Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Doctor John Ashton. Just yesterday I was travelling back from short holiday down the highway, towing a small caravan and I noticed that there was quite a bit of vibration in the car.
And I talked to my wife about this and I was thinking, yeah, sometimes you can lose a weight on a tyre and the wheel can become out of balance. And I thought we were thinking, yes, when I get back I need to put the car in and have all the tyres rebalanced and just checked. And as I was driving along, so there's a rest area coming up ahead.
So I thought, oh, maybe I should just stop and just cheque that, you know, it's not on a loose wheel nut or something like that, that the wheel is actually coming loose. So I stopped and went round, checked all the wheels, I couldn't move, everything seemed tight, all the wheel nuts seemed tight. So we hopped on, continued on our way and we just lowered the speed a little bit, you know, about 15 kilometres below the speed limit on the freeway.
It seemed to be less vibration, but then I realised, oh, we were going to call in and visit some folk that we hadn't been to before. And I was thinking, oh, I need to stop at the next rest area and set the, set the gps to the address so that I know where to go because we were approaching the town where, well, we were still quite a way off, but we were getting closer to the town where I would need to turn off the highway and navigate the streets that I wasn't familiar with. And we saw a rest area coming up and a caravan had passed us.
Another car towing a caravan had passed us. And I just made the casual comment to my wife, ah, looks, looks like that caravan that just passed us is going to pull in here too. So we're not the only ones pulling into the rest area.
So we pulled in and stopped and I pulled up behind the other caravan. Of course there were caravan parking areas and the driver hopped out and came up to me, he said, oh, excuse me, he said, your caravan left tyre has a really bad wobble. And he said, you know, he said it could be a bearing or something failing.
And he explained how they'd seen it coming along and he had been driving along and saw the rest area and had passed us and for some reason he hoped that I would follow in. Now, I guess it's not usual for, you know, if a caravan pulls into a rest area or any vehicle, why would the next vehicle want to, you know, pull in? But anyway, I had, we had a look and we noticed that the tyre felt very hot. The bearings didn't feel hot on the caravan, but the tyre felt very hot in one spot.
And so he suggested that just down the road a few kilometres, there was a service station, we could pull in there and have a better look, which we did. And so we unbolted the wheel and he noticed that there was a bit of a bump, so a sort of an out of round patch on the tyre. So we put the spare tyre on and I was talking to him and I said, look, I'm just so thankful that you stopped and suggested that.
And because he was helping me change the tyre, it's nice having two people here doing things. And he said, well, he said, I thought if we help someone, maybe the karma will come around and if we have a problem, someone will help us. So it's interesting, we put the spare wheel on and I gave him one of my little hope cards.
So I have a little card that I give out to people. It just says on one side, hello. I am a Christian and I've had many answers to prayer, which is why I'm passionate about God, who loves us and Jesus, and giving out these cards.
On the other side, I've listed some websites I thought you might find interesting and relevant to knowing God. Have a great day. And I have some websites on the other.
On the other side to side, different programmes that people can look up on the Internet. But one of the things that fascinated me was a couple of things that I was impressed to urgently pull in at the next rest area, where it was obviously safe to pull over with the caravan. There's plenty of room in the rest areas on the freeways and enter in the GPS address.
So it was such a strong, in other words, to do it now, not wait a little bit. And the other thing was that person was impressed just at that time to solve the problem and also to drive into the same past me and then drive into the same rest area. And he had the thought that maybe the guy will follow in and of course, you know, I wasn't thinking of following him for that.
But it may be a couple of interesting things arise out of this in that we had prayed that morning before leaving that we would have safe travelling with no breakdowns. And as I was changing the tyre, I thought, boy, if this tyre was very hot, if it had blown out and it would have then caused, you know, potentially serious damage to our caravan and, you know, if the tyre had come off and, you know, the caravan slid along the road or you know, fortunately, we had slowed down, obviously below the. Well below the freeway speed limit.
But it's very interesting. Where do thoughts come from? Now, at the same time, I'm reading a book called in 1942, Australia's greatest peril. And it's essentially a story of the potential or the possibility that Japan may have invaded Australia in 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 41, the japanese fleet and air force and army were very successfully and taken Singapore and so forth, and bombed Pearl Harbour.
And it's very interesting looking. And the author of the book has actually researched the diaries of some of the japanese leaders and commanders in the military and recorded on newspaper things. And it's very interesting, the decisions that people made, and they had to make a decision.
And at the same time, just in very recent time, there's been some horrific local crimes committed where a lot of innocent people were killed here in Australia, in a shopping centre, in a random attack. And of course, we hear of these attacks occurring, particularly in places like the United States, where there might be a random shooting of people that are quite unrelated to the perpetrator, just random events. And I remember doing research in this some years ago when I put together a book called the hidden Hazards of Alcohol.
And I was looking essentially at. Well, part of the book was looking at how alcohol affects our mind and body, but also how it affects behaviour and some of the crimes that were committed by people when they were under the influence of alcohol. And one of the things that fascinated me was often in these cases of random shooting, the people who were shot were people who.
