Examining the intersection of science and faith. I'm Dr Barry Harker and my guest today is Dr John Ashton. This is my 11th conversation with Dr.
Ashton based upon his book Evil Lucian Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution cannot explain the origin of life on Earth. Last time, Dr Ashton discussed carbon 14 dating and outlined problems with the Big Bang model. Today, Dr Ashton is going to review the work of a number of scientists who believe dr Ashton is a chemist with a PhD in epistemology, a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth.
Welcome again, John. Good to be here, Barry. John, you've presented some pretty compelling evidence that life on Earth is relatively recent, yet you're not alone in doing this.
Tell me about some of the scientists like you who are speaking out on this issue. Yes, I think that the evidence that evolution is impossible and that the Big Bang theory can't explain the origin of the universe has grown to such a level that now a number of scientists are pointing out the flaws in these theories. For example, dean Kenyan professor dean Kenyan he's emeritus professor of Biology at San Francisco State University.
And I think I mentioned earlier he wrote one of the first textbooks trying to explain the origin of life. It was called chemical predestination. And as he continued his research and was confronted with some of the questions and challenges that are associated with evolution theory, he came to realise that it was absolutely impossible for life to have formed from non living molecules.
And he speaks out on that now quite strongly. There are a number of YouTube videos where he's done interviews presenting his views and the reasons why, from a scientific and biochemistry point of view, evolution is absolutely impossible. He also mentions that a number of his colleagues are not very happy with him doing this, but of course he is such a senior scientist that he can go ahead with this and he doesn't have to worry about the sort of grants being cut off or this sort of thing.
So it's not career suicide or anything for him? No, which it probably would be for many younger scientists, unfortunately, because the major academies of science around the world have come out with statements essentially along the lines that evolutionists now regard as a fact. Another very that's ironic, isn't it, given the evidence that we've reviewed? Well, yes, it certainly is an eye opener and I guess many people who are listening may be thinking, well, with all this evidence, how come it's still being taught in our schools and so forth? Well, there's a lot of political pressure to do so. And I think the political pressure is simply along the lines to keep they want to keep God out of the classroom because the only other explanation for how we came to be here is creation is the involvement of God, a super intelligent, all powerful self existing cause for these so.
But as I said, other very senior chemists I mentioned before, I think James Mture, who's one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, that means that his research is quoted by other scientists very frequently and as I said, in the field of chemistry, perhaps more frequently than any other chemist at the present time. And his specialization is building molecules. And he points out, and he says, sure, these small evolutionary changes that we see, yes, they can be explained quite easily on the basis of chemical mutations and the loss of chemical code.
But I can't see how the codes can be built up chemically to produce the new body parts macroevolution. And he states that publicly on his website. And I understand he's also signed a public document descending from the Darwinian evolution theory supporting that.
Theory descending from that. Just here in Australia, we have Dr. John Hartnett, who got his PhD in physics from the University of Western Australia.
He's currently a research professor at the University of Adelaide. For a number of years, he was a research professor at the University of Western Australia. And he has a website, Johnhartnett.org,
in which he puts up a lot of the scientific evidence why the Big Bang? It was impossible. Can't explain the structures that we see in the universe. Warren Grubb.
Professor Warren Grubb. He's an emeritus professor at Curtin University. I think he did the foreword to your book, didn't he? That's right, he did the foreword to my book, Evolution Impossible, and his area of specialization is the evolution of antibiotic resistance in staphylococco bacteria.
And he again recognizes, sure, these microevolutionary changes occur, but not the macroevolution, not the type of evolution that the people generally understand as the Darwinian theory of how we came to be here, how fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles and reptiles into birds and mammals and so forth. Matter of fact, I'm very interested in data. I'm very interested in confronting the challenges that are made to creationists because people say, well, you don't have data.
