Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith in science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Usually I find that when I'm talking to folk and people find out that I'm scientists, they automatically assume that I believe in evolution. But I think that the evidence overall now there's a huge groundswell of modern discoveries that clearly point to creation and that evolution is absolutely impossible. I was also having a chat just a few days ago with a gentleman, and as we were talking, he said, well, look, I don't believe that God exists.
And I listened to him for a while, and one of his arguments was he'd had some bad things happen, lost some folk that were dear to him, and he questioned, where was God at that time? And he also then related some experiences with a church minister that had been very judgmental of him and his mother and his parents’ family. And I guess putting this all together, he'd come to this conclusion that he didn't believe in God. But then as I just listened and talked and I said, well, I believe in God.
And he then sort of just swung his hand around. We were standing outside and we were surrounded by gardens. And he said, but one thing I questioned as he waved his arm in sort of a spreading gesture was, how did this come about? How.
How did all this life come about? And then he mentioned and the universe. He said, I have questions about that. And I thought that was very good. He was very honest. So obviously, he'd had these experiences that in some ways had turned him to have the view that he didn't believe that there was a real God. But then he thought, well, on the other hand, how do you explain the origin of this? Now, of course, many scientists and young people today are being inculcated with the idea that there's this mechanical model that we call evolution, that somehow.
And the Big Bang theory is, I guess, as part of this whole picture of a mechanical model for our existence, that somehow inanimate brute forces created all the amazing structures and properties of the stars and galaxies in the universe and amazing structures that are out there, as well as all the chemical elements as well. So, remember, this theory has to account for how we produce all the elements, hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, gold, iron, silver, and so forth, all the different elements that we know exist. And somehow all these elements with all these different properties and the way that they then can interact with one another.
All this came around about by blind, mechanical, just sort of somehow interactions of energy. And, I mean, when we sit and think about it, we really don't even know what energy is in many ways. And the fields, the energy fields that can exist if they're heat radiation.
Then again, it's a combination of electric and magnetic fields that are carrying what we call the heat energy. There's so many things. What are these fields? So when we have this mechanical model that put all these things together, and then, of course, when we come to the living organisms and the amazing codes that are there, like the DNA code or language.
DNA language, and then the prescription or the instructions that are encoded in this DNA to make every living thing and all the different sets of instructions that are required to do that. And of course, the big excuse that scientists have for perhaps pushing this is their belief in the long ages that everything is very old. And one of the issues with this, of course, is, and I found it quite fascinating, is trilobites.
Now, I studied geology back in 1964, and it was taught back then without heavy underpinnings of evolution, it was just taught more as an observational science. These are the fossils that we find. We find them in these particular layers.
And sure, the layers were assigned different ages, but in actual fact, there wasn't a lot of emphasis on the actual ages, at least at the university where I attended, the evidence was more that these fossils characterised the particular layers and being able to identify key fossils, to identify the particular key layers in the geologic column. But one of the creatures that fascinated me were trilobites, and I had a friend who actually found some trilobites independently. And these are a highly complex animal.
Now, while they're a real challenge to evolutionists, why they're a major problem for evolutionists is that they are found very, very low in the geologic column. A matter of fact, they can occur in layers where below them there's virtually nothing, maybe a very few very primitive sort of algal type fossils, but very little below them. And then suddenly in these fossil layers, we have this really complex creature.
Now, trilobites belong to a wonderfully varied group of extinct marine creatures, and they belong to a group called the arthropods because they've got jointed limbs. And so this is the same group as insects and millipedes, centipedes, spiders, scorpions and crabs and prawns. They're the same family as these, which are quite complex animals that have quite complex dna, extremely complex DNA in them.
And so for these trilobites to have that complex DNA so early and so low in the geologic column is really a major problem. And they had an exoskeleton, so their shell was sort of their skeleton. It was divided into three parts, and hence the name trilobites.
They were trilobed, they had a central part, and they had a head. And in the head, of course, was these amazing eyes. And there's been quite a bit of research has been done in terms of these eyes.
In fact, a very important paper was published in scientific Reports, which is a leading scientific journal. I think it's part of nature, back in August 2020, and it was insights into a 429,000,000 year old compound eye. So, according to these scientists, the eye was 420,000,000 years old, but extremely complex.
And so it was a particular species of trilobite. And what made it very interesting for the scientists to study was the type of eye that it had was essentially the same as modern compound eyes. And they found fossils that show very excellent preservation of these structures.
And this is it. The structure is really complex. They got lens cone assemblies, which are like optic fibres, that guide the light into patches of light sensitive pigment cells.
And then proteins inside the pigment cells capture the individual light photons. And this causes the protein structure to temporarily change shape. And this change in shape opens little channels for different ions.
