The Echolocation Ability That Points to a Creator - FAS2618

Did you know a bat can avoid a wire as thin as a human hair in total darkness? For over a century, scientists were baffled by how they did it. Today on Faith and Science, we're diving into the micromechanical wonder of the bat's ear. Is this level of sonar technology the result of random chance, or is it proof of intelligent design? Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, Dr. Hello, Kaysie. Dr. John has written a book called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? And in today's program, we're going to be drawing on some insights from this book, particularly from chapter 6, which is by Dr. Ariel Roth. And the first question I have for you, um, obviously we mentioned about bats, and Spallanzani discovered that bats could navigate in total darkness while owls actually could not do that, and he was intrigued by this. So how does this Early experiment challenge our understanding of biological capabilities? SPEAKER B Oh, wow, that's a big question. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B But yes, of course, we know now that bats are able to so-called see in the dark through the use of sonar. And so what happens, of course, they emit very high-frequency sound waves that are reflected off objects. And as the sound comes back, that's picked up by their two ears. So the fact that there are the two ears enables them not only to sense direction, but also how far away something is. And this is, you know, quite important. But it's fascinating how they can obviously locate objects as small as a hair, as fine as a hair, and able to miss that while they're flying. Which is amazing. And this capability, of course, enables them to catch small insects, some of which themselves are flying very fast. And so not only has the bat got to be able to see the insect, but also calculate where the insect's likely to be when it's getting out. Just like as we coming up to an intersection and we can see a car coming, you know, to the side of us, say, we make a judgement as to whether we can go through ahead of the car or whether we're going to have to slow down or whether we're going to actually have to stop. So we do all those sort of things. And that's a result of being able to see, not only estimate, not only how fast is the car going, but also how far away it is and so forth. So it's quite fascinating that the bats can do this, of course, exactly in the in the dark using the sound waves. And it's quite a complicated and a very sophisticated system that they use. Their hearing system's similar to ours in that you've got the three little bones and the cochlea and so forth. And but it actually is set to a much higher frequency than what we can hear. Up to about 150,000 cycles per second. Very, very high, really high frequencies of sound can be picked up by these little creatures. And the fascinating thing is, of course, that when these frequencies enter the ear, the little bone systems are moving very fast that are amplifying this. And the movements, of course, because they're in something as small as a bat, its ear is very small, The movements of some of these little fine pieces of the structure of the ear mechanism are moving a millionth of a millimetre at very, very high frequencies. SPEAKER A So, so small amount, isn't it? SPEAKER B Yes. And in order to do this, they require tens of thousands of nerve cells connected to these little sensory sort of cells that are part of the sensory system. And I think this is something that when evolutionists talk about, you know, all of these systems evolved and this sort of thing and mutations to the DNA, we're not just talking about one cell being made. We're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of cells have to be made of different types of cells that all fit. And they have to be the right number. If there were too many, it'd just clog up the system. If there weren't enough, the system wouldn't work. So there's not only the concept of the design of the system, like the hearing system in itself, but also that system has to match the actual physical size, the physical physiology and anatomy of the actual ear itself. And all this reeks of— and just points in my mind anyway very clearly that a very, very sophisticated design here. Very, very sophisticated design. SPEAKER A Yeah, you make a good point there saying that these structures need to actually be contextualized, don't they, into that particular creature? 'Cause as humans, we have the bones in the ear, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. Yes. But I understand bats also have them. Yes. And they are very important for making that transfer of the vibration into the cochlea so they can hear the high frequencies. But that's very contextualised in the bat, isn't it? Because they're a lot smaller than us. SPEAKER B Oh, yeah. They're very, very tiny. Very, very tiny. SPEAKER A I'm trying to imagine holding one of those bones in my fingers. It's like, it would be so Fascinating, you know, tiny little things. SPEAKER B And there's a lot of things too that we don't realise, in that the amplification factor has to be just right to vibrate the eardrum, just the right, for just the right amplitude. You know, if those bones weren't the right size, it would amplify it too much, it would break or wouldn't work. There's so much that has to be just right. And the precision that we're looking at, for example, in those ears, as I said, is down in the order of 1 millionth of a millimeter. So these are extremely small. Yeah. You know, when you think of that, that's a thousandth of a micron. You know, these are really, really high precision. Yeah. Oh, this is really, not only is it engineering, it's high precision