Where is the data? And a few years ago at Macquarie University, a group from one of the creation scientific groups put on a seminar at Macquarie University presenting evidence for creation and why evolution was impossible. And as I recall, Dr. Alex Ricci, the curator at the Sydney Museum at the time, was at that seminar.
And he asked a question along or made a statement at the end of the program, something along the lines that he didn't believe that any practicing scientist with a PhD would believe in a literal six day creation. And I was later told about this and I decided, well, why not write to scientists who believe in creation and ask them why? And that way we're getting data. And so I began one of the first people I contacted was Professor Warren Grubb and he gave me the names of other scientists that he knew, mainly biochemists and biologists, of course, because that was his area.
And I wrote to these and then whenever I wrote to them, I would ask them if they were interested in replying to my question and also if they knew of other people. And so this way, very quickly, I was given the names of, I think at the time was over 80 scientists around the world in different countries. And so fortunately, it was a time when email was just taking off in the late 1990s.
And I contacted these people by email often, followed up with a phone call and spoke to them personally. I got about, I think, nearly 70 actual articles sent to me explaining and I put 50 of these together. Then that became the book in six days.
Why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation. Now, I noticed some of my detractors in their comments on the Internet would say that I picked out the best 50 arguments. Well, that isn't actually correct.
There were many really great papers that were sent to me, but their word count was too long. There might have been like 5000 words. And again, if they had publications out.
For example, like Dr. Dwayne Gisha, a University of California, Berkeley trained biochemist, he'd written quite a number of books providing evidence that really challenged evolution. So I didn't include his article.
In actual fact, I included a mixture of articles so that they fitted into my maximum word count of 120,000 words. But that was just what they came. I just asked them why they chose to believe in the literal six day creation for life on Earth.
And this is their honest answer. And so there were 50 highly qualified scientists, all with their PhDs that gave their reasons. And there were a lot of top scientists that contributed to that.
For example, Professor David Gower. And he served as a meritist professor of Steroid biochemistry at the University of London. He holds both a PhD plus a DSC.
So that's two doctorates. You need to explain the higher doctorate. Yes, that's right.
So a doctorate of science is awarded after for people who usually hold a PhD doctor in philosophy in their particular area of field and then for special outstanding specialist research in that particular area. They are then awarded a Doctor of Science degree. So he holds both those degrees and again, he's a biochemist and he specializes in this area, worldwide recognition.
And this is what he actually wrote in his essay. During the past three decades a great deal of work has been done and published in the field of creation research. This has stimulated me to criticise evolutionary theory in three areas that are of particular interest to me.
So this is Professor David Gower writing from the University of London. My chemical knowledge has allowed me to understand the criticisms of isotopic dating methods for rock samples and to realize that there are enormous problems with the interpretation of the data. Consequently, my own view is that rocks are nowhere near as old as they are alleged to be.
So here again that corroborates what I was saying earlier when we discuss radometric dating. Then his second point is from the biochemical point of view the idea that amino acids, sugars, et cetera, and some of the vital building blocks for proteins and deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA could be formed simply by interaction of electrical discharges with a primitive reducing type atmosphere can be criticized in so many ways and so many levels. And then his third point is my own studies in numerous biochemical control mechanisms, especially in the control of steroid hormone formation, for which I was awarded the higher doctorate.
DSC convinced me that all these processes are ordered precisely. This order and extraordinary complexity are entirely consistent, in my own opinion, with the existence of a creator who himself must be capable of creating such design. He goes on to say such complexity is also being found in virtually every other branch of science in general and is especially evident in the field of nature.
Far from pointing towards the formation by the chance processes of evolution this clearly speaks to me of an almighty creator. So there we have one of the eminent biochemists in the world speaking out. You know, another biochemist.
And I've stayed in his house is Professor John Kramer. He was one of the lead research scientists with Agriculture Agri Food Canada with his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota and he was one of the core scientists that evaluated the toxicology of canola and many other projects. And he points out no one has ever demonstrated macroevolutionary changes on a molecular level.
