Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
As I was watching the news the other night, there were a lot of violent crime, a committed by young people. And you hear these stories about immorality and this sort of thing, all sorts of problems that people have these days, particularly young people. And as I was thinking about this, I was thinking things have certainly changed since I was young.
When most people went to church and most people feared God and were aware that one day there's going to be a judgement and we're going to be held accountable for our actions. And of course that's why we need Jesus as our saviour. Because one day there is going to be a judgement of all the bad things that people have done and how people have destroyed this beautiful creation.
And as I thought about it, I was thinking the damage that has been done through our education system, of teaching young people that we evolved, that we came about by random processes of evolution, that the universe just evolved as we know, that's taught the big Bang theory and then evolution, somehow life started and then everything just evolved from that. And therefore there's no accountability, there's just humans are on top of the food chain, so to speak. And it seems then that as young people growing up with this culture, there's been a couple of effects.
And one of those effects has been to again, well, there's no God that we have to be accountable for. We'll do whatever we can get away with. And I can remember listening to a talk by David Belinsky, a philosopher for mathematician from Princeton University there.
And he pointed out that unless people are aware that there is a supernatural power that we've been, that we're accountable to, then there's no brakes on human behaviour. Humans will do whatever they can get away with. And we have this tendency to be selfish to do.
And if it means hurting other people or robbing other people, if we can get away with it, we'll do it. And we see this proliferated, for example, around us with all the scams that again has been reported on the news and people contacting people over the phone or on the Internet, however they do it and sort of trying to very sneakily get money out of people. And so we see this behaviour and while there's always been Roberts and bad things all down through history and people have fought wars, there was generally an accountability to the people, recognised that there was a God one day there was going to be accountability.
And of course in pagan times they tried to appease the gods with different sacrifices and all this sort of thing. And as I thought about this, there's that aspect of the teaching of evolution that has made our society very secular. But there is also another aspect to this.
And that is that we see that governments within our country are making, introducing more and more laws based on that there is no God that we're accountable to, or the God of the Bible is not the God that we are accountable to. And so they're looking at bringing in laws that determine that will affect how christians can worship, how they can educate their children and so forth. And this is a very serious aspect in my view.
And as I've thought about this too, I think so much of this has stemmed from this intellectual approach that there is no God. We evolved. We know that now science can explain our origins and therefore we can go ahead and make these laws.
And the fact now that we have politicians and governments that are making these laws irrespective of God's law is very, very sad because I think what the problem is that these people that believe that they're so educated and that they can make these laws have been totally misled in their own education system because we now know the evidence is just overwhelming that evolution is impossible and didn't occur. It can't have occurred. But the problem that we've had, as I've mentioned before, and that top scientists like James M. Tour, the world leading synthetic chemist, have pointed out that a lot of people, particularly biologists and geneticists, don't really understand the maths and the chemistry that underpins the theory of evolution. If it could occur and that we now know as impossible, the chemical reactions don't occur, the math shows that it's absolutely impossible. And there's this ignorance that they, because of this inculcation of evolutionary theory, it's actually blinded them to be able to understand the deeper concepts of science that are involved in this.
As I think back on this, my first boss that I worked for was Dr. Neil Grey. He was appointed. He was the first PhD qualified chemical engineer to work at the BHP Central Research laboratories. And of course, BHP is the world's largest mining company. But back in those days it was the largest steel producer in the southern hemisphere.
And I worked with him. I was his personal assistant. When he was appointed.
He'd just come from Imperial College London and he later went on to lecture at the University of Melbourne. And he was later telling me, he used to point out to students, look, do you really believe that all these amazing life forms around us could arise by random chance mutations? The maths and the engineering aspects just is totally impossible for these structures to occur by chance randomly. And I think this is just an important point.
I mean, I serve on the industrial advisory committee for a school of chemical engineering for one of Australia's top universities. And I'm currently involved as a research advisor for another cooperative research centre at another top Australian University that is well known for its engineering school research. And one of the projects that's just been approved the other day by the board that I'm involved in is where we're looking at designing what we call conditioners that enable you to dry some sort of seed, whether it be a coffee bean or wheat or something like that, which during the cooking process may have a very high moisture level.
And then you want to take it back down to a much lower moisture level very rapidly and without destroying the nutritive value. So that at the lower moisture level now you can actually process this raw material in a way that it will maintain structures that will perform perfectly in the processing technology platforms that you're using. For example, if you're making something like a biscuit or a cookie that we buy in a packet from the supermarket, and again, we take for granted, but so often we're so removed from the processes that involved in this when these things are mass produced as opposed to making at home on your tray.
Those biscuits all have to be the same size exactly to fit into the packet. They have to rise by exactly the same amount every time. And that manufacturer is producing thousands of these an hour, probably at a massive rate of production, so that it's economically viable.
And again, everything has to be controlled so it'll fit in the packaging, it won't rattle around and break and so forth. The design of these dryers. So we just want to change the moisture content for a grain, maybe a tonne of grain, which could contain millions of individual, say, grains of wheat.
