Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Some time ago, I remember reading an article about how classical music helped the brain work better. It improved listening to classical music, improved learning and other skills. And I can remember a friend of mine when I was studying at university, who taught geology at the University of Newcastle while I was there, and then later went on to the University of Tasmania, like myself, and then went on to later become the chief exploration geologist for the world's largest mining company.
And I remember when I would travel with him in the car, he would play classical music. I also remember going to see an eye specialist one time, too. And while he was examining me again in the background, he was playing classical music.
And I think it's an interesting aspect of things, because often on the radios, particular popular secular stations, there's only a few that seem to play classical music these days. And I was also reading recently about Bark, the composer, famous composer, who composed over 200 cantatas. And Jesus joy of man's desiring, was perhaps one of his most famous.
It's interesting that I remember reading an article where the author wrote that the reason why his music touches your soul is because it comes from the soul. It comes from his soul. And I think this was really insightful that this aspect of it, this article went on to say, did you know that his cantatas didn't originate as music and that they were prayers before they were songs? And that Bach, before he started writing a sheet of music, would scroll JJ and that stood for Yesu Yuya, and it means, Jesus, help me.
And then at the bottom of every composition, he inscribed three letters, SdG and they stand for Solideo Gloria to the glory of God alone. And so Bach, in his whole work, wanted to give glory to God. And of course, a lot of his music, again, is declaring that Jesus Christ is our Lord and related to that.
And I was thinking, as we look at creation and as we and look at the amazing creatures and plants in the world around us, it reminds me that when I go out in nature and just sit there and meditate and then just observe all the things around me, just sit quietly for a while and take in all the flowers, plants and the trees that might be flowering, the birds, I don't know, there's this sense of awe and wonder that how did these things come to be? And when I look at the complexity of these things, and as a chemist, I think, now, hang on, all of these creatures have instructions to make them. That is written in a chemical code, and that chemical code consists of chemical molecules that have been put together and constructed in a way so that they describe what that creature is and what it does, how it works, and then the fact that these creatures can communicate with one another and so forth. To me, it is just overwhelmingly points to an amazing super intelligence behind this.
This whole concept of mechanical evolution just doesn't cut it, it doesn't make sense. And I know biologists around the world are struggling to try and make sense of the theory and have it to explain things, but so many things that it just can't explain. As I've mentioned perhaps several times before, I think biologists perhaps don't have the understanding of the complexity of the chemistry involved that would be required to make evolution work, if it could work, and it's absolutely impossible.
And one of the creatures that has impressed me particular is the whale shark, rhincodon typus. It's a huge shark. It's not only the biggest shark, but it's also the largest fish in the sea.
Now, sure, some whales are bigger, but whales are mammals, not fish. It's interesting that there are whale sharks that live in the Indian Pacific oceans and also in the Atlantic Ocean, and they're actually quite genetically quite distinct, but they are huge creatures. And what stimulated this? Just recently, as I had some of the younger of my grandchildren over visiting, I put on a dvd for them to watch on the ningaloo reef, which is a coral reef off Western Australia, off the northwestern coast of Western Australia, just south of Exmouth, the port town of Exmouth.
And on this DVD, it had some footage of divers swimming with these giant creatures. And of course, seeing the diver near this shark just made you realise how huge the shark was. They grow to an average of 30ft long, or 18 metres, but some of them have been found up to 70ft long, or 21 metres long.
And that's a huge animal, huge animal. And the name Rhincodon comes from the greek word rasp tooth, and that's due to the rough appearance of their teeth, apparently.
I have been to Exmouth and I've actually snorkelled out on the beautiful coral reefs out there. We didn't go on the tour that went out to swim with the whale sharks at the time we were there, they had some quite steep seas, so it was quite rough. And I think some tourists had been injured when their boat hits an unexpected wave, and they were thrown about quite violently, but nonetheless, it would have been seeing it on video. It's an amazing experience and I would encourage listeners to look up, maybe on YouTube, some videos of the whale sharks.
They are huge and they just swim along so gracefully. They're beautifully coloured. Their backs and sides are marked with sort of a whole lot of dots and spots of different shapes and also little stripes.
And apparently each fish has its own unique pattern. And it may be how sharks recognise each other. And one of the reasons why the divers are happy to swim with them is that they're philtre feeders.