engineering. SPEAKER A And this is critical for the bat's survival, isn't it? Because it uses this to be able to feed in the dark. I think in the book it said something about 500 insects in a matter of 5— An hour. An hour, was it? Yeah. Which is like, that's a crazy amount of food that it's getting through. And it's using this system to do it, right? SPEAKER B Yes, darting around. Yeah. You know, sort of find some insects and, you know, and it goes one after the other sort of thing. Yeah, so it's quite precise. And I think one of the things that many people don't realize is that To get something to actually work at high precision requires a lot of design. There are a lot of factors. And to have put all this down to random chance mutations to a code, right? And this code is totally blind to the needs of the bat, right? It's a series of chemical compounds, what we call chemical letters. We abbreviate A, C, T, and G. And These letters encode an inner structure, the ribosome, and enable for proteins to be assembled in just the right way to construct the cells that make up these components. And they, you know, all different types of constructs there. And also there are all the nerve systems that are connected to the brain. A huge amount of complexity in this for the whole thing to work. Plus the brain has to be able to interpret those nerve pulses —as well. SPEAKER A Yes. And the book also, Ariel Roth's article, mentioned that they can adjust their pitch as well to compensate for the Doppler effect. You know, when you're moving, the sound changes. How does this fit in? I mean, this is also quite a sophisticated design feature, isn't it? Yes. SPEAKER B OK. So the Doppler effect too involves quite sophisticated physics. If you're doing physics at high school in the upper level, you'll learn about the Doppler effect, that essentially, for example, if a fire engine is coming towards you, its siren is at a higher pitch. And once it passes you, you'll notice there's a drop in pitch and becomes lower as it's moving away. And so this change in frequency is quite significant. But what it means is that the bat is using this to also adjust the speed and estimate the speed at which the insect, or it's approaching the insect, and it compensates for this change. Now this is pretty sophisticated. SPEAKER A Yeah, I was thinking that. Because all the time it's making these adjustments as well as interpreting the signals coming back. Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER B So one of the other fascinating things that isn't actually mentioned in the book, 'cause there's only so much you can put in a chapter, is of course that there are bats that actually can catch fish. And so they can actually compensate for the sound wave traveling into water and detecting the fish. So amazing. Yeah. So there's some pretty cool engineering out there. And one of the, the things that impressed me, I was actually just talking to a friend a couple of days ago in that the, the company that I work for has an engineering division and we design and build machines that, for example, pack product that has to be expanded to a particular precision to fit. So it then goes into packets. Now, if this particular product is too fat, it won't fit in the packet. If it's too thin, it will be loose in the packet and with travel will get damaged. Yes. So this, this guy was an engineer working for another company And he said, we were actually called in to try and design a machine that would actually do this job of packing this particular product. And he said, you know, we had engineers working out, we just couldn't improve, make the improvements that were needed. But later on, our engineers were able to do it. Now, here we had teams of engineers, we had consultant engineers coming in. And we built the machines. So we have these machines. And just the other day, I was looking at— we had done some repairs to some of these machines. And there were some sections that involved just the wiring, little processors, electronic processors and everything that interpret the electrical pulses that control the different operators. And they were lying down and I was thinking to myself, Just imagine if you gave a 2 or 3-year-old the job of drawing up the design, drawing up just the circuit board for one of these machines. It would never happen. Yes. You know, and there were only probably several thousand wires, probably only about 10,000 connections, different types of connections on this. This pales into insignificance when we consider the number of connections the different types of cells. And as I said, this was just the circuit board control mechanisms for the machines that control the robots that do these systems, let alone designing the robots. And we have teams of engineers doing this, and we work on for years with different trial and error to get it to work. And what evolutionists have to believe is that blind, random chemical changes to an extremely complex code could produce this amazing system of hearing and navigation that a bat uses that works so precisely. And to me, it's just overwhelming evidence of an amazing supernatural creator. So the origin of these things has to be supernatural. There's no known chemical explanation where this sort of structure could form by itself. SPEAKER A Absolutely fascinating and incredible example. The bat, as well as you sharing the context of what it's like for us to try and engineer things. It really helps to put things in perspective that this is a very, very incredible, incredibly designed organism. Very much so. Yeah. So thank you for that and for the illustration for purposeful design. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence, or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers.