Episode Transcript
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Welcome to evolution. Impossible. A production of three ABN, Australia. Television. Our host is Dr. Sven Ostring with special guest Dr. John Ashton. And our panel.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Welcome back to this fascinating journey, Evolution Impossible, where we're exploring whether Darwin's theory of evolution could have really happened. I'm Sven Ostring. Maybe at some stage in your life when you stopped to really think about what was needed to happen for evolution to work, you suddenly wondered if it was really possible you might have felt really alone at that point in time, because there are so many scientists that say that evolution is a fact in this journey. Dr. John Ashton has been confirming that you are not alone, and he has provided us with a cumulative case for why evolution really is impossible. It's also encouraging to know that Dr. Ashton is not alone either. There are many other scientists who've rejected evolution as well. Back here in the studio with me is Tim Turner. Good to have you back here with us. We've also got Morgan Vincent, my good friend. Glad to have you on with this conversation. And Harley Southwell, glad to have your intriguing and inquiring mind as well. John, you actually embarked on a project a number of years ago which was to contact at least 50 scientists to find out their view of evolution. Can you describe to us the process through which you entered into and engaged in this project?
[00:01:54] Speaker C: Sure.
One of the things I was just shopping for a book, actually on radiometric dating in a bookshop that sold a lot of creationist material, and a person came out from the back room and said, oh, I recognize that voice. And he said to me, John, look, hope you didn't mind, but we actually quoted your name at a conference.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Could be a bad thing.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: Well, that's right. I was a bit wanted to find out what was going on. He said, what happened was, he said, we presented a seminar on the evidence for creation at Macquarie University in Sydney, and the director of the Sydney Museum stood up and said, well, look, I don't believe that any practicing scientist with a PhD would believe in a literal six day creation. And they said, well, there's so and so who works at the Atomic Energy Commission, and there's John Ashton, the industrial chemist. And they said, So I hope you didn't mind using your and I said, no, no, I'm happy to witness for the Lord. And as I was going for a walk a little later, I thought, well, why not write two scientists who reject evolution who believe in the literal six day creation and actually ask them why? Why they do, no strings attached, just ask them why.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: It's a good plan.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: And so I contacted a few friends that I knew, a few professors around at different universities, and they told me about colleagues and I emailed them. Fortunately, email had started up back then because this was in the late 1990s and I contacted over 80 scientists and most of them were happy to agree. And I got well over 70 replies. Now, what I did was I had a look through these.
I wanted as many women scientists as possible, so if a woman sent an article, it automatically got in gender balance. But the other thing was, too, I wanted the book to be affordable and I had a 120,000 word limit on the book. Now, some of the scientists had contributed very good articles, but there might have been 5000 words or more. And I wanted 50 scientists because that was a very strong number. I thought, if I can have 50.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: I hope you had a few engineers in that number.
[00:04:25] Speaker C: I did, yes. The very first one was a top American engineer who headed the Underwater Propulsion Research Lab for the US Navy, actually. Yeah, a brilliant engineer. And so the book was put together essentially 50 scientists articles that fitted into that 120,000 words. And I think I'm only about 20 or 30 words short of that limit. So some of my detractors say I've picked the best arguments. But no, it was whether or not they fitted in that timeline, because they were all very good in a huge variety. Now, sometime later, Richard Dawkins did a review of my book and one of his criticisms was, well, these guys have been trained at church based universities, of course they're going to believe in creation. But really that was not a fair comment because only ten of the 50 had trained at a church based university, all the rest had trained at secular universities.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: It's pretty amazing that you caught the attention of Richard Dawkins at Oxford University.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: Yes, well, the evidence that they provide a lot of very high profile scientists contributed to the book by people who were head of quite prestigious laboratories. They had qualifications where they trained at the best universities in the world and so forth. And so these are top scientists that contributed to this book.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: So it's a pretty amazing network of creationist scientists in the world.
[00:05:53] Speaker C: Yes, well, there's a lot more now. I mean, that was 20 years ago, maybe.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Your book has been influential leading Water to accept the Bible.
[00:06:01] Speaker C: Well, it has been cited at secular conferences on science and philosophy and faith and science, this sort of thing. Yes.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: And what sort of ranking does it have on Amazon.com?
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Well, it has in the areas of creation books, it's often in the top 20 books still selling on Amazon. This is 20 years after it first came out, so that's really good. And it's gone through many printings.
It's been translated into german, Italian, Korean, Chinese.
[00:06:35] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:06:36] Speaker C: Spanish, not Chinese, as far as I know, Portuguese.
So quite a number of different languages.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: And the good thing is that you've actually included some of those scientific the reasons from a number of those scientists in your book. Evolution Impossible. And so what we wanted to do today is just kind of introduce some of those scientists to the panel and to the viewing audience as well. And Tim, I just wanted to ask you, was there any scientist in the book Evolution Impossible that really stood out to you and what really inspired you with their case against evolution?
[00:07:17] Speaker E: Well, it was really two. I was a bit greedy, but that's not a problem.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: You got 50 to choose from.
[00:07:25] Speaker E: The first one is dr. I think it's verna kit German with it.
[00:07:30] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:07:30] Speaker E: But his, I guess, work with information theory, him being an actual sort of authority on information and stuff, his look at the different levels of information that there are. So the first one's really basic as just if you were to take a scrabble bag and drop it on the floor, it'd still be information, but it wouldn't make any sense. It doesn't transmit anything to anyone.
But the more complex levels, there's five different levels. And the most complex level was something that transmits a message with an expectation of a response. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. He goes on to say that that's pretty much what DNA is. It is the highest level of information that we know.
And then that was kind of combined with the next guy in your book, Dr. Andy McIntosh. And some of his work was really interesting. I might quote, if that's okay, because it's a little bit hard to remember all the details, but he says that the biological structures contain coded instructions that are not defined by the matter and energy of the molecules carrying this information. And it made me really think it's like, well, where does information then come from? And he goes on to say that it's got to come from outside of that. And so I was like, that for me, really, just when you're talking about that specific information, that was something I thought, well, these guys really they've done their due diligence and they're being honest with the evidence that they've got in front of them. I was kind of wondering, though, is there any specific reason why the information has to come from outside the cell itself?
[00:09:11] Speaker C: Well, yes, because it has to come from an intelligence. And I think that's one of the points of Dr. McIntosh's paper, that energy, for example, can't somehow produce meaningful information. So this was a hopeful that early along, some of the pro evolutionists thought maybe sunlight somehow could stimulate information, could stimulate some sort of design, that some sort of energy system came in. And essentially what he's saying is that, no, the material world, energy, matter and so forth, can't produce by itself intelligent design. It can't encode by itself information. That code has to come so the sun out there can't suddenly send us a message. I am 93 million mile away.
It just can't do that. And there's nothing out there that's information. It's actually sort of non material or abstract as opposed to the material. So in all the cases, I think, as mentioned earlier, it comes from an outside source, an intelligent outside source already operating powerful evidence for the existence of God, actually, when you read his paper.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: And there's a whole area in science and in the community called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where they're looking for information coming through radio waves to the earth. And if you find that information being transmitted, the natural conclusion is that there's intelligence out there. And so Stephen Myers would say in his book, the Signature in the Cell, if we find that similar kind of encoded information in the cell, it's a signature, it's an indicator to point towards an intelligent creator and designer as well. It's really quite amazing. It is. Morgan how about yourself? Was there anybody that really stood out to you amongst this collection of 50 scientists?
[00:11:20] Speaker F: There was, yeah. There was the professor, David Gower, professor at the University of London. And he brings out three major points of why he refutes the evolutionary theory and model. The first one has to do with the isotopic dating method of fossils, age of matter and whatnot, radiometric dating? Yeah, as well. And so I found that quite fascinating to observe that that when he looks at all the evidence, when he observes it and took research in, that he couldn't find it matching up. The second one is what he would refer to as the basic building blocks. And again, he just finds order, he finds intelligence with that. And following on what you're mentioning, Tim, that again, it just can't happen per chance.
The third point that Professor Gow brings up is his own study after many decades of studying. And although I haven't studied to the same level he has, what I do resonate with him, though, is as he was. So I try to be as well that when I'm intellectually honest with myself, like Professor Gower, when we see all things around in the world, we see order, we observe design. We observe this and have to come to the conclusion, well, if there's order, if there's design, then there's a mind behind this. And so in my field of studying, undertaking postgraduate studies, now I can see that as well in all matter of life, that there is that design as well. So a question, if I may. Dr. Ashton is a professor like Dr. Gower or others in your book or around the world, they undertake such a pursuit of study in whatever field with such purpose and intent.
How do you perceive those who do study with such purpose then coming to the end of their study and finding that there is no purpose to life, whereas the 50 scientists here have taken that pursuit of study with purpose and have found purpose? There's this almost this split, this fork in the road where they pursue their study with purpose. And then some do find purpose and then some don't.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: No, that's true.
And those scientists are atheists, and they're contempt with that that this world is all there is. I think one of the things that just comes to mind as I mix around in the academic circles, there are probably a lot more scientists who actually believe in God, and they just haven't confronted the evolution issue as such they've heard about, but they're not working in that field. They might be working in some other field of biology, but it doesn't come into the evolutionary aspect. Or they might be working in engineering or medicine or biomedical research, these sort of areas. And so it's sort of like, well, that's there. I'm not going there. I believe in God. I go to church. I'm doing my research, and I'm doing it well. And I think we'll find there's a large number of scientists like that because they've gone through the education system.
