Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just the other day, a friend was talking to me that he had seen a study done on a survey of young people who had decided not to follow in the christian faith. They'd been raised in christian homes, gone to church for a while, but then had chosen to give up on their Christianity. And one of the main reasons that they gave was related to the teaching of evolution, which they said essentially had undermined their faith in Genesis, the creation account, and hence the Bible.
And of course, this is really concerning for a number of reasons, because we are accumulating more and more evidence all the time that evolution, as we understand darwinian type evolution, is biologically impossible. Sure, we see changes occurring, but not changes that produce new types of organisms or new types of body parts. And of course, the problem of the origin of life arising from nonliving molecules is a massive problem.
We have so much evidence now that it's absolutely impossible also to occur, that life is supernatural, despite the fact, and I think I've explained in other programmes that there are many learned professors and so forth that believe that scientists are on the brink of understanding how a life formed and that certain important chemicals have been shown to be able to be produced easily. But of course, when we drill into the actual evidence and we explore the evidence, we find that it's not the case. These sort of reactions they're talking about would not occur in nature, in the environment.
As a matter of fact, it takes highly skilled chemists, using some of the best chemical equipment available and the purest chemicals in top laboratories, to be able to produce the compounds. And they're not easy. It takes very experienced chemists, and these aren't necessarily alive, they're just some of the compounds that might, if they could somehow self assemble, form the constituents of a cell.
But again, you still have the massive problem of making the cell alive. So we're just so far away from scientists having any clue about how life can form. And this isn't, of course, getting through to the students.
And I find this so personally frustrating because the evidence is there, but it's not being communicated to students. And that's why, of course, if you're listening to this programme and remember, many of the past programmes, or I think pretty well all the past programmes, are online there, you can find them on the 3abnaustralia.org au website. If you click on the listen button and just keep scrolling through, they're there. And of course, please put up links on your social media pages. Tell people about these talks on social media, and of course there are many other resources that we can point young people to.
James M. Tour, a chemist at Rice University in the United States, has a number of excellent YouTube videos on dealing with, for example, the chemistry of life. And so if you google his name and say creation, evolution, or scientists don't have a clue on the origin of life, these sort of things.
And there are many other top scientists that are speaking out as well, particularly if you go to creation.com, there are so many good articles and research articles on that website that again, provide the evidence why evolution did not occur. And as we look at the science more and more, it's supporting the biblical account of creation.
So again, I mention links like creation.com on your website, and of course 3abnastralia.org.au and click the listen button there.
And of course there you can listen to one of my other programmes, Science Conversations, is there, where I go through the evidence that I set out in my book Evolution Impossible, 12 reasons why evolution cannot explain the origin of life on earth. And of course, there's also Evolution Impossible on the tv catch-up site too on 3abnastralia.org au.
So I think it's so important that we get this information out, particularly on social media pages now, where information can travel fairly quickly, that there are excellent resources out there. The book “In six days” Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation is available also as a free download on creation.com.
If you go into their website and do a search on In Six Days, the book will come up and each chapter of the book is there by each of the 50 scientists, plus a preface by myself. And of course, one of those scientists was Henry Zuill. Now, he was a professor of biology at a university in the United States, and he was a very good friend of mine. Unfortunately, he has passed now.
But his section in the book In Six Days is particularly interesting. And one of the things is he raises a very important point that often isn't raised even in creation circles, and he asks the question, what does biodiversity tell us about creation? Does it tell us anything about creation? Does it have anything to say about why it was created? And he also challenges, well, does it support a six day creation? And he goes on to say that I believe there is a connection between biodiversity and creation. And he points out that all of the attention that he's seen directed, has been directed towards the immediate problem of conservation.
And because we now know, without biodiversity and its ecochemical and ecophysical services, it's doubtful that ecosystems, or possibly even life itself could exist. And so this much is very clear from the research. And it's interesting, I was reading a report just recently, and I think that it had some very challenging statistics in this report, and I would encourage listeners to look them up on the Internet, do Google searches on the rate at which we are losing our biological treasures, the biodiversity.
And for example, according to this report that I was reading, rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface, and now they cover a mere 6%. And some of the scientists estimating that these last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years. And at the time the report was written, one and a half acres of rainforest were lost every second as people were clearing rainforests around the world.
Of course, this is very short sighted. And another statistic was that nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms, will destroy or be destroyed or severely threatened over the next 25 years. And this is largely due to rainforest deforestation.
Another statistic that I saw in one of the reports was that scientists estimate that we're losing, and the figure was 137 plant, animal and insect species every day due to rainforest deforestation. So that's 137 on average, plant or animal or insect species every day. And that's approximately, I think, around 50,000 species a year.