And we want to have those flowing through this system so they come in at one moisture level and go out at another. And it involves what we call computational fluid dynamics. Now, on this particular project that we have for a client that we are going to look at, drawing in this particular case wheat, where you're going to have a fully qualified university professor as the research advisor, and we're going to have a PhD student.
So that's a person who in engineering has an honours degree, first class honours degree in engineering, and he'll be studying for his doctorate. And his doctorate will be looking at the design of the structure of this device and looking at the mathematics of it so that we can actually control for raw materials that come in at different moisture levels, but have them come out at the exact moisture level at the end. Because after all, if you're buying something like wheat or coffee beans, these coming in from raw material, they're going to have quite varying moisture conditions, depending on the farms they're grown on, whether there's been rain and so forth, these variables.
But at the end, it all has to come out at a particular control rate. And we might have airflow, the rate of rotation, the rate of flow that these particles are coming in, and yet all the particles have to be dried. We don't want to miss one. We have to dry all. Now, these things that we just take for granted when we buy a packet of biscuits is going to involve a three year project, a lot of mathematics, the computer programmes that are involved in computational fluid dynamics, generally costing you in the order of $60,000. This sort of thing for licences, and involved highly intelligent programmers developing the models behind these things.
And most of us, as we buy a biscuit, we don't realise the technology and the design that has gone in behind the manufacturer of that cookie or that biscuit behind there. When we look at the things in nature, they're far, far more complex than that. Far, far more complex. And yet we want to believe, we're told that we have to believe that these amazing structures came about by random mutations, random mutations to a language, to a set of instructions that are written using chemical compounds, four basic chemical compounds that we abbreviate, act and g, that are for the names of these chemical compounds. When we're writing the code, and the codes involve miinsolettis, and what we're saying is that random blind changes to those codes can produce these amazing structures, interrelated structures of the plants, flowers, birds and bees. Now, today I plan to talk about birds and bees.
I have a friend who was an ornithologist, he's a professor in that area, he's a world authority on swifts and swiftlets. Professor Michael Tarbuton, a good friend, I've known him for over 40 years. And it was interesting reading an article that he'd written in a very interesting book, and it's called Design and Catastrophe:
51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature. And it's published by Andrews University Press, and quite an interesting one. So reading, I was reading the article that he had on interrelated design in the swiftlet, and he said, birds have to maintain five strategies for incubating legs, and all five have been known for more than 150 years.
And scientists felt that every conceivable pattern for a complicating the essential task of incubating the embryo and bird's eggs, had been recorded. So we're just looking at something. We're just looking at, how do we incubate an egg? Well, we think that's pretty basic, wouldn't we? Well, the basic categories, one, either both parents sit on the eggs, or one parent only, or other adults of the same species might sit on the eggs, or other species, like the cuckoos, might come and sit on the eggs, or there might be non animal heat, such as megapodes, that use mounds of compost.
But back in 1985, Dr. Tarbaton discovered that Australian swiftlets, which produce only one egg, because they can't find enough feeds to find two nestlings. Remember, they eat insects, swifts.
They're able to equal the annual productivity of other swiftlets, which produce clutches of two. And this was achieved despite the fact that both species, these Australian swiftlets, can only find enough insects to raise their clutches for the 125 to 150 days. Now, what they do is, what he found that they did, was that the swiftlets employ a very interesting strategy.
And what happens is a second single edge clutch is produced once the first nestling becomes homeothermic. That is, it's warm enough, it can keep itself warm by itself. And what it does is it begins providing the warmth for the second egg.
And so the second egg is actually incubated by the first hatchling. Isn't that interesting? And this strategy, points out, is so finely tuned that in most cases, the second egg hatches the day after the first nestling fledges, allowing both parents to continue feeding until the second nestling fledges that just flies off, which usually is just before a flux of insect prey at the end of the wet seasons in the savannah environment. Now, another thing that I found out in reading his article was that swiftlets have the ability to echolocate.
That is, they can find their prey and they can find their way into caves every night to sleep and breed. And Dr. Tarbudon points out that he's found nests up to one kilometre from cave entrances.
So that flown that far up into the dark cave. That's interesting. I didn't realise that there were birds that could echolocate as well.
Now, just imagine the changes to the genetic code to provide all these abilities and to provide these particular instincts. Now, we talk about instincts. Now, remember, instincts are non material, our brains are material, but these whole control and I guess the hormonal control that controls the egg production, all these sort of things, the hormones that are involved, that are complex chemicals that are all produced by random mutations.
No, these are all evidence of an amazing creators. And these little swiftlets, of course, they mostly nest up high, away from in the caves where snakes can't get them. And in the Cook Islands, they spread their nests out in caves to avoid the crabs that climb over the cave walls looking for nestlings.
On the other hand, in Papua New Guinea, they nest on the floor of the cave where there's no ground based predators. And it's interesting that, of course, Switzerlands produce a saliva, which is like a superglue, that glues the nests together. It's quite amazing, actually.
