So they're called t helper cells, and some killer cells, they're the t cytotoxic cells. Yeah, there's an amazing role, but I think one of the important things is that all these defense systems operate together and protect us from the invaders. So we're under constant assault from billions of foreign antigens, the antigens that come to us in the forms of bacteria and different infectious agents, viruses and so forth.
[00:20:27] These all have to be dealt with when they get into our body through a cut or through breathing them in, this sort of thing. When our innate immune system is overwhelmed and I guess the bottom line is that it's hard for me to just explain by talking without diagrams and so forth, to illustrate how complex our immune system is and the set of chain reactions that occur, how one mechanism is switched on, that mechanism switches on another support mechanism, and so forth, because both the innate and adaptive immune system are really much, much more complex than I've tried to explain.
[00:21:18] Our leukocytes, for example, secrete many types of what we call cytokines, and these fall into different categories.
[00:21:29] Csfs, tnfs, interleukins, interferons, and they all have complex roles in immunity. For example, T cells produce various interferons that are crucial in antiviral resistance.
[00:21:45] And one sort, the IFN gammas, they activate and recruit macrophages.
[00:21:54] And then we've got NK cells, natural killer cells, they activate them to fight viruses as well. So we've got all these sort of switching on mechanisms again, so these immune systems don't destroy good cells and so forth.
[00:22:12] Some invading cells are too big to be devoured by phagocytes. And so the t cytotoxic and natural killer cells, NK cells, punch holes in their membranes using a weapon called performin. The target cells, then auto destruct, after which the macrophages engulf any of the remaining debris. And it's an amazing system that is set up. And so all these systems that we're talking about have all these subsystems in them also, so that all the cells, antibodies and cytokines get to where they're needed in their body. There has to be a transport system. And so our circulation system is also designed so that our dedicated immune system cells, the police and crack troops, rapidly reach the sites of disturbance, damage or infection.
[00:23:17] And so you've got the role of the lymph nodes and the ducts and vessels of the lymphatic system.
[00:23:25] And you could think of the nodes as detention centers where insurgents are detained and then eliminated.
[00:23:35] And I guess, overall, whatever the menace is, there are dedicated cells are always on hand to devour, deactivate and destroy, whether they're viruses, fungi, bacteria and other things attacking our body.
[00:23:56] The immune system is truly a design marvel. It really, really is.
[00:24:05] And I'd encourage people listening to go online and look up the immune system and read about the amazing complexity of it. It's astonishingly sophisticated, and to me, and many creationists, it speaks so eloquently of a super intelligent mind of its designer.
[00:24:34] To me, it's just overwhelming evidence of a creator. It's overwhelming evidence to me, these systems that they could not arise by random blind chance mutations, because so early on, living organisms would have failed. You had to have a coordinated system. It's amazingly complex. It's taken years of scientific research to understand how our immune system works. Textbooks on our immune system are really thick.
[00:25:13] And as I said, I've found it really hard to do justice to describing how it works and explain it to you in my talk today.
[00:25:27] When we think about this and these emerging systems that are all encoded for in our dna, and that code works perfectly to create these systems, not only in us, but plants have their own immune systems. All the different animals and insects have different types of immune systems in them as well to protect living things so that they can reproduce. To me, this just points so eloquently to an amazing creator. But our immune system is really amazing.
[00:26:06] And I think that, again, it points to the overwhelming evidence that there truly is a God. And I know many young people are questioning this, is there really a God? And there are so many distractions now with all the sort of computer games and artificial intelligence that's being created, developed. And again, this all takes in super intelligent minds to do this. And yet people are ignoring the overwhelming evidence for the super intelligent creator God that created us. The Bible, of course, explains that this God came and revealed himself to us through Jesus Christ, who performed miracles that were eyewitness, that cannot be explained by science. And the people that saw those miracles went on to give their lives to ensure that that message was written down and kept for us. And they preached and told what they saw so that it could be preserved for us today. It's a shame that so many people are ignoring this message which is in the Bible. And that's why I'd encourage listeners and those people who are Christians to encourage their friends to get a Bible and begin to read it and understand how this reveals our amazing creator God.
[00:27:33] Remember, if you want to relisten to this program, you can just google threeabnaustralia.org au and click on the radio button and on the listen button. And there are many other programs on many other topics too, that you can listen to that all point to the amazing evidence for our creator.
[00:27:59] I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:19] Your have been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio.