I challenge you to look up and see what the very latest statistics are on this. And it's interesting, of course, too, that over 100 prescription drugs that are commonly sold worldwide have come from plant derived resources and sources. And so when I think about this, this connection between biodiversity and creation must be very strong.
Now, there was a biochemist, Michael Behe, that wrote a book called Darwin's Black Box. And he, in that book, writes about the complex biochemical relationships in cells and suggests that the evidence is there that there must have been design to have the biochemical systems. And of course, we tend to see the world particularly assigned us through, as Henry Zuill puts it, the lenses of our own scientific disciplines.
Thus, Michael Behe, who's a biochemist, he looked at cell complexity as evidence for design. And Henry Zuill points out, look, if we jump to the ecological level at the other end of the spectrum of life, so you've got the biochemistry is right down a very small molecular area. If we look then at complete organisms, he says this as we look at life on planet Earth, it reveals an unimaginable complexity there as well.
And he argues, professor Henry Zuill argues that the ecological complexity is built upon layer and layer of complexity. Going all the way through the different hierarchical, structural and organisations, down to the cell and even lower. And so what he argues then is this.
Ecological complexity in nature is powerful evidence of design, and hence the importance of biodiversity for survival. And of course, biodiversity is really an emerging science, although over the past couple of decades it's made a tremendous amount of progress. But it's still really not possible to predict what will happen when a particular species is removed from an ecosystem or when it becomes extinct.
But we do know that it will have an effect. It's hard to predict what that effect will be, but we do know that it will have an effect. And what has already been discovered suggests that ecological relationships are essential, they're actually essential for life.
It's as if biodiversity is as necessary for normal ecosystem operation as any of the even cellular functions within organisms. And it seems to further suggest that the particular services that different parts of an ecosystem provide have been simultaneously present right from the beginning. Now, this is a very important point, and I'll, for example, quote exactly what Henry Zuill says on this matter.
He writes, “If biodiversity is as necessary for normal ecosystem operation as appears to be the case, it suggests that these services and organisms providing them had to have been simultaneously present right from the beginning.” And he goes on that, “if these ecological interrelationships are really indispensable, then there is no easy evolutionary explanation. And this also suggests that ecology was design.”
And I think since Henry wrote this, a huge amount of evidence is accumulating that this is the case, that the ecological systems just reek of design and interdependence, which, as he points out, means that they must have been there from the beginning. Now, this all points to, of course, a very short time frame. If things were evolving, all the different interdependent systems would have had to evolve very quickly.
We know that that just doesn't happen anyway. So it's powerful evidence for, again, a very short creation, because if creation was spread over a long period of time, you'd have the same issue. And here we have powerful evidence supporting what the Bible described as a six day creation.
Because during those very short time periods, that short time period was short enough to create all the interdependent systems so that they would survive. He points out that the situation actually parallels what happens in the cell. At one stage, of course, cells were visualised as mere sacs of nucleated protoplasm and little else.
But the development of the electron microscope and biochemistry has changed all that. And yet, of course, the claim continues that the amazing ecosystem, biochemical ecosystem within a cell could arise, but we know now it's absolutely impossible. This is because we now have so much information documenting the extremely high level of internal cell structure.
The complexity of the cell is now just too daunting to flippantly assert biochemical evolution to explain it, as Henry Zuill points out, you need to close your mind and press on blindly to ignore the evidence for supernatural design in the cell. In the same way as with the cell. As long as ecology appeared to be only a loose collection of organisms without binding interrelationships, one could likewise think of it possibly originating through natural processes or evolving.
But now that ecosystems appear to be held together by essential and unbelievably complex biodiversity, about which information is steadily increasing, we have this dilemma similar to the one we faced originally with the intricate structure of the cell. And so again, as we look at biodiversity and the importance of biodiversity for the survival of ecological systems, we see that it becomes powerful evidence for short creation.
Some christians, of course, have been swung over by the so called radiometric dating evidence that the life on earth is millions or billions of years old, and therefore they've gone for this theistic evolution approach.
But we need to realise that the requirements of biodiversity for the sustainability of ecological systems again shows that that's just not going to work. The long ages view for evolution just doesn't work. And let's not forget too, that when we're talking about radiometric dating and these sort of things, all we're doing is we're just measuring, using mass spectrometers, the concentration of elements in rocks or in plant material if it's carbon 14 dating.