And again, though, when we think about it, the composition of this glue, again, the compounds that are involved in this saliva, that becomes this glue, all have to be again coded for in the genetic code as a result of random mutations. I think he talks about a third design feature in the swiftlets is that they can fly all day without resting, and even during breathing, they hold insects they catch in a pouch below their mouth that's designed to hold over 750 insects. Again, these structures that enable them to carry the food.
Another thing is the nestlings are designed to grow slowly. That means that they can survive not only being fed just two or three times a day, but even during cyclones, to prevent the parents from catching food for several days. And so all these factors that are in there, and remember, all these abilities are in there as a result of the genetic code coding for these metabolic rates and so forth, that are there.
The compounds that control the metabolic rate, all have to be produced by chemical reactions that are encoded for in the DNA to make the compounds. And one of the, again, the research, engineering research that's been done as to why swifts and swiftlets can fly all day at one of the universities, showed that their wings work quite differently from other birds. They used leading edge vortices to provide lift.
And studies at London University, which is there down the bottom of Sweden, there in a wind tunnel, have shown that some of the design features that enable low energy flight enable low energy flight, even while pursuing insects all day. And in swifts and swiftlets, the upstroke of the wing provides thrust as well as lift, equal to 60% of the lift on the downstroke. So isn't that amazing? The amazing design and aerodynamic design of these wings means that these birds get lift on the upstroke as well as the downstroke.
Because most birds don't produce any lift on their upstroke. And what we have to remember is that evolutionists say, oh, this is some random mutation that's enabled them to develop so they could fly fast enough to catch insects and all this sort of thing. But when you think about the amount of design that goes in to actually design the leading edge of the feathers and so forth, and the structures of the muscles and the skin on the bird and the nerves and the muscles that are involved and ligaments and all these sort of things, they all have to be coordinated.
And when I think about, we just got this project, it's going to run for three years through probably four years, looking at designing just a design to dry some grain. When you think of the amount of engineering that goes into design wings, and when you look at the amount of physics that we knew 100 years ago, and yet it still took us ages to 150 years ago, the amount of physics that we knew, but it still took us an amazing amount of time and thousands of engineers to get to designing aircraft that we fire today. And those aircraft still don't self reproduce.
They still require intelligent pilots to find them, or design the control mechanism, and again, they still can't fly and have the same performance and efficiency that birds like swiftlets, have. To me, when we look at this, the evidence, the amazing evidence for design, and I think when you understand the problems that as engineers, we try to solve using our knowledge of maths and physics and thermodynamics and so forth, and the amount of time that are spent and studies that are spent and experiments to get it right, to get the maths right, it makes you realise that things like the design of bird's wings, the feathers, the weather structures, and that just can't arise by chance. The wing design again generates a clockwise leading edge vertices on the downstroke, anticlockwise leading edge vertices on the upstroke, and all these elements together have the effect of increasing manoeuvrability in a bird that is otherwise designed for speed.
And so not only are these birds extremely fast, but they can have high manoeuvrability that enables them to manoeuvre and catch flying insects. So that's what they feed on flying Switzer professor Tarburton concludes by saying the range of design features, all essential to enable swiftlets to do what they do with none of them able to achieve their end results by themselves. Speak of an intelligent orison, and a origin, rather, and a creator who plan nature not only to achieve a multitude of diverse ecological relationships, but also to occupy our minds for eternity.
And so I think what he's saying there is. There's so much that we can learn from just studying. And he spent a whole lifetime just studying swiftlets, let alone all the other 5000, or nearly 10,000.
I think there are species of birds around and all their unique features. Well, I had planned to talk a bit about the amazing structure and mathematics of bees and some of their behaviour, but I'll leave that for another time now at this stage. But I think when we look at both birds and bees, the mathematics involved in the design of these little creatures is amazing.
And the engineering that the mathematics defines is absolutely amazing. And to me, this is just overwhelming evidence that we have a creator. And to me, this is also powerful evidence that the Bible account, which describes the creator and creation, and which is just so compatible with what we observe the Bible account, and also historically, the historical aspects of the Bible that we can cheque, all add up.
To me, this is just so much evidence that one day we will be accountable to a God, to the creator who made this beautiful planet and who offers us a relationship with him who came to earth as Jesus Christ, performed those miracles of healing, again that went against the laws of nature and again proved that he was God by resurrecting himself on that day after that horrible crucifixion and the evidence we have from eyewitnesses. And I think this should all make us realise the reality of what God offers. A God of love, who wants a relationship with us, who wants to change us, to change our mind, to become like him.
And of course, that account is found in the Bible. And as we read the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, and particularly the book of John in the New Testament, that clearly outlines God's love for us and his wonderful plan for us. It's such an important thing for people to know about.
So I hope that as you listen to the programme, you'll tell other people about it on your social media. And remember you've been listening to Faith and Science. And if you want to relisten to these programmes, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
