Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
In recent year, well, probably the last century or so, people have turned to science in particular, as the, the arbitrator of truth, of knowledge. And we talk about scientific evidence.
If there's scientific evidence for something, then that's more or less the gold standard. And, of course, when it comes to origins and why we're here again for a long time now, for decades, people have said, well, science has essentially proved evolution. Well, I, I really challenge that in terms of, sure, there was a time when the scientific theory of evolution certainly seemed to dominate, but that was because many people who were defending the creation position at the time did not have a deep understanding of science.
We have a much, much greater understanding, a scientific understanding of living things now, and particularly us and humans and our brain, and also understanding the brains and in particular, the biochemistry of all living things. To the point, as I've mentioned many times in the programmes previously, the Darwinian style evolution, where random mutations produce new types of body parts and new organs and new organisms, is absolutely impossible. And I'm using this word “absolutely”, and I can't stress that strong enough.
It is absolutely impossible for random mutations in nature to produce changes to the DNA code that would result in successful new body parts that are totally functioning and totally operational, let alone the impossibility of nonliving molecules coming together to form some sort of living organism with a reproductive mechanism that will enable it to reproduce the same sort of organism, or even a similar organism that could survive and hence multiply. The chemistry involved is so complex, the reactions that are involved in synthesising, that is creating the new molecules that are responsible to build the structures inside the living cells, the different membranes, the different iron channels and so forth, that are required for nutrients to travel for so many things, and let alone the formation of what we know now as DNA, and a molecule which encodes a language, a chemical language, that describes the structure and function and the components of an organism.
And to have that code, and again, the code reader, we know it's absolutely impossible.
And so here in this current era, we're still having children taught the theory of evolution. Why? Because they don't want to teach the people about God, because they say, well, which God are we going to follow? Is it the christian God or the Hindu gods or the Buddhist position? There's all these different positions.
And, of course, I think there's powerful evidence supporting the Bible, the Bible account, compared to the accounts of other religious documents. And the Bible has special claims. It claims that the people that wrote the Bible, their minds were inspired by God.
Their minds were directed by God to write these messages, to warn people. And, of course, people often scoff, what about the stories of the flood and Adam and Eve and this sort of thing? But perhaps they forget that we think that Adam lived over 900 years, Methuselah lived well over 900 years, and Noah 900 years or so, too, and those three generations. So Methuselah was alive during the time of Adam, and he was also alive during the time of Noah, and so he could pass on to Noah details.
And those stories would have been passed on as to what the world was like before the fall. And also the stories of the Satan, that there was an evil one, there was an evil mind that challenged God, part of the creation that God had created earlier in heaven, who is part of the angels that challenged God and God's authority there. So there was this rebellion in heaven.
And this so much explains the origin of evil, too. The biblical account for the origin of evil makes so much sense. And we see the behaviour of characters that are described in the Bible and include some of the heroes of the Bible, are described with their shortcomings.
The old expression warts and all were worse than warts. Some of the things that they did were really bad, but they repented, they changed. They recognised that there was this superior intelligence, this superior intelligence that designed all the living systems that designed us, that design the bees, and the amazing systems and biochemistry that is in bees if you go through the programmes of Faith and Science.
A few programmes ago, I talked about bees, and it's amazing when you just think that the worker bees have these glands in their head that produce the royal jelly. If they feed the royal jelly to a little larvae, it will grow into a queen. Now, that all sounds really good, but you've got to think of the chemistry, the biochemistry that has to be designed, the enzyme systems have to be there, present to synthesise and or to enable the reactions to go that synthesise.
The royal jelly. And the royal jelly has to have these characteristics that it affects. As the little larvae is growing, it affects its biochemistry, so that it develops the reproductive system of a queen bee and the structure of a queen bee, not a worker bee.
And we can see that these molecules have all sorts of programming interactions that they interact, they switch on and off. Other genes, the genes that are already there in the codes, some are switched on, some are switched off. There's amazing complexity.