Yet many people readily speculate evolutionary links between bacteria, plants, animals and man. And he says are the gross structures not made up of individual cells with complex molecules? If macroevolution is unlikely on a molecular level how can the whole be changed? Endless DNA sequence comparisons do not explain evolutionary development. Furthermore, the changes or mutations observed on a molecular level such as DNA are predominantly disruptive and always with a loss of not gain in information and complexity.
And he goes on to give a whole lot of examples in his own area of speciality which is resolved with lipid research. And that's what you were stressing through the conversations, wasn't it? The fact that if you can't get the changes at the level of the cell then you're not going to get those macro changes. Exactly.
And all these changes, these mutations that biologists talk about and the pro evolutionary biologists talk about they are underpinned by chemistry. These guys are brilliant chemists. They are cutting edge chemists in the world and what they're saying is our knowledge of chemistry says evolution is impossible.
Are they able to get this into the journals? Barry, one of the scientists who has been successful in publishing a research paper supporting creation is Dr. Andy McIntosh. He holds a DSC in Mathematics from the University of Wales, as well as his PhD, of course.
And he is a professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory at the University of Leeds. So his speciality is in the area of thermodynamics. But as I said, he's a mathematician and he looks at the mathematical equations behind this.
But one of the things he's always been interested in is the defense mechanism of the bombardier beetle, which relates to some of the principles relate to jet engine designs. But he also points out that you've got two very unstable chemicals that are stored separately and once they are mixed, they produce this explosion. So he points out how could something like that evolve? By chance? It would destroy itself on the way.
But in two nine, Dr. Macintosh published a groundbreaking research paper in the International Journal of Design and Nature and EcoDynamics. Now, this journal is one of the journals where they look at design in nature to sort of help them solve engineering problems because in many instances nature is far ahead in its design of our best engineering technologies.
And so this is why to think that these amazing designs in nature could arise by chance to me is just so ludicrous when we have our top engineers in the world studying designs in nature to get clue as to how we clues as to how we can solve engineering problems. And he published a paper in that journal in which he showed that biological structures contain coded instructions that are not defined by the matter and energy of the molecules carrying this information. Therefore, the genetic information required to code for complex structures like proteins requires information to come from external sources of information and cannot arise from natural environmental forces.
And so in other words, this information has a distinct non material nature that cannot arise as a result of some input of random energy. So this research paper actually provided very powerful support from the concept of an external superintelligent designer being responsible for the complex information contained in each type of living organism. So it was actually a very, very fundamental paper that actually refutes that the information and design, say, in DNA, can occur from natural random processes.
It has to have a non material source. And this is very important. But I know from talking to him, he had a lot of difficulty getting that paper through, even though he's probably one of the world's top mathematicians and a brilliant scientist.
And so this is the opposition that these sort of people so there is a criticism that people who believe in creation don't publish in the journals. Yes, well, one of the reasons is that they get closed down. They don't get through the peer review system because all the leading journals are peer reviewed and no major journal is going to these days publish anything that obviously goes against the theory of evolution.
In fact. And so all the people that I've talked about so far that have spoken out, they all believe in creation and they're all believers in God. I mean, I published a paper in Chemistry, Australia back in two seven, and it was called a Creationist View of the Intelligent Design Debate.
And I listed my sources. And the instant that that journal article was circulated, there were responses from leading evolutionists in Australia saying that the Royal Australian Chemical Institute should not have published my paper. They didn't give any scientific reasons for they didn't cite any references.
They just said should not have been done, should not have been allowed. What was the outcome of that long term outcome? Well, the outcome was that they deleted my paper from the electronic version of the journal. Of course, they couldn't recall the journal.
It had already gone out to libraries and everything. And that was in April 2 seven, if people want to look it up. Were there any kickbacks to the editor? Yes, the editor was forced to apologize.
