Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
The company that I work for is involved in a wide range of different operations. And one of those operations is to build machines that are used in the food processing industry. And one of those machines we internally call a biz pack, and it packs biscuits, biscuits made from cereal flakes.
And, for example, in a packet, you might have four rows of twelve biscuits stacked on top of one another, and the biscuits are stacked on top of one another, there's no paper fill in between. And the biscuits, of course, have to fit exactly into the packet so that if they rattled around, they would break and go to crumbs. If they were not quite the right size, then twelve wouldn't fit in the packet, and that would be different to what the packaging claims is in there.
So, years ago, these biscuits were packed by hand, say where two people at a line. As the biscuits were coming down, they would take the biscuits off the production line and put them in the packets. And so a machine was designed to pack these biscuits, and these machines cost several million dollars to build to replace two humans.
And it required a team of engineers to design these machines that two humans could do just with their hands, and engineering design for processes like that and all the bits and pieces.
And I've seen these machines being built, and there's no way, in my view, anyway, that given the number of parts, electronic components and so forth, that these machines could be assembled, say, for example, by a two or three year old putting parts together randomly, they would never come up with their solution. So to me, when you compare the complexity of the nerves, muscles, tendons and so forth, circulatory systems that are just in a pair of hands, all the bones and joints, all the different cells that are on the surface of the joints and in the structure, extremely complex.
And so we have this powerful evidence for design. But in industry, the systems engineering, the engineer in charge, looking at a total system, and so you have individual specialist engineers work in different systems, in different components of the entire system. But when you have a very complex engineering problem, you require the approach, which is called systems engineering.
And this has been recognised as a science for over about 60 years, I suppose. And this approach is essential, really, to the proper development of complex and complicated man-made systems.
I was reading a very interesting article by Dr. Jonathan Corrado, who had qualifications in mechanical and systems engineering. And he wrote quite an interesting article on the earth's system, for example, as being designed for life. And he called his article the “Earth's Design For Life: A Systems Engineering Masterpiece”.
He talks about, when you look at the earth, the earth itself has a number of really complex systems. He talks about how, for example, systems engineering, he defines as the discipline that integrates complicated systems and ensures that they operate, and that there's balance and integration, and which, of course, then defines that the system will be successful. So when you're looking at a systems engineering problem, you've got to consider the concept and then the architecture, the intricate design of the system.
You've got to evaluate and manage complexity and stability. And also you have to have methods on how to assess whether the system is functioning as designed. And I know we spent quite a bit of research recently, for example, on another project, just looking at a method that we could use to determine foaming.
So, in other words, if we had a system operate that was producing foaming, was there a method that we could use to measure the amount of foaming that the system would produce? Because sometimes foaming is desirable, such as in mineral processing, and sometimes foaming is not desirable when you're doing particular extractions and separations. So, again, this is something that people often don't recognise, too, that having valid methods of measuring that your system is working. These days, system engineering concepts and practises are used in nearly all complex projects.
But, you know, one example, and this is one that Dr. Corrado points out of a complex system that displays all the hallmarks of skilled systems engineering, is that of our planet Earth and its external support systems, such as the sun and galaxy and our moon. He points out that this system is beautifully designed and optimally positioned within the solar system, and it's intricately balanced to enable and sustain life.
So the Earth system has all the tailor made features that engineering systems researchers have determined that are necessary for a planet to be capable of supporting living things. Dr. Corrado mentions that there's more than 250 optimised design requirements that a planet must have to support living organisms based on carbon.
And so one of these include, for example, a robust that is able to withstand variations in inputs and customised atmosphere. So a robust and customised atmosphere, appropriate quantities of water available in its various phases from ice, liquid and vapour, an ideal range of surface temperatures and a period of rotation on its axis that is finely tuned. And, of course, a lot of these points were raised in a book that was published by Oxford University Press some years ago, back in 1998, I think the first edition came out called, “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle”, by J Barrow and F Tipler.
And it's interesting, the fact that system Earth has these finely tuned parameters and more, actually many more design elements that are essential for life suggest that it is a systems engineering marble. And this is what Dr. Jonathan Corrada writes. And so it's evidence for incredible intelligence. And he gives other examples.
For instance, the range of colour a star emits depends on its mass. And in the case of our sun, this was carefully engineered to ensure that the colour of its light is in the right range. If it were shifted more towards the red or more towards the blue, the photosynthetic reaction needed to allow plants to grow and produce food for all, and as well as produce life giving oxygen, would be far less efficient.
