Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
The other day I read in one of the news feeds that I get that in one of Australia's most affluent cities, the capital city of Australia, Canberra, 60% of teenage girls are suffering from some form of mental illness. It may be depression, anxiety and so forth. And that's a huge number.
And what the article was saying was that this is a huge problem that they're attempting to address and that more resources need to be putting into this. But when you think about 60% of teenage girls, teenage young women are suffering a mental illness. And a lot of these are talking about the people are concerned about climate change, they're fearful these things, they're worried about body image, some are being bullied on social media, a whole lot of issues that young people are facing today.
And as I talk to people about this situation, one of the people was saying, well, one of the root factors is they believe, was the teaching of evolution and that we just rose by chance. We're just survival of the fittest, we're not particularly special. We're just another animal.
All these aspects, and as I think about it, the way the theory of evolution is being taught today in our schools, and particularly being inculcated into the minds of young people from a very early age, primary school, now we're facing a very, very serious attack on truth, because evolution in terms of a process to produce new types of organisms is absolutely impossible. As I think about the issue of why are we here? Why does anything exist? It blows their mind, why should there be anything? And the fact that anything that we have, the fact that we are here, that we're alive, that we have minds, we can communicate with one another, we can comprehend to a degree the universe, this planet, our surroundings, we have these emotions of love and anger and all these sort of things, to me, clearly points to some sort of higher order, to God. It's so obvious to me as a scientist, and yet when I look at the way the media promotes particular ideas, particular, very secular ideas, I can understand why young people are growing up and they don't have this faith and hope that there is a superior being.
They hear all about the problems on the earth, pollution, the bleaching of the coral reefs, the destruction of rainforests, and they get worried about the global warming, let alone the war type issues, cold war issues, nuclear weapons, all sorts of things like this. But there's so much encouragement in the Bible as God talks about in Revelation, chapter eleven, that God will destroy those that destroy the earth. And this earth is not our final home.
God has a plan for us. Sin has disrupted our planet. The battle between Christ and Satan, between good and evil, has been won by God.
But God wants all of us, human beings to have that opportunity to be with him. But there will come a time when God will say, enough is enough. And so there's this tremendous hope, this whole universe is going to be recreated.
And people say, the whole universe, but perhaps some people imagine the universe must be so permanent, but it's not. When we boil it down, so much of it, of our universe is based on force fields. When we understand mass and matter and so forth, the actual amount of solid material itself, so much of it boils down to really sort of force field type scenarios.
And God is going to recreate the whole system because we're polluting the universe. We're sending out microwave radiation encoded with evil. You think about it, all the television programmes that are being broadcast around the world, part of that radiation encoding all those programmes that include programmes about all sorts of evil and bad things, are being sent out into the universe that could be picked up and received later on somewhere as they travel through space.
All your mobile phone messages, part of those are radiating out into space. So God is going to recreate the whole lot. And when we think about it, people don't sort of understand this, that so much of us is actually energy fields and of different types of energy fields that are responsible for interactions, that produce effects that we known as we perceive as something being solid.
We see things because the reflection of photons off these, interacting with these energy fields that in fact result from the interaction between electrons and the nucleus. But even the nucleus itself, where we delve down into the different particles that make up the subparticles, that make up the particles that constitute the nucleus. It's an amazing system.
But what this points to is that there is a higher authority and one day there will be justice. And the thing is that the whole Bible picture that points out is that we have a God that loves us. Science has been forced to reject that.
It's just a vote made by certain atheist scientists that have moved and influenced the educators that we have to keep God out of the picture. But people forget that there are angels as well. We rarely talk about angels these days, but we need to remember that the Bible records accounts of people being released from prison by angels and then going out to preach about them.
That's pretty significant experience. To be in a roman prison and then released by an angel. That's pretty realistic.
I mean, the Roman system there and guard system was pretty efficient in what they did. And to have that experience, and there are many experiences like that recorded in the Bible. And even in modern day people have reported these accounts.
And young people, I believe, need to have this hope, need to have this hope that there is a God that loves them, there is a purpose in their life, and there will be a better world remade for us ahead, and that after we die, we will be recreated to enjoy that world again. And that's the hope message in the Bible. And that's of course, why God came as a human form, as Jesus.
And I guess for some people it's hard to understand that, to accept that if there is really a God, how could he come? And why would he come as Jesus? Why would he come at that particular point in time, in that particular mean? There's too much to explain that on this particular talk there. But when we look at some of the great writers and great, you know, sort of like C. S. Lewis, the wrote that thought about this. And as they studied the Bible, as they studied the Bible account, they realised it all made sense, it all added up. And some of the great philosophers and scientists that like James Maxwell and Clark Maxwell and so forth, they believed and they saw, it made so much sense.