I rang him up because I knew him, I'd spoken to him. My paper was a peer reviewed paper and it was actually published as a feature article. And it was in response to an article criticizing those people who believe in intelligent Design and arguing along the lines that if we allowed intelligent Design to be taught in schools, then we'd have to also allow astrology, spoon bending and flat earth theories to be taught, which is absolutely ridiculous.
There's a massive amount of evidence for creation. Matter of fact, in my view, the creation worldview can be used to predict outcomes because what we say is that nature is designed with a purpose. And when we begin looking for a purpose in nature, we actually find clues.
Like a classic example is most of the fruits are high in sugar, but they are also really high in antioxidants. And if we take sugar cane, for example, we've refined, we've processed the sugar cane. We've made pure white 99.9%
sucrose without realizing that when God made it, he put it there with a whole lot of antioxidants and compounds that we now know slow the release of sugars into the bloodstream and provide the antioxidants that protect the damage that sugar would do in the bloodstream. But we've, being blinded to God as a designer, separated it out and have been ignorant to that. It's only recently now that we're discovering the benefits of all these other compounds that were there that God put there with the sugar to make sugar, whole sugar cane a good food.
People that eat whole sugar cane don't get dental carries and have perfect orthodontal development from chewing the sugar cane. And there are countless examples. Matter of fact, I published those in a book called The Perils of Progress.
It was published by the University of New South Wales Press, zed Books in the UK, university of Cape Town Press, number of university presses in which I pointed out that there was a blueprint for health in nature, if only we would look for it. And the basis of that was that we were designed, the whole environmental system was designed for health. Sure, it's become disrupted now, as we understand, with pollution and of course, sin people fighting one another.
But when we drilled down, we could predict major problems in environmental health issues by ignoring the fact that there was actually a plan and a blueprint in nature and applying our technology to overcome nature in a way that wasn't in harmony with that purpose of nature. I find it really interesting that the concept of intelligence is invoked in science, and yet it appears that blind nature is able to perform feats of engineering and design that baffle the greatest minds of our age. Oh, yes, there's so much research that's been done, isn't there? From the sort of design of dolphins and their sonar systems, flight in different animals has been studied.
There's just so much. And as I said, this particular journal, the International Journal of Design and Nature and EcoDynamics, summarize a lot of this research that is being done today. So science is actually mimicking nature in an effort to improve systems? Yes, we're looking for design in nature and structure and saying, oh, wow, okay, so that's how it's done, and we copy it, and yet we say that all this happened by chance.
All this happened by chance. Yes. I think the average person with a reasonable amount of common sense can see it's absolutely impossible.
These structures haven't arisen by chance, brilliant in their design. I got my copy of in six Days from a secular bookshop. How did you manage that? Because most bookshops that put creationist material on the shelves are going to get a response, aren't they? So what happened in that case? Yes, well, In Six Days was well received by the publisher New Holland, and it was a very successful book because, as I said, the contributors were top scientists from around the world.
There was John Bohm Gardner, who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and he was a geophysicist who'd worked on designs or thermodynamic modeling of the Earth's mantle. And as well, he had studied at Princeton University as well. And he provided a lot of evidence with regard to radiometric dating and also the probability calculations for life on Earth and the geological structures and so forth.
In terms of the flood, there was another geophysicist, Dr. Ker Thompson. He'd been the former director of the US.
Air Force Terrestrial Sciences Research Laboratory. I mean, these are really top scientists that had contributed to the book. Again, all creationists, all believing in young Earth six day creation.
And I think that no other book had put this together. What sort of reaction did you get and other people get who appeared in your book? Is there an ongoing issue with their careers. The book went through a number of printings here in Australia.
It sold very well. It attracted several major newspaper feature articles. So this was in syndicated Sunday papers around Australia carried articles on it.