Now, what I mean by an iron is these are charged atomic particles that actually sort of move down these channels. And so via this highly complex process, chemical signals are converted into electrical ones, and these travel along the optic nerve to the brain, and here they're further processed. So it's an extremely complex process.
And here we find this in these creatures that are right down near the bottom of the rock strata that we find the geologic column. And the other thing, too, is that for these eyes to work in these trilobites, the lens cone eyes require very precise alignment, and they need to be constructed of materials with the correct optical properties. And each unit has to be optically shielded from its neighbour.
So to inhibit stray light. So modern organisms with compound eyes, like insects and crustaceans, have many lenses. In fact, dragonfizer was reading, have up to 28,000 lenses.
And because of this, this huge assemblage is capable of processing a huge amount of information. And of course, the insects, like a dragonfly, has to navigate, find food, detect motion in light and dark. And when we think of this, all this information is processed in their brain.
They take this information in and process it. And so the brains, for example, of honeybees, have these sort of eyes, is the size of pinheads. And, matter of fact, compound eyes can even detect infrared and ultraviolet.
And these are wavelengths of light that mammals and ourselves don't. Appear to be able to see. And one of the things that came out in this paper that was published in 2020, August 2020, was that the fossils contain newly discovered optical structures.
And the samples that they looked at, the trilobite eyes, had been very intricately preserved. And as I said, it was a real surprise, the evolutionists to find that they had components that were pretty well identical to the modern compound eyes. And matter of fact, to quote the researchers, they wrote, equipped with a fully modern type of visual system, a compound eye comparable to that of living bees, dragonflies and many dinernal, daytime living crustaceans.
And so this was the eye of this trilobite creature. They lived, I guess they're portrayed as crawling around the bottom. There.
They find lots of fossils of these creatures that were obviously buried very rapidly to preserve them. Again, when we find these sort of things at this age, I think it's really time to challenge these slow evolutionary models over long periods of time. These are extremely complex mechanisms.
How could they evolved without any evidence of ancestors, of significant ancestors, to have this highly complex visual system? And then, of course, the brain to process this system and remember, even the structure of the brain associated with these animals have to be encoded for in the DNA, the structure to make the brain cells, to construct the structure of the brain, make these little line channels, have these whole systems, and then the mechanisms whereby the animal knows or can respond to these stimuli in a way that enables us to get food, to avoid danger, and so forth, find a mate and so forth. As I said, one of the article commented that fossils of these trilobites are found in large numbers. This particular one was found in mudstone layer about 1.4 metres thick in the Czech Republic. And there have been excellent preservation there. One of the things that I guess attracted me to trilobites were all the different varieties, shapes and sizes of trilobites that they are.
Not only did they have multiple jointed legs, a bit like the wood lice or pill bugs, they had quite varied appendages that came out of their body, out of the sides of the head part of them, usually. And of course, these are classic examples of a creature that appears abruptly in the fossil record with no apparent ancestors. So because trilobites obviously were marine insects, they had to see clearly underwater.
And so we know that light bends differently through water compared to air. And so all these properties must have been there in the trilobite lands to allow for that. From my perspective, just this aspect alone, let alone the reproductive system of the trilobites their digestive system, the structure of their body, all the different body parts, their jointed legs, tremendous amount of code required to encode the instructions to make all these particular body parts and also for them to work, and particularly their eyes, the amazing structure of their eyes.
Of course, we can talk about examples like this that, to me, are so obvious that evolution can't happen. You can't have a creature this complex as a trilobite with such advanced, for example, optical system, an eye system, just suddenly appearing in the fossil record right down the bottom, and with no apparent ancestors, and you can't fit that into this slow, gradual change over hundreds of millions of years model. It just doesn't work.
There's no way you can just suddenly have this huge genetic code just forming there. And the other thing is too, finding all these things buried. And the fact that they're down the bottom there, to me, again, is just powerful evidence for a catastrophic global flood type event.
And I was reading recently to another article that again points to the young age for this catastrophic event. And that was an article unfolding. It was an article that I read quite recently in a creation magazine.
It was called Fantastic Folds. And it was by a gentleman, Gavin Cox. Gavin was, as a qualified minerals engineer, works in oil and gas prospecting, and he's worked in 14 countries working in this area.
And I'm sure you could find this article on the website creation.com. It's called Fantastic Folds. And when I look at the pictures in the article, I mean, some of these folds are just so sharp, and they involve multiple layers, many, many layers, and they're all then folded back on themselves and so forth.
And so you've got to imagine, how can all these layers bend under those conditions? And to me, it's just powerful evidence that these folds occurred when that material was still relatively soft. And in his article, he talks about rocks and how rock can change shape due to a stress that's called strain. And he talks about how there's different types of deformation that can occur.