Another thing that the young people don't hear about now is the account of George Miller, the man that ran these orphanages in Bristol on faith and cared for thousands of orphans on the base of God, providing and kept a diary account of answers to prayer. There's so much been documented really for the evidence for the existence of God that just isn't being passed on to our young people today and constitutes really, really powerful evidence for the existence of God. And also we have so much now powerful evidence for creation.
We have websites such as creation.com, just Google creation.com. This produces articles that answer a whole lot of questions, providing powerful evidence now and often cite these secular scientific reports that are being published in the literature today that powerfully support creation.
There's answers in Genesis Institute for creation research and there are many other creation sites that support and provide the evidence for creation. My book, In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation. It's still available on Amazon.
And when you look at it, I think there's several hundred reviews of the book or comments about the book, and it gets a very strong star rating, nearly five. And so many testimonies of how this book has changed people's lives. And again, on the website creation.com, google for In Six Days Preface you go there to that particular link. On the left hand side, there's a list of names you can click on the scientists, all with their doctorates, and they explain why they choose to believe in creation. They explain the evidence.
There's my book, Evolution Impossible - Twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. Again, that gets fantastic reviews on Amazon.
That's a book that, as I refer to the scientifically literature out there available and sets it out, it gets excellent reviews that I've been able to explain in clear layman terms the powerful evidence that evolution is absolutely impossible and did not occur. And I guess to some people, some of the detractors say, well, what does Ashton know? He's a chemist. But I think we need to remember and understand that evolution, the claim of evolution, is underpinned by chemistry.
And the chemistry points to the fact that evolution cannot occur. The reactions required to develop new code that's responsible for new body parts just doesn't arise. We can have evolution that results from duplication of existing parts of the codes, or evolution that occurs by deleting part of an existing code.
But that's the loss of information. And that form of evolution is most common, but it doesn't lead to new body parts. It leads to perhaps new types of organisms, organisms that can't fly or have less body parts and so forth, different types of fur or wings and so forth, because deformities occur, but doesn't lead to new types of body parts.
And one of the aspects of the powerful evidence why evolution is absolutely impossible and powerful evidence creation is the human genome. Now, on the 31 March 2022, in the journal Science, there was a new paper published. It was called The Complete Sequence of a Human Genome. And it's in volume 376, issues six, five, double eight pages, 44 to 53. So the title of the research paper is the complete sequence of a human genome. Now, it's interesting when you look at that, there are about 100 authors to that paper, 100 scientists contributed to this paper of working out this human genome.
Now, we heard that the human genome was cracked back around about 2000, but in actual fact, they only really determined the sequence of a very small portion of the genome, less than 2%. That was the euchromatic fraction of the genome. That's the genome that's responsible for encoding amino acids, essentially.
And on this basis, we had all these people claiming, oh, well, it's 97%, similar to chimpanzee and all this sort of thing. It was only 2% of the genome. The rest hadn't been cracked.
As a matter of fact, they've been working on it for the past. Almost quarter of a century. Teams of scientists around the world have been trying to understand the human genome, the human DNA code, working on it, and just recently there was still about 8% of a female code to go.
And that's what this paper is about. I'll read you the abstract. The abstract reads, since its initial release in 2000, the human reference genome has covered only the euchromatic fraction of the genome, leaving important heterochromatic regions unfinished.
Addressing the remaining 8% of the genome, the telomere to telomere t two consortium presents a complete 3.55 billion base pair sequence of a human genome, t two tchm 13, that includes gapless assemblies for all chromosomes except Y, corrects errors in the prior references and introduces nearly 200 million base pairs of sequence containing 1956 gene predictions, 99 of which are predicted to be protein coding. The completed regions include all centrometic satellite arrays, recent segmental duplications and the short arms of all five acrocentic chromosomes, unlocking these complex regions of the genome to variational and functional studies.
So we can see, here we are, this groundbreaking paper published in Science 31 March 2022, and over a hundred scientists involved from different top research groups around the world. And they're just part of one, they're just part of the telomere to telomere research group. There are a whole lot of other consortiums and essentially what they've said is that we have put together now and have been able to map the structures of the human genome over 3000 million base pairs, 3 billion base pairs, because up till then, only about 2%, as I said back in 2,000, was characterised and the rest of it was assumed to be junk DNA.
Now, I guess just to recap on this, so we can understand, remember when we talk about DNA, these very long biomolecules known as polynucleotides, and they're composed of simpler little. They're a real long polymer molecule and the basis of a polymer molecule is the monomer. That's the individual unit that is repeated.
And these monomer units are called nucleotides. Right. And each nucleotide is composed of one of four nitrogen containing what we call nuclear bases.
They're cytosine, guanine, adenine, thiamine, and so that's why we abbreviate those CGA and T. Or, I like to remember it, Australian Capital Territory is good act and g, and then these are bonded with a sugar called deoxyribose and a phosphate group. And so these nucleotides, so remember, they're made up of these bases that are act and g.