They eat plankton, and it's amazing, the two to three tonne of plankton a day. And although also little, small crustaceans and little tiny fish and squid less than a foot long or 30 centimetres long, just small little creatures swimming in the sea. And so the whale shark suck this vast amount of water as they're swimming along through their wide mouth, and then philtre, through their enormous gills.
And that's something that I noticed as I watched these videos. The gills are enormous and they seem to be very floppy to me. But, of course, these gills also extract oxygen from the water as well as sieve their food.
And it's estimated that their mouse have several thousand tiny teeth. And they're really not sure what these teeth are for at the present time. The other thing about the whale sharks is that they're super streamlined.
Their bodies are so shaped that it significantly reduces water drag. And this is one of the fascinating things about this, when we think about the genetic code, and people often talk about how, well, something like the whale shark has, over millions of years, evolved to have such an efficient shape. But let's think about it.
How can the laws of fluid dynamics direct the function of the DNA code? How can the requirements for the body to be a particular shape change the molecular code, which we know is written using four chemical letters that we abbreviate, act and g. And how can it write. How can random mutations write new code to create a body that is so streamlined? To me, it is just so obvious that it's impossible.
These codes are really complex. The code to construct the shape of the whale shark and its skin and so forth, and all these properties that give it its ability to swim so efficiently through the sea, to arise by blind chance mutations, the code is so it's just absolutely impossible. And why isn't the code? Why aren't random mutations in the code, for example, producing changes that you'd expect in a butterfly? This is the thing. How can evolutionists believe that the mutations just happen to fit the right environmental situation? Because, after all, they're just random mutations. They're blind mutations to the code. And of course, obviously if it was developing a design like a butterfly, it would fail after a while.
And of course the argument is that it's natural selection, but when you think of the size of the code to do this and the number of iterations that there'd have to be, and remember, it has to be an iteration that can survive in the offspring and be reproduced, to me it just becomes so obvious that these are design features, these are features that have been built into the code by a super intelligent, supernatural designer. And one of the things is the whale has very tough scales and of course scales cover all sharks, but in this particular case the scales are like little teeth. They're structurally similar to teeth and have a hard enamel outer layer, a middle dentine layer or the bony tissue and a pulpy inner core.
That's quite interesting. I didn't realise that. So it's really like they're covered with little teeth.
Their skin and the drag reduction enables the shark to swim at about 24 to 28 kilometres, or 15 to 17 miles daily. And they swim about 8000 miles a year. And they've been known to dive to the depths of about nearly two kilometres, 1.9 kilometres actually, or 1.2 miles. So very versatile animal. That's a long way down two kilometres in the ocean. One of the fascinating discoveries that scientists have made relatively recently is that the whale shark teeth and skin teeth are not just restricted to their mouth and skin, but unlike other sharks, even their eyes have them.
So whale sharks don't actually have eyelids like other sharks do.
And with their fairly square blunt heads, their eyes, which are at each corner of their head, are quite exposed and actually are quite vulnerable. However, despite this, their eyes apparently are actually quite well protected. Japanese scientists have discovered thousands of tiny teeth on the whale shark's eye surfaces.
And so they're actually called identicals. So using special underwater ultrasound and x ray scans, these scientists were able to show that these tiny eye teeth occur in rings around each iris. With about nearly 3000 little teeth per eye.
They come in four different specialised shapes. The ones from the top, they look a bit like oak tree leaves, apparently. It's quite a unique and novel way of protecting the whale shark's eyes.
And again, this reeks of design, not some sort of random mutation. And I think it's really incredible. The other thing is that one of the issues with the teeth on the eyes, of course, from an evolutionary perspective, is to explain their origin.
But of course, as I've said, if we look at a creation viewpoint, we can see that this is just another amazing design property of the sharks. The fossil shark teeth have been discovered. And so again, we know that in the part, these creatures haven't essentially changed over long periods of time.
Whale sharks estimate to live for somewhere between 80 to 130 years. But it's very difficult to know this exactly. Some research that has been done suggests that they add a growth layer to their backbone, to their vertebrae each year.
And previously it was believed that this happened twice a year, and it's now believed that they don't grow quite that fast. So there's still a lot of things to discover and learn about these amazing creatures. The largest fossil bony fish is actually not a whale shark.
It's another fish called a leedsichthys problematicus. And they've found fossil records, fossils of them, that suggest that they grew to about 30 metres, or 98ft. So a little bit bigger than the whale shark, the other extinct giant shark that perhaps people have read about, the megalodon, or big tooth.