Also, if the sun was more massive, the high energy radiation would increase to overwhelm this defensive shield in place, which is the Earth's magnetosphere. And this would, of course, then be directly harmful to life and has the potential to strip away the atmosphere. On the other hand, stars of very low mass are unstable and often emit flares that would strip the atmosphere of any planet close enough to be habitable.
And so for a star of its particular size, the sun is actually exceptionally stable, according to the data that we have. And again, for any star like our sun, there's only a limited range of distances from it within which an orbiting planet could potentially be habitable. If the sun was significantly less massive, that range would become too narrow.
And also any planet within the closeness required for life would suffer from tidal locking, that is, from the force of gravity between it and the sun, meaning that one side of it would be locked into continually face the sun. And so this would mean boiling temperatures on one side of the planet and freezing temperatures on the other. So there's a lot of fascinating aspects of just the design of our planet, its position around the sun and the position in the solar system.
That, again, are just all evidence of perfect design, particularly when you take them all together. See, if you just had one of these factors, say, oh, well, random, it could produce it. But when so many factors line up, the probability begins to increase very, very rapidly, till the point that we can say it's absolutely impossible to arise by any form of chance.
It's a design feature. He goes on to point out in his article, which was published in Creation, Volume 44, Number 4. On pages 54 to 55, he points out that the Earth's distance from the sun also appears to be precisely measured for a stable water cycle.
If the Earth were too far away, most water would freeze. If the earth were too close, most water would boil. And also the Earth's rotation period, axis tilt, magnetic field and crust thickness, and the amounts and proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide all show signs of conforming to the appropriate specifications set in advance.
He also points out that the earth system ensures that it's high in the atmosphere. The balance between the ozone's formation and its destruction ends up with the amount needed to protect life on the surface from destructive ultraviolet rays. So we know that the ozone layer protects us from these harmful ultraviolet light rays from the sun, which would destroy living matter if the full intensity was allowed to get through.
So the ozone layer is very protective of that. And of course, this is one of the reasons why we need to, to protect the ozone layer. And we realised, fortunately in time, that a lot of the fluorocarbons and so forth that were being used as refrigerants were doing a lot of damage to the ozone layer.
And of course, things like chlorine and that, that we use in water, chlorination, all these sort of compounds, many other compounds weaken the ozone layer. And there are parts on this earth's surface now where the ozone layer is much thinner and we have much higher rates of ultraviolet lights, a lot easier when you're out in the sun in these regions, you find that you burn much more quickly. And so again, when we look at other design systems, of course we have the DNA molecule.
Now this is another amazing design system that enables living organisms to be constructed from their gamut cells. So we know, for example, that DNA, which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, is a very long information storage mechanism that has the four chemical letters, a adenine, t, thiamine, c cytosine, g, guanine. And of course, the way to remember this is, I do it anyway, Australian Capital Territory is good act and g.
And for example, in humans, there's about 3 billion letters of those codes. Those particular chemical bases, adenine, thiamine, cytosine and guanine. These are chemical bases, individual chemical structures that make up a coding system that we call the letters of the code. And so the language is written using these four letters in English. Of course, we have 26 letters, but in biological systems, four are used.
And of course, the DNA, just a single strand of human DNA would be about two metres long. And every day, in every cell, about 1 million of those letters gets damaged by oxygen or water or by being overstretched or over twisted. And there are around 50 trillion cells in the human body.
And so you have about 50 pentillion mutations in your body every day. And so this requires a huge complement of DNA repair enzymes. And without these enzymes, life could not exist.
Yet the information needed to make these enzymes is recorded in our DNA. So which came first? The DNA or the DNA repair enzymes that are coded in the DNA? And of course, DNA by itself would be useful, useless, if it wasn't for a ribosome, the little molecular machine that takes that information and builds proteins. But of course, the DNA, the language in DNA, again, is powerful evidence of system design, in this case, computer.
Well, it's not really computer, but information systems design, information engineering systems. And it's really frustrating that we have all these evolutionary ideas that are taught in school about DNA having been, that have now been shown to be false. For example, it was once said that humans share between 98% to 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, however, we know today that this number has dropped to about 85%.
And there are massive differences between the two species, with humans possessing entire gene families that are not found in chimpanzees and vice versa. And for more information on that, there was an interesting article that's available on creation.com. If you google 1% myth by Don Batten, or “The Myth of 1%”, it's an interesting article there that has a lot of details on that.
It's interesting that Dr. Jon Ahlquist, the scientist who first proposed that our DNA is 98% similar to the chimpanzees, and he proposed this back in the early 1980s. He retreated from this idea and even became a creationist.And there's a story about him, was actually featured in Creation magazine. And if you just googled creation.com/ and then his name, jon-ahlquist, and you can read all about that.