They're the code. They're essentially the code letters. And they're joined together by a chain, which is a type of covalent bond known as a phosphodiester linkage between the sugar of one nucleotide and the phosphate of the next.
So this is the chemical structure of DNA. And so essentially it's a structure that holds together a whole lot of chemical molecules, these cytosine, guanine, adenine and thiamine, that are the code, right? And it's sort of like paper can hold together the ink that writes a statement about a code, but that code involving those four compounds that we assign letters to because it's easier for our brains to understand. Act and G describes the human body, right? All the functions of our human body.
So the human genome contains these 3 billion base pairs, or nucleotides. And these nucleotides, which are arranged in this linear sequence along DNA, the deoxyribonucleic acid, and they encode every protein and genetic trait in the human body is in this code. And so this information, we know is contained in about 20,000 genes, which only, and bulk of that we understood, only represent a small fraction, about 1.5% of the total DNA. And so the remainder was called non coding sequences. So when you think about that, that's 98.5% were believed to be these non coding sequences because they don't code for amino acids. And this was a massive amount of DNA that lay between the genes on the chromosomes. So the genes are small sections of DNA code.
As I said, there's about 20,000 genes that sit on the chromosomes. So in humans, we've got 23 pairs of chromosomes, right? So there's a duplication there. And so the chromosomes are groups of the contain the genes, and then the genes themselves are made up of thousands of these nucleotide bases, or the code letters of the code in each gene.
And these genes are then clustered together in the chromosomes. And out of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans, 22 are the same in both male and female. But the 23rd one is what we call an xx chromosome in females and an xy chromosome in males.
And of course, sometimes there are mutations have occurred. And so, unfortunately, some people can carry mutant genes. And these mutant genes can be responsible for genetic diseases.
They can be responsible for deformities in our body. They can be responsible for genetic or sexual deformities as well. Such as in the xy gene, some people can be xxy and so forth, and this caused a lot of confusion.
But we need to understand that these are mutations, they're not as the original plan, as God made people. So these are breakdowns, they're duplication that has occurred. Now, one of the top researchers in this area is Dr. Elliot Margulies Margulies. You can look him up and he talks about these non coding DNA, how it plays a role in expression, in gene expression. And he writes, this non coding DNA is just what it says, it's non coding.
You can think of the genome as being split up into two parts. There's the stuff that codes for proteins and we call it coding DNA, and for lack of a better term, the rest of the genome, that's the other 98% of it, is referred to as non coding DNA. And some people will try and refer to this as junk DNA, but this is Dr. Margulies writing. But I would suggest otherwise, because this represents 98% of our genome sequence and it does all sorts of things, like it regulates those genes to figure out where they should turn on and where they should turn off and how much we should turn on certain genes and how we are going to pack up the DNA into chromosomes and so forth. And there are probably a whole host of functions that non coding DNA does that we still don't know what it does yet.
And some non coding DNA is transcribed into functional non coding rna molecules, transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA, regulatory RNA's. Other functional encoding DNA includes the transcriptional and translational regulation of the protein coding sequences that scaffold attachment regions in the origin of DNA replication in centimetres and telomeres. So telomeres are those sections at the end of DNA sequences, at the end of genes, rather, and then, and centimetres.
These are vast sections of DNA that are just repeated hundreds and hundreds of times. And the thing is, some of these sequences were extremely difficult to figure out. Now, when you think about it, this massive amount of work that's gone in there to this code, and this code will be useless without a code reader, the ribosome and so forth.
And evolutionists have to believe that this amazing code that works, that describes everything, the intricacies of our immune system, our reproductive system, our visual system, our digestive system, all our muscles, skeletal system, arose by chance. Chance chemical mutations, chance chemical random reactions that arrange those letters, act and g. Look, you don't have to be a statistician to work out that it's impossible.
It's absolutely impossible when we do the stats, it shows it's absolutely impossible. And it was fascinating to read the report that this particular sequence, and the sequence doesn't represent one particular human female, because samples of the gene were taken from a number of different female genetic materials, they suddenly cracked the Y chromosome. And so it's interesting that it says that the homogeneous Y bearing chromosomes are not non viable.
So a different sample type will be required to complete this last remaining chromosome. And so they say it should be possible to assemble a Y chromosome from a male sample using the same methods described here with their reference assembly technology. So this just describes the amazing complexity that scientists have been struggling with all these times.
The evidence for creation is so overwhelmingly obvious now that we understand this, now we have this great depth of science and it's so important that this message get out to young people. And I really hope and pray that listeners to this programme will draw people will put references to it on their social media, will tell other people about.
Tell other people about the other websites such as Creation Ministries International creation.com and similar organisations, and other books and resource material that is available now that can be really good resources that young people can have to reassure them that we didn't evolve.
We are created by a loving, all powerful God. And that loving all powerful God can save us. That loving all powerful God will one day recreate us in a new world, made new, where we will live with God forever. You've been listening to Faith and Science.
And remember, 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.