In order to get their degree, they've passed the exams, they've had to learn about evolution, but then they've moved on into other fields that aren't directly related to that, but they haven't gone into the area to research it. Now, Professor David Goer, he was in the area where he discovered some of the human hormones, and he's a world famous biochemist, so he's right at that frontier, particularly in mechanisms. And also he was very interested as a Christian to delve into this. And I think it's just a shame there are certainly many top scientists that they never find God.
It's really sad.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: What about you, Harley? Was there anybody who really stood out.
[00:15:20] Speaker D: To you as your book? Dr. Kirsty Thompson, the former director of the US. Air Force, terrestrial Science Laboratory. He made a very interesting point when I was reading through the book about how evolution cannot be in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics. And basically the second law of thermodynamics is simply teaching that we observe everything to slowly be breaking down over time. If you put something out into just a vacuum over time, it will degenerate. It will not become more complex. It will fall apart. Instead, and I think this is something we've talked about, you know, how there's no added DNA coming through mutation, but it's all stuff falling apart. We look out in the universe and we see stars burning up rather than burning in and all these different kinds of things. And so he's making a very good point about a random event. Creating order isn't possible when we observe the second law of thermodynamics, a scientific law, which is very well founded. But that also did have a question that I was thinking about as well. If we look out in the universe and if we look on our own planet and look at our own bodies and so on and so forth, and we see the second law of thermodynamics in action of things breaking down and not necessarily becoming more beautiful, but becoming more ugly over time. Why would a loving God create that kind of law in the universe that would slowly cause everything to fall apart if God's supposed to be the Creator and sustainer?
[00:16:51] Speaker C: Yes. So the Bible as God has revealed to people that really believed in him, such as Paul when he wrote that he is currently sustaining everything.
But we also know that God talks about the consequences of evil and the effects of evil that have been allowed to happen because that was man's choice. Man chose to disbelieve God and to believe Satan in the fall. And essentially the bottom line is that by choosing to believe Satan over God essentially meant that they accused God of being a liar. Now, if you're a liar, it's very hard to ever prove yourself because whatever you say is considered well, yeah, considered false. Yes. Or could be. You don't know where you are. So God had to prove it. And of course, we know he demonstrated what he was like through him coming to Earth as a human and living as Jesus Christ and allowing humans to put him to death.
We can see then that God at that time said, okay, well, when we hand over domain to this sort of power that no longer is based on love and truth, then we have other effects take place. And I think that corresponds to the law of well, thermodynamics is part of that. Now, whether that was there in Eden, it probably was to a degree, because it can drive thermal processes, but God can continually replenish things as well. So we've got a supernatural situation. So it's almost like God is saying, well, look, I'm still there, I'm still sustaining everything, but I'm just withdrawing a little bit and letting you've made these choices. I'm letting it follow on with the choice. So it's sort of like with a child. As you're teaching a child, they're going to be disobedient and there's times where you absolutely stop them. You don't want them to run out of road. But there's other times when you say, well, if you continue to play like that, you're going to fall off that and you're going to hurt yourself, but it's only going to be a little way. And you let them learn the consequences, but at the same time, you're limiting how far to make sure they don't hurt themselves. But you want them to learn some lessons. And I think the whole universe is learning a lesson of when we turn to evil, this is what happens.
But I mean, I don't know. There are only thoughts we don't know.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Another person that you mentioned in your book is a geophysicist by the name of John Baumgartner, and he worked at the very famous Los Alamos National Laboratory.
But he made a comment, or used a term, I should say the Einstein Gulf.
Could you explain what that is because that sounds quite intriguing.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's very similar to what the paper that was referred to earlier by Dr. Andy McIntosh. And that is essentially that material things can't carry the concept of abstract ideas.
And so a rock can't tell you that it's on the ground or a rock can't tell you that it's hot or something like this. And so there's an idea of communication.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: It can be hot.
[00:20:22] Speaker C: It can be hot, but it can't tell you. It can't tell me. Yeah. So it can have physical properties, but it can't communicate this. And so what it's saying is that when we use language and so we've got say the word here, evolution, written in English. So it involves little letters, right? Those letters are written in ink on this bit of paper here.
And they're physical molecules as such, but they can't actually say anything. Those molecules can't say anything. There's a gulf. What it is, is an abstract thing. My mind looks at those symbols and in my mind I read that and I say there's a message there that is saying that evolution is impossible. And so that's a very abstract thing. And so what it's essentially saying what Einstein is essentially saying is that in the theory of evolution, it works on chemical mutations. It works on material things.