It reeks of design, it reeks of programming, complex programming, not some arbitrary random mutation. And we're just talking about one tiny little feature in nature, the little glands on the head of a little worker bee that create the royal jelly. And how, again, the chemistry involved if the little bee larvae is fed bee bread, a mixture of pollen and nectar, and all the larvae is fed a little bit of royal jelly for the first day or so, a couple of days, when they're fed the bee bread polynector mixture, it switches on different genes and they become a worker bee.
This whole switching mechanism just reeks of intelligent design, super intelligent design. And if there's that super intelligent designer, and I think we all have this sense of morality, when we see something really bad has happened to an innocent child or harmless sort of animal or something like that, we have this sensitivity that that is wrong, that shouldn't have been done, those people shouldn't have been doing those bad things. We have this sense of morality that is there.
We have a sense of morality that's wrong to steal from people, wrong to take other people's things. And essentially, the Bible sets it out as the Ten Commandments. And we can see essentially, for most of those commandments that we can see, they're intuitively, and our conscience is programmed to that, to this right and wrong.
And so it explains evil. But the Bible goes further than that, and it says we are to worship God, we are to remember God every seven days on the Sabbath day. We are to remember God, and we know which day the Sabbath day is, because that's the day that the Jews had kept, that the Jews were keeping in Jesus' time, and that Jesus kept the Sabbath day.
He even kept the Sabbath day in the tomb, so to speak. And so we have this alignment. We know that that's the day after Good Friday, we know it's the Saturday, so there are so many things that we can align.
I was listening to a programme just recently on the book of Esther and the historical evidence from the Persian history and so forth, that correlates with the historical record in the Bible. And I have a book with me now in the studio. It's called a defence of the Bible, third edition, by Dr. Gary Baxter. And he has a very big section there on archaeology and the archaeological evidence that supports the accurate history in the Bible, and how they're know little pieces of jewellery and other tablets and inscriptions that go right back and quote in the very old books of the Old Testament that go back way before the time of Christ. The other thing that is happening, of course, in our world today that is really challenging is that people in some sense are now questioning and challenging science.
We're being bombarded almost daily, it seems, in the news and different protests about climate change and global warming and all this sort of thing. And it was interesting to note that just the other year in 2020, in the journal temperature, Medical Physiology and beyond, there was an article by Valentina Zharkova, and I think they're at the University of Newcastle on Tyne. And it was talking about modern grand soldier minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling.
And it's quite fascinating how we hear a lot about carbon emissions and cutting down burning fossil fuels and this sort of thing. And my own personal view is, sure, we are getting global warming through the greenhouse effect, from the greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. But one of the things that concerns me is not so much the burning of fossil fuels, but the cutting down of the forest.
They're clearing a massive amounts of forests, because forests take the carbon dioxide and they convert it into carbohydrates and they make it into wood and they store it. And of course, all our food comes from that carbon dioxide, too. All our food comes from the carbon dioxide cycle that is made by plants.
All the food comes from plants. Originally, if people eat meat, they eating somewhere along the line, that animal has eaten an animal or has eaten grass, or has eaten an animal that has eaten grass and plants. And so essentially, all our food comes via this cycle from carbon dioxide.
I think we have a far greater need to incorporate responsibility. People have to be personally responsible and in terms of companies as well, have to have moral responsibility against clearing vast amount of forests. And I think one of the things is we can see that greediness is destroying our world.
The whole thing is greediness and breaking the laws and not being environmental stewards. But one of the other fascinating things is, of course, as pointed out by this paper, is that we neglect the fact that our heat comes from the sun. And there have been times in the past when there have been ice age.
There was a general ice age, I think I remember reading from about 1250 through to about 1850, and there was a particular ice age in Europe in the late 15 hundreds to the 16 hundreds. I think somewhere around that period, I might be out by a century, but it was a particularly cold period that was referred to, has a particular name, the Maunder Minimum, that was recorded back then. So you can look up these solar minimums.
But one of the things, of course, is that brings another effect, is that the sunspot and the magnetic fields of the sun are changing and they change. And that changes our solar radiation. That changes our cosmic ray radiation.
So it changes the amount of radiation reaches the earth and the amount of temperature that we can rise. And there's a lot of debate in science about how important will these changes in solar radiation. So it looks like we're heading now towards a solar cycle of solar minimum, where the radiation from the sun will reduce.
And there are a lot of different cycles. Some of them are still disputed. Scientists have been looking at different cycles of a couple of hundred years, some 90 years, and then, of course, shorter cycles of eleven years and so forth.
And so we know that there are a number of solar cycles, and they affect this activity, they affect the solar radiation that the earth receives, they affect the cosmic ray radiation that earth receives. And of course, this interferes with any attempts to carbon 14 date as well, because that dating, the level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere, depends on the solar radiation, the cosmic rays from the sun that are hitting the earth at that time. And so that's why, again, carbon 14 dating, again, it depends on the variation.
We have variations in the cosmic rays producing a level of carbon 14. We have variations in the earth magnetic field that repel most of the cosmic rays and protect us from more damage from them. And so this is why carbon 14 dating and these long dates that are claimed really can't be substantiated.
But we know that carbon 14 has a particular half life of 5727 years. I think it is that shows us that if we're detecting carbon 14 in these dinosaur remains and these sort of things, they can only be thousands of years old. They can't be millions of years old.
So all this evidence, again, is pointing to confirm the Bible, but again, as scientists debate whether the earth now will go into a cooling period, whether how much effect it will have on the effect of the increase of carbon dioxide emissions, and all this sort of thing becomes very controversial. And again, we have the scientists arguing between themselves. And it seems to me, and I've observed this for some time now, it depends on the worldview of the scientist.
If you have a scientist, and his worldview is that he's enamoured with global warming, he's going to interpret what he sees in terms of mechanisms that are going to support that theory. And it's the same with the theory of evolution. Another one, a friend of mine brought to my attention a book that was published at the end of 2021, November 2021.
It was called The Real Anthony Fauci. It was a book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nephew of the late John F. Kennedy, I think. And he was an author that was named some years ago as Time Magazine's hero, one of Time Magazine's “Heroes for the Planet”, for his success in helping the Riverkeeper project lead to fight to restore the Hudson River.
And he is a resolute defender of children's health. He had a landmark victory against Monsanto, as well as in the Dupont case, which actually inspired the movie Dark Waters back in 2019. And it's interesting, he's published this book which again talks about manipulation, and I don't know whether you go so far as to call it as corruption, but certainly manipulation by the drug industry over how Covid is treated.
And this sort of thing gets a lot of reviews. I was interested in. I haven't read the book, but as I said, was only brought to my attention a few days ago.
And anyone that's interested in looking it up on Amazon, it's called The Real Anthony Fauci, but apparently it's heavily referenced. But one of the reviews that I was interested in was, by Luc Montagnier. Now, he was a Nobel laureate for physiology.
He was one of the guys that developed. He's a virologist, he was one of the guys that developed the really successful treatment against AIDS. And in his review, like Professor Luc, Montagnier writes, unfortunately, he's dead now, I think, but died just recently.
But he writes, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who was from one of the Nazi propaganda specialists, wrote, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”. His review goes on, “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr exposes the decade of lies.” So it sounds like it's an interesting book, but the point I want to make is this, that we find there's a growing number of people that are saying, look, we can't trust science. Science has become politicised.
There are political agendas underpinning science. And to me, this flagged a red light. For example, during the COVID situation, when in certain countries, the use of the drug ivamectin was banned to treat it, despite, for example, a major review being published of a number of studies of the use of ivermectin and how in the treatment of COVID that was published by researchers from the University of Newcastle on Tyne, again, and there was a meta analysis that was published and again, the fact that the ivermectin drug is relatively harmless, it's quite a safe drug to use in terms of side effects. To me, that just ran red lights that something is coming on. I think there's a growing sense in the community.
I've read. I've rather spoken to other people, too, that sense that something isn't right. And I think, really, the Bible tells us, not only is the Bible accurately about the past, the Bible is accurate about the future. And it's amazing when you consider the prophecy that was given to Daniel hundreds of years before Christ.
Daniel, who was the advisor to Nebuchadnezzar, that famous Babylonian king that built the hanging gardens of Babylon, of course, and founded the Babylonian Empire, really expanded it. Daniel was one of his advisors. Nebuchadnezzar, of course, had this amazing dream.
And in order to have the dream interpreted correctly, he said to his advisors, you have to tell me what I dreamt. Then I know you can interpret the dream. And of course, Daniel, one of his advisors, prayed to God, and God revealed the dream to him.
Daniel was able to go to Nebuchadnezzar, reveal the dream, and of course, that was amazing. It's been recorded.
And that dream predicted that history of Europe there from the time of Nebuchadnezzar right through to the second coming of Jesus. And it talks about how Europe will never be. Europe would follow on from the Roman Empire, but as a number of smaller countries would never be united.
And in the days of those kings, God would return and destroy the earth, because people have been. We are destroying the earth as humans ourselves. And that's when the second coming of Jesus comes.
And we know that this situation, the unsettled things that are happening around the earth, among people around the earth, in all the different countries today, there's this sense of unsettledness, that something is not right. And part of that is this loss of credibility of science in many areas. And I think one of the things underpinning this is the continual teaching of evolution.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that we have that evolution is absolutely impossible. And what happens is people that speak out, scientists that speak out against these different things, and a whole lot of areas have become politicised. Gender and all these sort of other areas scientists speak out on the basis of science, are being closed down here.
We know that it's politics, and truth isn't determined by the number of votes. And I think it's fascinating when we think of what Goebels wrote, a lie that is told a thousand times becomes the truth. And this has become so relevant and it's become so real in areas like evolution, gender studies, different things like this at the present time.
And so it makes it very hard for people who are not scientifically trained to understand what is the truth, what is real and climate, what's really happening with climate, what really are the important issues in regard to preserving the earth and being a good steward of earth. But one of the things that we can hold on to is the Bible. And that's the important thing that we need to really, really understand that the Bible was inspired by God.
It sets out the future. Science can't tell us the future. I'm sure it can predict the path of a rocket or a satellite and so forth, and an object under the influence of a magnetic field and this sort of things, because we have laws, we have laws that were set up by, you know, as some of our know, scientists, astrophysicists like Paul Davies point out, what's the origin of the laws that govern the know? They come from God.
And this is the beauty. The Bible explains why we are here. We were created by God because He wanted to create beings that he could love and would love Him back.
And really, the bottom line is we've stuffed it up. We have been influenced by evil. It seems our genes have been influenced by evil.
But God offers us that opportunity to change through power, through the supernatural power that comes through believing in Jesus Christ as God and saviour. And people say, well, why should you know Jesus Christ was a man. Well, no.
When we read the Bible account, Jesus Christ was God. God came as a man, and that's why he was able to resurrect himself and appear to those disciples. And we have all those witnesses at that time.
It's an amazing story that top scientists, top philosophers in the world have read and see. This is an amazing story. It fits or account, it fits, it works.
And millions of Christians testify to the change in their lives when they came to know God as portrayed by Jesus Christ, this wonderful person that came, that brought healing, performed miraculous healing, lifted people up, raised them up, encouraged them and changed their lives for the better and the good. An amazing person was really God. And when we believe that, when we choose that, and we choose, I want to be a friend of Jesus, I want to be in his kingdom.
God performs a change on us that enables us to become new people, people that we can have that fellowship with God. And God one day will come again and he will take us to be with him forever and be able to fellowship with him forever. That's the amazing message of good news that the Bible has for us.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. And remember, if you want to relisten this programme, you just google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word, and click on the radio button and you'll see the programmes there. To click on the different programmes.
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I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