Or were killed were people who were doing a lot of really, really good things in their life were really making a difference. They seemed to be. To me, it seemed to be most often the cases where people were heard and we come out, where do the concepts of thought to do evil come from? And where do the thoughts to do good? Where were the good decisions come from? Where do bad decisions come from? Now, Herbert Butterfield, who was a professor of history at the university at Oxford some decades ago, wrote a book, Christianity and history, and again, he looks at a number of providential situations.
So there's not only providential situations such as, you know, the fog and the weather conditions for the evacuation from Dunkirk were such that the evacuation was able to be successful. And from Dunkirk by the British, were able to evacuate their army and save much of their army. And the Germans who were fighting them at the time were.
The weather was such that they couldn't use their planes as effectively and so forth. And the thing was, it was very unusual weather for that time of year. And I've talked in the past about many instances like this, how the Voortrekkers were protected from the Zulus at the battle of blood river and so forth.
And again, when we look at some of the decisions, decisions that Hitler made to, again, not go and invade England, but to go and attack Russia. And when I was reading this book, just some of it last night, again, people made decisions. Some people made really good decisions, other people.
And it seemed like in most of these cases, the people on the winning side, the people representing right, made good decisions, the people representing wrong, made bad decisions. And it doesn't always happen. Of course, people who are trying to do good can make good decisions as well.
But it seems that the overwhelming situation seems to favour the outcome that in the end, what we have, the notion of good wins. And it's interesting, of course, the Bible talks about the origin of sin coming in and this turning away from God and turning towards doing evil. And the things we know are evil are sort of lying, stealing, killing, these things.
These are the evil things, the bad, bad things. And we have two areas that underpin this, that approach this. And one is the whole issue of consciousness and the whole mind body problem.
And it's interesting that if we look about our mental processes such as consciousness, and physical processes such as the brain events, in other words, the changes in electrical current that operate our nerves, that affect our muscles, that enable us to do things right. And so our consciousness is non material, but we know that there's a connection. There's our thoughts, which are non material, can affect and cause these changes in electrical voltages and so forth.
But it's fascinating that up until the present time, the specific nature of this connection is unknown. There's been a lot of attempts to look at this. And so that's one aspect that we look at, is the whole problem of consciousness, the fact that we are conscious.
We have this ability to think. And when we look at the evolutionary processes, where you have non material atoms, molecules, that supposedly come together to form the first living cell, and then these cells mutated and over hundreds of millions of years, or thousands of millions of years, became us, at some stage, they have to explain how this consciousness came to being. And of course, there's no known explanation at the present time.
You know, a few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable explaining consciousness, but they thought maybe quantum theory could provide the missing ingredients. And there were a number of different theories that proposed quantum mind theories of consciousness. And in particular, the orch or ior theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, of course, a famous physicist.
But it's interesting. None of the quantum mechanical theories have been confirmed by experiment. And in actual fact, empirical evidence is against the notion of quantum consciousness.
And in actual fact, an experiment done by Catalina Cursinow, spelled, for those that are interested, c u r c e a n u in 2022, suggests that quantum consciousness, as suggested by Professor Roger Pedros and Stuart Hermerov, is highly implausible. So this is a major problem for science. It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which, roughly speaking, is how can a mental experience arise on a physical basis? And so this really, again, is powerful evidence for the existence of a non material creator.
And the Bible talks about this. The Bible talks about how wisdom comes from God. The Bible talks about how, when we choose to believe that Jesus Christ was God incarnate, was the creator incarnate who came to live amongst us and die for the wicked on behalf of us, the punishment that we deserve that when we believe that, then when we accept that, that God gives us the Holy Spirit.
And the Holy Spirit, of course, is the Bible refers to as our teacher and so forth. But it seems that in a way, that this gives us wisdom, it changes us. In other words, and the Bible talks about this too, how we have a change overcomes our mindset.
How gradually we change from a person that is essentially selfish and prone to do things that we would call evil or wrong, to one that shies away from doing those things, hates doing those things, and that this is a change that takes place in us when we choose to believe this. But the other thing that comes from this is the concept of wisdom, the concept of being able to make sensible and good decisions. And this leads us to the other area.
Not only do we have the mind body problem of consciousness, consciousness and the philosophers have spent ages and written heaps, all the different theories you can read up about consciousness and the level of consciousness. And no one is any the wiser through to thought. What about thoughts? We do.
Not only are we consciousness and being aware of something, but we have the ability, for example, to, to entertain. We can become creatively humorous. We also tend to have the ability to judge, make a decision, as that person did.
They did something that was really bad, or that person, like the person that helped me, told me about my tyre problem, did something really good. Now, there were many, many cars that passed me, there were trucks that passed me, but no one took the time to actually make an effort to warn me that my tire was vibrating very, very badly on my caravan. And so, of course, because it was in a towed vehicle, it wasn't as direct.
I couldn't. I didn't realise how badly it was vibrating. But, you know, when the guy who pulled over, who incidentally was a high school science teacher, told me, he said, wow.
He said, I almost thought of videoing it for you, where he said, your tire is really badly, bouncing up and down really badly. And of course it was because it had gone out of round due to the failure of part of the rubber. So when we consider these things of where thought comes from, where did the thought come from for him to actually make that effort? Where do thoughts come from for people to decide to become missionaries, to decide to go and help people to go and decide to do really good things? Where do the thoughts come from? Where people decide to do really, really bad things, such as kill random people, steal randomly.
You know, we had our car broken into just over a year ago and a number of things are stolen. Fortunately, our car wasn't stolen. But where, where does this come from? And it's fascinating that the Bible describes this behaviour.
It describes these thought patterns. They come as a result of sin, they come as a result of being possessed with evil thoughts. And it's fascinating that the Bible talks about demonic possession as well being that people become so overcome with evil that in actual fact, it's like demons have entered them.
And in actual fact, the Bible talks about demons coming into people and doing things. It's fascinating when I've talked to people who have worked as missionaries in places like New guinea and some of the Pacific islands and in some places in Africa, I talk about how the worship of the spirits, the worship of the spirit worlds of demons is very much part of the culture of some of those people and it's very real to them. And a number of missionaries have testified to me of seeing sort of spiritual phenomena occurring in these places.
And so this is the Bible explanation, is that there are not only good angels, in other words, spiritual beings that the Bible talks about that have rescued people, such as lead lots of out of Sodom before its destruction. The angel that visited Mary, the angel that spoke to Daniel in the lions and closed the irons, the lions mouths in the lion stem, the angel that spoke to the ladies after Jesus resurrection when they'd run to the tomb. So there are these good ones.
But we also hear of the demonic spirit spirits as well. And it seems to me that this is, you know, powerful evidence, again, for the Bible, for the Bible account of where these things come from, where the evil thoughts come from. If we allow the influences of demonic spirits and evil to come into our mind, then this can explain a lot of things.
And it also behoves us, though, the important reason as to why we need to choose God. And this is a fascinating thing and millions of christians can testify to this. And you can read much in the christian literature of the personal testimonies of people who have had, perhaps initially, very bad lives, done bad things, but then chosen to accept Jesus, their saviour.
And it has totally changed. It's turned their life around. They've changed into a really, really beautiful person and gone on to do amazing things in their life for good, for the betterment of mankind.
It's fascinating to me as we. Well, for example, on the news this morning, my wife mentioned to me that there was a story about how youth crime in the state of Queensland is getting out of control. And we've had a lot of articles in the state of the Northern Territory, similar situations occurring.
And it seems to me that there's a clear correlation. As we have removed the teaching about God in schools, as we've removed and lessened the teaching of scripture in schools, it hasn't been replaced with, it seems a good thing. And I think the other.
One of the other aspects that comes to mind is that when people are in charge of education, syllabuses and this sort of thing, we must consider just the straight material aspects. But they don't realise that there's this non material aspect. There's spiritual warfare going on.
There is a battle for our minds, because our minds, our non material thoughts, is how we connect with God. And obviously, one of the ways you'd think that if you want to take over a place is that you take over people's minds. And, of course, this came out again in the book that I was reading using propaganda.
There was very, very interesting propaganda. When battles were fought, one side would. Both sides would describe the same battle, even though there was a winner and a loser in winning terms, and the efforts to influence people that they can't possibly win and break resolve and this sort of thing through telling lies, through telling things that weren't necessarily true or that weren't definitely weren't true in order to control people's minds and hence get them, for example, to surrender.
And I'm sure this is even happening in the different wars that we here about today. And this is something I think that we need to remember too. It comes down to an issue of what is truth.
And one of the things that fascinates me is that despite all the evidence that we have now, all the scientific evidence that we have now, that evolution is absolutely impossible, the complex genetic codes cannot arise by chance. The molecular machines such that are involved in separating the DNA strands, reading sections and duplicating sections, the ribosome. And so these molecular machines are so complex and so well integrated that they could not result from blind, random processes, because they're all structured by codes that are written in a language, and languages are totally independent of the physical environment.
And so when we look at this evidence, and yet there are people who are persistent and politically active to make sure that creation isn't taught in schools, but instead evolution is taught in schools. And that this is powerfully undermining the account that we have in the Bible, that we were created by a supernatural, supreme, all knowing, non material God, super loving God. And.
But the truth about this is not getting out there. And people argue over what is truth now. But it's fascinating that the Bible says that God is truth, the creator of this universe is truth, and therefore his word is truth, and his word can influence our minds.
And we have this clear evidence now that the Bible was written by people who were influenced by, by this creator being, and it generates this coherent picture of the history of the world and us and the origin of evil and the explanation for evil. This is so important and this is the message that needs to get out. And this is one of the reasons that I do this broadcast.
We have so much evidence now for the existence of God and evidence that the Bible is truly the word of God for us to lead us to a knowledge of him and a relationship with God. And that's why I would really encourage you to read the Bible. Make sure you have a copy of the Bible and read it, because it will change you for the better.
You've been listening to faith and science. If you want to re listen to these programmes, remember you can to google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the radio button and the listen to faith and science.
And also please put up the links on your social media pages if you really enjoy this programme so that other people can come to know about God too. I'm Doctor John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
