Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Over the years I've met many scientists who have rejected evolution and believe in creation. And of course sometimes you know, people have raised the argument, well maybe it's because they've been, you know, raised in a Christian home and they've never sort of challenged the concept of creation. In my case I became a Christian in my early 20s and I was raised in a home that we were nominally Methodists.
We used to tick the Methodist box on the, on the religion forms back in those days in the 1950s and 60s and I went to uni. Well I studied hard in high school. We didn't have biology in high school, we just had physics and chemistry as part of the, the science courses there.
And as I recall I did physics and maths honours. I won a Commonwealth University scholarship to study at whatever university I chose in any course in Australia but also was awarded a BHP cadetship at their new research laboratories that were nearby here at Newcastle in Australia. Now BHP at the time operated the largest steelwork system in the southern hemisphere and they had a very advanced research laboratory.
They were doing a lot of cutting edge research and their first PhD chemical engineer arrived there in 1964, March 1964 and I was appointed as part of my cadetship his personal research assistant. And I was at uni, I chose to study science and I worked with this man. Now he was a Christian.
He certainly influenced my life but later on too I found out that he was a very strong creationist. Now when I finished uni and I top chemistry at the University of Newcastle and at the time we had a couple of world leading professors there, our professor of chemistry was a world authority in polymer chemistry, wrote textbooks on the subject and later took up a position as the chief scientist for CSIRO Australia's Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation. And the professor who took over from him who was my honour supervisor, was a world authority in analytical chemistry, wrote some of the international textbooks, authored some of the international textbooks on analytical chemistry and at the time I said I topped there, won the CSR Chemicals prize and then was subsequently awarded the Tyoxide Research Fellowship which was the highest paying postgraduate research fellowship in Australia.
And when I began my studies there and at that time I began thinking about, you know, what's the meaning of life? I'd been quite successful in my studies, what's the purpose in life? And it was at that time that I started going to church and I started reading the Bible. Now when I started studying, reading for this PhD in chemistry, people at the church would ask me, well, what do you think about evolution? You know, do you believe in evolution? Now, at university, I'd majored in chemistry and I had senior minors in applied maths and physics, but I'd also done geology. Now, in geology we did stratigraphy, palaeontology, mineralogy and physical geology, I think was the other one.
And so I was quite. We didn't really learn about evolution as such. We learned the fossil record, how you identified the ages.
And one of the things, as I was reading the Bible, of course we have the Bible account goes back about 6,000 years to creation. And this was very different, of course, to the ages that were assigned to the different fossils that were used to identify the different ages in the geologic column. So one of the things was, I began researching this.
What was the evidence in particular for the long ages? And so I began researching the evidence for, and the methods that were used for radiometric dating. And one of the things I noticed was that there were a lot of historically observed larvas that had been dated and gave very old dates, millions of years dates, and yet those larvas were only, say, hundreds of years old. Now, one of the other things that really catalysed this was that I had a friend studying geochemistry at the Reading for his doctorate in geochemistry, and he was working on an old gold mining site, studying the geochemistry of this site.
There was a lot of native mercury in the area, so forth. And one of the things he had dated was a pavement, partly fossilised or petrified, I should say European shovel handle or pick handle. And so part of it was still wood and part of it had been fossilised or petrified, rather.
And so he had this carbon dated by the government laboratories and the date came back at 6,600 years. And I remember he took the reports and we discussed it and he showed me the reports and he said to me, john, this is crazy. How can this shovel handle be 6600 years old? And we looked at their methodology, we looked at the correction factors and this sort of thing, and we could see, wow, there's a lot of ifs, a lot of assumptions based in this methodology that was being used to date this European shovel handle.
Then the workings dated back to the late 1800s. So, you know, we don't know how old the tree was. Of course, it was cut down to make the shovel handle and it would have been imported, presumably from England or some European countries.
So how old was the tree that it was cut down for? And we were pretty sure it wasn't 6,000 year old tree. So this was one of the things that really catalysed my research into the evidence for creation. And I think over the years as I've looked into it and I've met many other scientists that have again rejected evolution.
When I talked, as I said to my first boss many years later, I caught up with him. He'd left BHP Research to join the University of Melbourne and later become a, a professor down there. And talked to him and what he said was, you know, he said, I used to say to, he said to me, I used to say to my students, do you really believe that this amazing complexity of life and the amazing machines and in particular chemical machines that are involved in life came about by random chance mutations, you know, and it's a, you know, common sense is absolutely impossible.
And that was his position. And of course over the years I've met other people that have studied. For example, I had met one guy who had found a piece of lava that had entrapped some timber.
He had the timber dated, came out about 30,000 years. He had the lava dated, came out around 30 million years, this sort of thing. So obviously there are major problems with this.
I've seen research papers, for example a paper published by researcher University of Lund in Sweden not so long ago where they dated a giant marine reptile fossil. Some of the soft tissue that was found in that fossil dated 25,000 years with carbon dating. Yet the fossil itself from the surrounding Rocks was dated 70 million years.
So another example of course was the large volcanic eruption Mount Nguhoe that took place in the late 1940s when rocks from that lava flows, lava flows were dated by the Earth Sciences Group at the Australian National University. The dates came back 130 million years upwards by all different methods, gave different results. And so this fact that definitely confirmed to me, or at least data, the massive amount of data, that there's major problems with these long ages that we assumed.
And of course over the years I looked up the literature, looking at erosion rates and many other factors that pointed to the earth being quite young when we looked at history too. And I'd always been interested in history, I did history in high school, found it quite interesting, enjoyed reading history. And again when I became a Christian and began reading the Bible, of course the Bible has record of a lot of history and again being a scientist type, I would cheque the amount, would cheque the historical records in the Bible against secular historical records.
And of course they line up so well that and again also the prophecies as well are amazing historical evidence for the prophecies. So all this sort of, you know, confirmed that if the Bible historical account was correct and the evolutionary, the creation account also made more sense than evolution. Of course, later on in life I decided to read for a PhD again.
This time I chose epistemology and I read under a Harvard and Oxford educated philosopher, Ron Lara, in the area of philosophy, looking at epistemology, looking at how we know and what's the basis of scientific knowledge and what is the underpinnings of how we know. And when you look and when you analyse the evidence for evolution, it's very, very shaky and major assumptions that have been made that are wrong. And when we actually look at the evidence that we have today, particularly from biochemistry, that show us that it's absolutely impossible for the chemical reactions to occur to actually synthes the first living molecule, it's absolutely impossible for those reactions to occur in nature.
The sort of compounds that are required, we observe, can only be produced in already living systems. The other thing is of course that when we look at the complexity of the genetic code again, the chemical reactions responsible and required to produce new meaningful code for those reactions to occur randomly in such a way they produce new meaningful code that can generate a new body part is absolutely impossible because the number of reactions that are involved that actually have to be all coherent together. So when we look at these factors together, it's powerful evidence that the evolution scenario that we're teaching our children in school today is false.
It's a false scenario. And this is one of the reasons I choose to believe in creation. And as I said over the years, over the past, past 60 or so years that I've been mixing with scientists and working in the scientific research laboratories and universities and so forth, I've met many now other scientists that have come to the similar view that the evidence for evolution is very, very shaky.
The evidence for creation is very, very strong. You've been listening to faith and science and remember, if you want to re listen to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org au click on the radio button.
There are many programmes there where I've looked at a range of topics and I would encourage you if you find something that you found really interesting, compelling, please share it on your social media, tell your friends about it so that we can spread the information that there is very, very powerful evidence supporting the biblical account of a loving creator God that wants to a relationship with us and who died in our place on the cross so that we don't die eternally. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Have a great day.
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