But there was a backlash from other authors because New Holland, they're a top publisher, they publish a lot of books in the area of natural history, like Birds of Australia and these sort of things. And my understanding is that a number of other authors complained to the publishers that they didn't want to be associated with a publisher that was publishing evidence for creation. And so as a result, New Holland relinquished the rights and the book is now published by Master Books in the US.
So their issue was with the fact that it was evidence for creation, not the fact that it was evidence. The publishers were very comfortable with the book. These were top scientists from around the world that contributed.
The book was selling really well, but they decided to give up the rights under the pressure, as I said, from other authors. They obviously want to have the other authors continue to write for them. And of course, New Holland continues today as a strong publisher producing really good material.
Full marks to them for actually publishing it in the first yes, yes, in hindsight it was a very brave thing to do, but it meant that the book really got out there. And of course, there's a German edition of the book. There's an Italian editions of the book.
The book's been published in Portuguese. Are you planning to update it? No, it's still a very strong seller on Amazon. Over 120 reviews on Amazon.
I think. See, the people who contributed to this book weren't put up. They didn't have to write on anything.
They were allowed to be just themselves, to be honest. This is why I believe and their evidence is powerful. You weren't leading them in any? No, no, this is just what they said.
And it's are some of the detractors attempt to downplay this. For example, if you Google well, Richard Dawkins did a review of the book and I think the title of the essay might be an Honest Creationist or something like, you know, he, in my view, attempts to discredit the book by saying, well, look, some of the contributors trained at church based university or church affiliated universities. Well, from memory, I think only ten of the 50 trained at church affiliated universities.
But not all those universities would be creationist universities anyway, would they? Well, probably all the ones that all the contributors that contributed to the probably did come from universities or had studied at universities. But as I said, it was only ten of the 50. The other 40 didn't.
So there's still plenty there. And as I said, a number of the scientists are really top scientists that contributed. Aren't their numbers growing? I mean, are there more scientists coming across to this point of view? Oh, I'm sure there are, yes.
When you look on some of the websites around, the lists are much higher. Now, some people have criticized, for example well, hang on. Some of the people that contributed to your book were, say, mechanical engineers like Jeremy Walter.
Now, he is head of the Engineering Analysis and Design Department within the Energy, Science and Power Systems Division at the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. And he's been the leader for a number of undersea propulsion development projects for the US. Navy.
Now, when you read his history, he was one of the top high school students in the US. When he finished school. And he went on to study engineering at Penn State University.
And he'd probably be ranked as one of the top engineers in the United States. Now, people say, well, okay, this guy's an engineer. How can he comment about creation and evolution? How can he criticize evolution? And the point is this I've met this guy.
I've stayed in his house. These guys are extremely clever. They have extremely deep powers of comprehension.
They studied science, general science, as part of their courses. They can read biology textbooks just as well as many other people. This is one of the things that I think people miss.
These top scientists have very deep powers of comprehension. They can understand. What does this mean? And they're also brilliant at maths.
They can do the calculations. They can understand probability. They can understand.
And we looked at those issues, didn't we, during the series conversations. And these guys can read. They can understand science.
They are very familiar with the assumptions that are made and understanding assumptions when you're designing propulsion systems for nuclear submarines and so forth, you have to be spot on. You can't make mistakes. And this is the caliber of people that we're talking about here.
These guys are absolute precise. And when they read the biology literature, they see the flaws, and they see the major and there were a number of other scientists in that Penn State Engineering department who were creationists. They saw the major problems with evolutionary theory.
And so that's why I don't believe that claim that some of these people are engineers or they're physicists or something. What would they know? Most of the people that I know that are top in these hard science fields like engineering, physics, and so forth, they are very, very clever people. They have very deep powers of comprehension.
But as we go through the book, there were other guys like Jerry Bergman, who had several PhDs in the area of biology, and he actually has put out a book studying the persecution and made a case study of scientists, and particularly science teachers in the US. That lost their positions and scientists that lost their research funding as a result of publicly coming out and saying they supported creation. That's not the picture that we get of science as a disinterested pursuit of truth.