Again, further evidence of amazing design and engineering comes in the error that was believed earlier on, that it was once said that about 97% of the human genome is useless junk, and now has been found that this DNA that was supposed junk is essential because it allows for mutations to accumulate in our genome without destroying the existing information it contains.
But evolutionary biologist J. S. Mattick stated that the failure to recognise the function of junk DNA may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.
And so we now know that the DNA itself, the genome, contains multiple overlapping codes. This means that any given DNA letter could be included in multiple instructions at the same time. So one letter may be part of a code that affects the 3-D structure of DNA.
At the same time, this letter could help the code for the production of DNA repair mechanisms and more. And it's interesting, without this overlapping information, the genome would have to be very much larger. The fact that these letters can be involved in multiple codes is one of the amazing design features of the DNA system that enables it to carry so much information in such a small amount of space.
It's quite fascinating. And again, this is one example of how, for example, a human genome's complexity far surpasses what was expected. And I think when we think about it, the more complex life is, the harder it is for us really to believe in evolution, accounting for it.
Random, blind mutations. Another interesting thing, of course, that's come to life is that, of course, we inherit our DNA from our parents, but certain portions of our DNA come exclusively from one parent. For example, every man inherits his Y chromosome from his father, and only women pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their children.
Both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial genome are subject to mutations, and this has been used to construct a global family tree for men and women. And so, again, as scientists trace this back, the information shows that all humans today are descendant from a single man, a single woman. And of course, that single man would have been Noah, because Noah and three sons, who, again, they would have inherited their Y chromosomes from Noah.
So everything descends from Noah. And of course, the mitochondrial DNA would have come from the three wives. And I understand there are three distinct types of mitochondrial DNA as well.
So it's amazing how it fits the biblical account of creation. And so again, we see this evidence everywhere.
And that was an interesting article that I read recently by Bruce Lawrence. It was called “The Marvellous Molecule, A Look at the Language of Life”.
And there's actually another book that has just come out recently that again points to these amazing system design in living things is a book called “Design Dissected”. It's quite a new book. It's by Professor David J Galloway. So it's called “Design Dissected” by Professor David J Galloway. And of course, he is not only an MD, but also a DSE doctor of science.
He's a surgeon who trained at the University of Glasgow and worked at various hospitals around the world. His postgraduate academic work was focused on cancer research and in particular, investigated aspects of cell division and the way at which can be influenced by various environmental and dietary factors. In 2015, he was elected to the role of president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and he writes this fascinating book.
Design Dissected insights into the unbelievable complexity of human biochemistry and physiology. And his prime interest in this book seems to be demonstrating that there's real scientific evidence that the biosphere was designed for a purpose. And he presents a series, according to John Lennox, who wrote a very good review of the book.
Professor John Lennox, who also has a DSc as well as a doctor of philosophy and a PhD. So it's three doctorates. He's professor of mathematics at Oxford.
He writes that Galloway presents a series of telling challenges to naturalism and materialism, showing that they simply do not have the explanatory power to account for what science has revealed about the nature of life and consciousness.
So it's a fantastic book that is now available that provides another reviewer, Michael Behe, who wrote the book Darwin's Black Box. He wrote, doing as a review of this book, he wrote, “By far the strongest evidence that a system was deliberately designed is the very structure of the system itself. When we discover multiple complex parts elegantly fitted to work with each other, the conclusion of purpose is irresistible. In the book, Design Dissected, surgeon and academic David Galloway regales the reader with” evidence after evidence “of the wonders of the human body — and of the disasters that result when a part fails. By the end of the book, his conclusion that the body was purposely designed becomes self-evident.”
So here we have this amazing evidence for design, for a creator, for a supernatural creator. And again, I think if any listeners have doubt that we were created, then books like this, and the evidence I've alluded to in this talk today, provides powerful evidence that there was an amazing creator that created not only this life on earth, but our solar system and universe as well.
You've been listening to Faith and Science, and remember, if you want to re listen to this programme, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word au and click on the radio button and look for the Faith and Science programme.
And in these talks, I've included references so that people can follow up and cheque some of the evidence and share it with others too. I know today people have doubts, being raised all the time by the popular media and so forth, as to whether God exists. We have powerful evidence that God exists and it's the God described in the Bible as well.
And so please, I would encourage all listeners to share these links, the 3ABN Australia links on your social media pages. Tell friends about them so they too can learn about the overwhelming evidence that we now have that we were created by a loving creator God.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