But that shark only reached about 55ft in length. But still it was much bigger than the great white sharks that we have, but again, not as big as the whale shark, which I said can grow up to about 70ft. So, yeah, they're amazing creatures, the whale sharks.
The other interesting feature of the whale sharks, again related to their eyes, is that originally researchers thought that whale sharks probably didn't have very good eyesight. And so to study this, researchers filmed a whale shark's eye movements. And it was observed that whale sharks were able to closely watch divers who were swimming alongside them.
In fact, they found that the whale sharks have an uncanny ability to actually swivel their eyeballs and actually suck them into their eye sockets to protect them. So there's quite interesting mechanisms there all around the structure of the eye. And again, when we're looking at these things here, we have mechanisms that work.
They're quite unique, they're interesting way that works on this sort of amazing giant creature. Again, all these features have to be programmed in the DNA language as instructions to construct these things in this chemical code. And again, as we look at all these aspects of these amazing fish, it just points to design.
Design, intelligent design, incredible intelligent design. It's interesting, whale sharks bear live young, and the egg actually hatches inside the mother. And it's interesting, one shark that was captured off Taiwan in 1995 contained 304 little baby sharks inside.
Again, all the reproduction aspects, there's so many fascinating aspects to these sharks, but I think what fascinates me is when you see them, just the films of them, just cruising through the water. They're just so huge, and their mouths are so huge. They could easily swallow a diver.
Easily swallow a diver, just open the mouth and swallow a diver. But yet they don't. They're not interested in eating humans and humans can swim around them.
I guess we have the story that Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish. Maybe some people, maybe it was a whale shark type of fish that swallowed, you know, I think know the Bible's record of this and how Jonah survived, I mean, we don't know, but it was obviously a miracle. And God used this giant fish to take Jonah to the coast there near Nineveh so that he could take that message to Nineveh.
And it's quite clear that there are certainly fish that are big enough to do that. And of course, it would have been a miracle God would have preserved Jonah within that fish at that time. So I hope this one might inspire you to have a look on the Internet for pictures of the whale sharks.
And it's certainly one of my. The Ningaloo reef was one of my most favourite places in Australia. I remember we stayed at place called Coral Bay on the west coast, and it was amazing we stayed there.
You stay in, there's a caravan park and accommodation right next to the beach, and you just walk across the beach into the water and about 50 metres from the shoreline, you're swimming over beautiful coral in amongst amazing fish and other creatures. It's truly an amazing place. And then, of course, a little bit further out, there's outside of the reef, of course, that's where the whale sharks are.
Of course, tiger sharks also inhabit the area, so one has to be careful there. But I'm absolutely fascinated with these creatures and to me, they just clearly point that evolution is absolutely impossible. And this whole concept, as I said, of these little teeth covering and protecting the eyes is quite amazing, an amazing design feature of these sharks.
Remember that there's so many good articles now that are available on the Internet that provide the powerful evidence for creation and why evolution is impossible. I recommend the site www.creation.com. They have a lot of articles there with their references to the peer reviewed scientific articles to support creation.
They have a lot of resources on that website. And also, of course, I've presented in my book evolution impossible, twelve reasons why evolution cannot explain the origin of life. I systematically set out the evidence that we have, together with the references to the scientific literature, as to why evolution is absolutely impossible.
And these books are available in the usual online booksellers around the world Book Depository, Amazon and so forth. Koorong in Australia. And also there's my book in six days, why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation.
Each one of the contributors to that book held a doctorate degree and they explain why they choose to believe in creation. When I wrote to them, I simply asked them, why do you choose to believe in creation? And this book is their responses. Again, if you go to the website creation.com and do a search on "in six days", all the chapters of that book are available there as a free download.
And remember, as I've talked on this programme, Faith and Science, you can simply Google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button. And while you're on 3abnaustralia.org.au website, remember there are also the television programmes that are there. And if you go to the tv catch up there is a series, Evolution Impossible, in which I discuss and answer questions on each chapter of the book. All these things are really, in my view, helpful resources that are out there to have resources for you to share with other people.
And so please remember on your Facebook pages and other, and Twitter and so forth to alert people of these programmes and other resources that are available that clearly demonstrate that evolution is impossible. The scientific evidence supports creation. And remember too, that these programmes are also available as podcasts on the different podcast sites.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Radio.