This relentless pursuit of truth and evidence that's not the picture that's coming through from what you're telling me. No. Well, that's right.
I'm not saying that all scientists are like that but I'm simply saying that there is an issue here with the perception of science as a disinterested pursuit of truth and the sort of behavior that you're describing to me. Well, that's true. I mean, there's a very powerful political evidence fraction to science.
And this is why when you get these statements by these Academy of Sciences in support of their statements they don't cite research papers published in the journals of Nature and Science. They just make these assertions. So it's just dogma, really.
Yes. And they make assertions that scientists believe in evolution. Well, the claim is that religion is about dogma.
But what you're describing to me fits the picture of dogma. Very much so. As we've discussed previously, there's no hard evidence for the evolution of new types of animals and, and new, new body parts.
But there's overwhelming evidence that it's absolutely impossible. And in the book that I present here are some of the calculations that are done and independently. See, these scientists that contributed to in six days they didn't collaborate.
They worked totally independently and they often produced similar articles in their papers. Another biologist was Henry Zool and he wrote a very interesting article. Matter of fact, the publisher of New Holland thought his article was brilliant.
And he pointed out that for living systems you need ecosystems. And so there's so much interdependence within living systems that the evolutionary structure that proposed just wouldn't work. And the other guys explain the ecosystem a little bit more.
Well, the ecosystem is where you've got a balance between sort of plants and animals and bacteria and you have things like the nitrogen cycle that involves all those things. You need that cycle to be in place to produce the nitrogen requirements to produce the protein and yet that requires bacteria, plants and animals. So there's lots of things like that where you have to there's an interdependency, there huge interdependency and yet many of these things occurred at totally different phases in the so called evolutionary paradigm.
I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you're listening to science conversations. My guest is Dr.
John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. John has been discussing the work of scientists who believe, like himself that creation is the best explanation for the evidence that we see. We'll go to a break now.
When we come back, John will continue his discussion of scientists who believe. If you have any questions or comments in relation to today's program you can call three ABM, Australia radio within Australia on 024-97-3456 or from outside of Australia on country code 6124-973-3456. Our email address is
[email protected]
au that is radio at the number three ABN, Australia. All one. Word au.
Our postal address is three ABN, Australia, Inc. PO. Box seven five two.
Morissette, New South Wales 2264, Australia thank you for your prayers and financial support. If you've just joined us. I'm Dr.
Barry Harker and you're listening to science conversations. My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
John has been discussing the work of scientists who believe and who, like himself, are speaking out about the serious anomalies in evolution. For the remainder of our time today, John will continue his discussion of scientists who believe. John, can you tell me if there are other scientists who are writing books like you around these issues? Oh, yes, certainly.
And that material is being widely circulated. And as well people are putting material out on their websites. Like for example, I've already mentioned James enTour on his website.
He has this material. We've got Dr. Robert Herriman.
He was a performer, professor of mathematics of the United States Naval Academy. And I think he was at one stage one of the highest ranking mathematicians in the US. And he has a website where he puts up very detailed scientific arguments against evolution and in support of recent creation.
So there are people putting these up on the Internet. And as I mentioned John Hartnett earlier with his website johnhartinet.org. Another scientist that stands out is Dr.
John Sanford. He holds a PhD in Plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and also served an associate professor at Cornell University for more than 20 years and was a co inventor of the gene gun for facilitating genetic engineering. Now he authored the book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, in which he provides the evidence that argues that mutations consistently destroy genetic information and do not create new information.
Now, one of the important aspects that Dr. Sanford raises is that from the mutation research that they have been doing in recent times, we can actually put an upper limit on the age for life on Earth. And that upper limit is actually 100,000 years, absolute max and most likely 10,000 years on the basis of a reasonable interpretation of the data.