Those material things can't develop or communicate a concept of information, right? And they can't spontaneously material things don't have any property that encodes intelligence and design all these things because these are abstract things. Design is an abstract thing. When you're designing a house, you may be going to have a house built and you have an idea, I'd like the bedroom there and the bathroom there and so forth. These are abstract ideas. They're not real. It hasn't been built yet, but you can picture it and you can make it. That's an abstract. And then you can communicate it. You can communicate it with those words, I want the bathroom upstairs. And so you get a message and that can go across to the builder who can say, yes, I can do that. I can put the bathroom upstairs. And so we are communicating, but that's nothing to do with the air molecules that are coming out of my mouth, vibrating, carrying sound, vibrating off the eardrums, connecting little nerves, sending a message to the brain. That's all material things, but it's transmitting a concept. And that's why saying there's a golf and the evolution model is pure material. It's the materialistic worldview. So this is the Einstein golf and it gets us into this non material side of things, which is really fascinating. It's the God side of things. Cool.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: So having read through all of these 50 or 70 responses from these scientists, did you pick any themes coming through that was really kind of unified? All of these scientists reasoning with regards to rejecting evolution and heading towards belief in God or believing in God it's interesting.
[00:23:07] Speaker C: I think they all had certainly very common interests in science and they had very strong scientific reasons for believing in God as well as strong faith reasons.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: But maybe you meant to ask the question to the audience there. I'm sorry. Go for it.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: So, any other questions that you might have with regards to these scientists and their reasons for rejecting evolution?
[00:23:31] Speaker D: So there was the point made earlier about Richard Dawkins'response to your book saying that these scientists came from faith based institutions where they earned their degrees and PhDs and so forth. But you said that wasn't the case for all of them. But how many of them really may have been grown up in a faith and then have maybe taken a confirmation bias into science?
Or are we seeing scientists who are coming in atheistic, seeing design and then deciding to believe in a Creator?
[00:24:07] Speaker C: Sure, in order to answer that question, I actually went a step further and what I did was I wrote to scientists around the world who I heard were Christians and I asked them why do you believe in God, in the miracles of the Bible, answer to prayers and the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ?
And again I got these responses and one of the conditions to contribute was that you had to be educated at a secular university and taught at a secular university as well. And a number of those people actually became Christians while they were studying at university. Really interesting. And they gave their personal testimony there. And so the book came out as The God Factor published by Harper Collins. It's still available under the title on the 7th day as a sequel to in six days. But that's an amazing book there because all these scientists had that background, educated in secular universities, had academic positions, tenured positions in secular universities, and many of them came from that background. And I actually noticed that that's when I became a Christian. It was after completing my first degree at university and while a research fellow at the University of Tasmania and I thought a number of the contributors did that.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Any other questions that you guys might have?
[00:25:42] Speaker F: Just maybe more an observation that it seems by the discussion that's taken place today that science and faith aren't mutually exclusive, but rather they kind of build off each other, they feed with each other, two sides of the same coin, so to speak.
[00:25:59] Speaker C: Well, it's a classic example that of John Pokinghorn, who was professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, resigned his position to study theology.
Know he's a very strong Christian. Matter of fact, I think Stephen Hawkins took his stephen Hawkins took his place.
So that's quite fascinating. So we have top physicists and I think when people, particularly in the area of physics, they realize, whoa, there's so many really interesting things going on here that there's so much evidence of a creator God out there behind the systems that we observe in the universe. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff.
Real scientific research points to the Bible. So many of the great scientists in the past, like Isaac Newton, he spent more time writing in the area of the Bible and looking at Bible prophecy than in the area of physics. And Clark Maxwell. Similarly top scientists.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: It's an amazing thing. You know, there is a growing number of people who are rejecting Darwin's theory of evolution. That's the way science works. When we discover evidence which demonstrates that a scientific theory is false, we need to be honest and willing to reject it. That's why many scientists have decided to do and reject evolution. But what about you? What are you going to replace evolution with? I'd like to invite you to explore what the Bible tells us about how life began. How a God of love described in the Bible created a beautiful world in just six days. Grab a Bible off your bookshelf or download a Bible app on your phone and start reading the Bible from the very first chapter. Also get a copy of Dr. John Ashton's book Evolution Impossible. It will help you realize that your decision to reject evolution is the right one to make. Did you realize that there's other evidence that God exists? Join us next time as we explore that powerful evidence that God wants a genuine relationship with you. We look forward to seeing you there.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us on Evolution Impossible, a production of Three ABN, Australia television. If you have any comments or questions, send an email to Radio Three, ABN, australia.org au or call us within Australia on 024-973-3456. We'd love to hear from you.