In the article, I said there's elastic defamation, where a rock can bounce back after stress is released. There's ductile deformation, which means the rock changes shape under stress and will not return to its original shape. And if rocks are stressed hard enough, they'll fracture, thus irreversibly changing.
And that's brittle deformation that it's called. And he talks about how long aged geologists, geologists that believe that the earth is millions of years old, imagine that stress, with or without heating, acted on the rock and applied gradually for a long enough time, typically millions of years. What they believe is, can cause brittle rock to deform like plastic.
And folds in rocks are explained in these terms. But really, does the folding require millions of years? And of course, is that really possible? When we look at the flood and the flood model, the flood model fits that all these layers lay down while they're still soft. And there were then massive movements in the earth.
And these folds occur in these layers. To me, it just makes so much sense. Looking at just the pictures in the articles, some of the folds are really sharp, like less than a 45 degree angle.
So you just imagine bending rock layers back on themselves so that the angle between the two surfaces is less than 45 degrees. That's fantastic bending. And the other thing is, there's other pictures in the article that show, I don't know, perhaps 30 or 40 layers, very similar layers.
And they're folded in quite a complex way perfectly. And there's no evidence of any stress structures or anything like that. And some of the folds are 90 degrees, or more than 90 degrees, and yet all these layers have retained their parallelness during that time.
When I look at these pictures and look at this evidence, I think the folds that we see that are all around the world, these and sharp folds as well, that are found in these rock layers in various places, to me, just clearly point that these layers that are found all around the world, that are supposedly span millions and hundreds of millions of years, were all laid down in a very short time period. And while they were still underwater or very fresh, there was massive movements of the earth's surface that the time when the mountains were pushed up. And to me that makes so much sense, because if these rocks millions a year, so they're going to be very hard.
And to bend them 90 degrees without cracking just isn't going to happen as long as if these rocks are sort of metals are reasonably ductile. But when you look at salacious materials and those sort of crystals, while they can be deformed, and that's the principle of your pz electric starters on your barbecue, those little spark generators, they can be deformed the way and the extent that we see in nature there. So when I look at these problems, when we look at the issue of believing in creation versus evolution for scientists, scientists have to, if they're going to continue to believe in evolution, have to allow for massive amounts of genetic information encoded in a highly complex code to have been developed very, very early on to explain creatures like trilobites and then for them to suddenly appear without ancestors, where are all their ancestors? To me, this is just one example, but really, there are millions of examples like this out there in the fossil record of creatures that just suddenly appear of different types, all the different types of flowers, different types of flying insects.
These are examples that demonstrate to me creation. You can't just generate these highly diverse information packets in DNA just like that, with huge variation. And we know that random mutations don't produce the new codes that work.
And when we do the math, it's impossible. There's not enough time. Even if the earth was trillions of trillions of trillions of years old, there still wouldn't be enough time for all the possible combinations to work through to figure out the right one.
That is going to work. But then, on the other hand of that, when we look at these folded rocks, we have the evidence staring us in our face that there must have been a global flood. And instead of spanning millions of years, it spanned a very short period of time.
And so when we look at this, and then when we consider the question, like the gentleman I was talking to said, well, I don't believe in God, but how do we explain the origin of this? How do we explain the origin of everything living? And if you go down this mechanical model, really, do you really believe that just somehow there were some sort of mechanical processes generated the laws of physics and chemistry, that generated the force fields that led to the construction of matter, that led to the arrangement of matter in an ordered fashion so that we have different elements. We have 92 or 93 thereabouts that are relatively stable elements, and that out of these elements, then we can construct living things. And then, let alone you still haven't explained consciousness.
But the Bible does. The Bible explains consciousness. And that's why I'm happy to be a scientist who believes that there is a God and that God is the God explained in the Bible.
To me, it just fits so well. And I'm meeting more and more scientists now, too, that are speaking out that they see the same thing. The evidence is there staring us in the face that there is a God.
And as I spoke recently, too, when we look at historically, the evidence for the resurrection, that evidence is just overwhelming as well. And again, resurrecting Jesus from dead to life to being translated, it could have been easily disproved just by producing Jesus' body. It never happened.
But by believing, as Bible points out, we can be saved. It's a great message in the Bible. I would encourage everyone listening to get hold of your Bible and read through it.
It makes so much sense today to read the Bible. It's supported by history, it's supported by science, it's supported by personal testimony and it's the way to salvation and eternal life. We know our biochemistry is going to run down, we know this earth is going to run down.
But the Creator who made all these things clearly stated that this was not his intention. God has plans to recreate this world, this universe, and He wants to recreate us and then have a personal relationship with Him. And that is done through believing in Jesus Christ our Saviour.
Read it for yourself in the Bible.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. And remember, if you want to relisten 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.