And he also provides really compelling theoretical evidence that whole genomes cannot evolve up the evolutionary tree. And he actually provides this evidence based on evolution and modeling that refutes the evolutionary premise that different life forms are merely the result of mutations and natural selection. And that book is selling quite well again on Amazon.
Another author is Professor Walter Vyth. He contributed to in six days as well. He holds a PhD in zoology from the University of Cape Town and was chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Western Cape.
And he later wrote a book, the Genesis Conflict putting the Pieces Together. And he explains how the fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and how many modern discoveries in biology and zoology support creation, not evolution. So here, as I said, is a zoology professor who was head of his department and I understand, yes, he put that book out after contributing to in six days.
But you're not getting this information through newspapers or science writing particularly? No. Well, Walter Vyth now has his own television programs as well. He has resigned from his university positions and he's essentially devoted his life now to publicly presenting the evidence why evolution is impossible and creation and he's very highly qualified to do that.
I mean he was one of the few South Africans to win grants from the Royal Society for example and his research was in the area of fishes for fish, zoology for memory. So yeah, it's a very highly regarded researcher who now, as I said, he wasn't always a creationist by the way. He became a creationist and he is so impressed now with the evidence for creation that this now is his life work to travel around the world and do television programs presenting firsthand the evidence for creation and he's just as well qualified as Richard Dawkins is.
So even though this material is being published and it's available on the net or you can get it through Amazon, it doesn't seem to be impacting on the science writing. No, it's not getting into our schools, it's not getting into public schools, that's for sure. But that will happen in time I guess.
Well, we'll have to see. I can't speculate on that but I think the point is that you've got top scientists educated in the field who are coming out on paper and putting their evidence down for everyone to see and it's out there and it's more accessible now on the internet, isn't it? And it's on the internet and yet still our education system is stubbornly holding. No, we have to teach children that everything can be explained by material science, in fact it can't be explained by material science.
There is overwhelming evidence for a creator, for a designer and I think for purpose of our lives here and this is why it is so important we aren't the result of random mutations and that we're some ape life ancestor slowly changed and became us. All the evidence points to the fact that we were created special with special brains that can understand creation. We can understand know dogs and monkeys, can't understand the laws of thermodynamics or Newton's laws of motion, they can't, but our human brain can.
We're programmed to be able to do that and we're designed to be able to do that in the way our brain is designed. And there's overwhelming evidence that we are here for a purpose. Just like we see purpose in nature, there's a purpose for our lives.
This, access to this to me by teaching people that we just evolved, by teaching that the universe came about by just some random thing and trying to push God out of the picture, I think is doing a major disservice, especially to young people. Because in my view, if we look at the evidence we can see, there truly is a God. And the evidence is too, that's a loving God.
Despite what some people say about all the tooth and claw, when we look through the picture, we can see there's two conflicts going on here. There's a conflict between good and evil. We see it in our society every day.
There are people that are doing really good things and there are people that are doing really bad things. And there's a higher dimension to this. I think we have a conscience.
There's something that talks to us, or at least this is what I experience. And most of my children and family that are people I talk to experience is this there's something when you're doing something wrong, there's something says you're doing something wrong. Where did that come from? But what I see science, education are saying, no, keep that away.
Particularly in origins. Every other area of science, it's fine. Physics, chemistry, general biology, it's fine.
But when it comes to origin, oh, no, keep God out. Whereas in actual fact, I think if people were made aware we have overwhelming evidence for the existence of God, more people are going to take time to find Him, to come to know Him. And from my reading of the Bible and when you think about the Bible, it was written by 40 something authors who all relate their experience with God and have recorded it for us, saying it's very real and that if we seek for God, God finds us.
He's a loving God, and he changed our lives. And I think that's my experience. That's the experience when I've talked to so many of the contributors to books like in Six Days that these people are changed.
They are beautiful people when you talk to them. They're highly intelligent people. And you can see they have had an experience with a loving God that has changed them to become and that's where we're going in our next conversation, isn't it? Give us some more authors.