But we have to go through a whole lot of hoops of assumptions to come up with a calculation of an age, and they're not related. Sure, the chemical measurements are robust and we have very accurate mass spectrometers, but what do those concentrations of elements mean? To translate a concentration of a particular radioactive isotope to a particular age for the rock is very tenuous. And really, when we look at , as I've pointed out many times, whole lot of other evidence, such as erosion rates and decay of the genome and the survival of soft tissue and so forth, it just is totally at odds with the extreme age dates that are produced by radiometric dating.
And also we need to remember too, that depending on the system that they use, you get different dates for the same rocks as well. So we mustn't, in my view, place too much weight on this radiometric dating evidence. I mean, the secular world does, because remember, all the time they're trying to disprove the existence of God, they're trying to disprove the accuracy of the Bible and the account that it gives of this intervening supernatural creator God.
So let's not get carried away from that, especially when we have this evidence from the biodiversity and the ecological relationships that we're now discovering to show that these systems must have been present pretty well all along. Sometimes you might hear people talk about coevolution, but coevolution is defined as the joint evolution of two or more non breeding species that have close ecological relationships. So note here, though, that the ecological relationship had to precede the coevolution.
So consequently, coevolution really is no answer for understanding the origin of ecology. And of course, we can have fine tuning. We know that small amounts of evolution occur.
You have fine tuning in systems, particularly as environmental parameters change and so forth. But it's very important to not discredit the importance of ecological diversity.
But, you know, there's another problem, and that is when we're talking about an essential multispecies integrated surface system, an entire integrated system, there seems to be no adequate evolutionary way to explain an entire integrated system.
Think about how could multiple organisms that have once lived independently the services that they now require? So that's another very thing, systems of living things supporting each other. The modus operandi of biodiversity is exactly what we would expect to find from a creator. Remember, God said, “Give and it shall be given unto you”, and another one “Freely ye have received, freely give”.
And it seems that if this is a law that God's kingdom operates under, then surely we would expect his creation to operate the same way. And it appears again from the study of ecology that that's exactly what we observe. When Henry Zuill talks about a woodland near where he lives, matter of fact, I've been to his place, he lived up in the mountains in a little sort of log, not a log cabin, because it was house size, but in a lovely area with beautiful mountain views, and a lot of wildlife. He loved wildlife. He talks about as he sits on his veranda and looks out.
He says, ticks and chiggers are abundant. For anyone not familiar with the chiggers, they're tiny mites which can get into your flesh, causing itchy welts. And poison ivy is common as well.
And there's several species of venomous snakes. So he says, where did these blights come from? And of course, when he looks at ecological systems, he says the biblical account of sin and the fall explained so much of this as well, the predators and parasites that developed in the ecosystems as these particular creatures became degenerate. And that what an abundant resources that were formally more available as they became scarce.
In order to survive, they turned to other sources of sustenance, including systems that weren't and on the original menu. And of course this is what the Bible says. So it's really when you look at the Bible account and we look at some of these little nasty things that occur, it again fits with the picture, the picture of the input of evil and the consequences that resulted from the input of evil.
And again, that makes sense too in terms of a loving creator that remember, the Bible describes God as a very loving person. And of course evil is the opposite to that. Another aspect that is considered in ecology is the concept of redundancy.
And redundancy is where a number of different creatures or organisms can serve the same purpose. In other words, it seemed that God built in to the system a whole lot of redundancy. In other words, if part of it failed, there was some backup systems.
Of course, we see this in the human body too. Some amazing backup systems are there in the human body. And of course the Bible actually talks about this as well, in that God's foreknowledge that evil could possibly arise.
And if evil did arise, there was a plan to counteract it there. In so many ways, the biblical account makes so much sense to me, and it makes sense in terms of the scientific observations that we deal with. Of course.
Henry comments that the original created ecology must have been quite different from what we find now, and we can only speculate about the details. The amazing thing about ecosystems today is that despite all that they have suffered, they still continue to function. And that's a very important point.
The redundant services, regardless of their original purpose, must play a part in that. And we need to appreciate the roles of biodiversity and redundant services because they're so important for survival. Know when we consider this evidence.
Henry comments, what does this all tell us about the sixth day during which God put the ecosystems together? He says biodiversity does not specify a six day creation, and it's not that finally focused, but it strongly supports such a possibility. It suggests that our ecosystems were assembled during a very short time indeed. Otherwise life could have failed for the lack of mutually benefiting multi species ecological services that are now requirements.
Biodiversity consequently suggests that ecology was created. So that was Henry summarising that up. And so I think we've seen that biodiversity, in my view, is powerful evidence for a short creation. And hence the literal six day creation.
You've been listening to Faith and Science.
And remember, if you'd like to re listen to the programme, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr John Ashton. Have a great day. Your been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