Yeah, sure. Well, Dwayne Gish, he got his PhD in biochemistry from the University of California in Berkeley, which would be one of the top state universities in the US. Worked for many years in medical biochemistry research both at UC Berkeley and at Cornell.
And he published one of the books that I read earlier on, very convincing and powerful book called Evolution the Fossils Say no. And then he published the book Evolution the Challenge of the Fossil Record. And he argues that there's a lack of scientific evidence for the evolutionary intermediate species in the fossil record.
A matter of fact, I heard him debate at the Hobart City Hall. I was in Tasmania at the time. And I went along and he debated from memory, was the professor of zoology or it might have been one of the professors from within the medical faculty.
It might have been the professor of anatomy, actually, I think from memory. Now, the professor from the university, really what he spoke about was a bit of a joke. And when Duane Gish got up, he just spoke so well, he presented one piece of evidence after another, after another, after another.
It was powerful. He won the debate hands down. But I'll tell you a very interesting experience, just a personal experience, that my first career job was as a cadet physicist at the BHP Research Laboratories.
And the guy I was working for, Dr. Neil Gray, he'd just come from London University and he was a Christian and he attempted witness to me. But it was only just recently that I found out that he was a creationist.
Now, after leaving the BHP Research Laboratories, he took up position at Melbourne University, which, as you know, is Australia's highest ranking university. And I think he went on to become the professor of Metallurgy there. But I met him again, caught up with him fairly recently.
And what I didn't know was that not long after working at the University at Melbourne, when Dwayne Gish, Dr. Dwayne Dish, was travelling through Australia giving these lectures, he organized for Dwayne Gish to speak at the University of Melbourne. And it was attended by a huge number of people.
Attended? But after that he received a note from the department saying if you want to keep your job, don't organize anything like this again. Now, they're not the exact words, obviously, but that was back in the 70s, there was censorship and here we have a top scientist being told don't bring a creationist into the university. But of course, at the University of Melbourne, in one of my other books, The God Factor, one of the former professors of physics at the University of Melbourne contributed and he was a great believer in God.
So within the universities, despite what some of the officials might try to do, there are strong believers, but there are many others, like Dr. George Javer, who's professor of Biochemistry at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, which was famous for carrying out the first successful child heart transplant. And he earned his PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University.
And he authored the book Evidence for Creation natural Mysteries Evolution Cannot Explain. And again, he's a brilliant biochemist and he explains how from a biochemical perspective, evolution is impossible. So here we have these top chemists in the world trained at top universities.
George Javer spent a lifetime researching E. Coli and they explain and spell it out why evolution is impossible. They're not afraid.
Another guy was Dr. Colin Mitchell, again PhD in Geography from Cambridge University. He'd also studied at Harvard and Oxford from memory.
He was an international consultant, he was a geographer, he was consulted by governments around the world on environmental matters and he wrote a book, the case for creationism. And I've used that book because again, as a brilliant scientist, his work is meticulously referenced to the literature powerful support for creationism. Then you've got Dr.
Lee Spetner again. PhD in physics from Massachusetts Institute of you know, the top university in the US. He taught information and communication theory at Johns Hopkins University, another top university in the US.
And he's published a couple of books. Not by chance shattering the modern theory of evolution. And he explains again the evolution on the basis of genetic mutations, how this powerfully refutes the evolutionary theory.
I notice he's just put another book out too. I'm sorry, I just can't remember its name. It's just skipped my mind.
On a more local level, Dr Andrew Snelling. He did his honours degree at UNSW University of New South Wales. PhD, University of Sydney in geology.
He's published a two volume work of over a thousand pages titled Earth's Catastrophic Past Geology, Creation and the Flood, in which he provides again the geological evidence for massive catastrophes in the past. So again, this material is out there again referenced to the peer review literature, extensively referenced. Another guy.
And I've stayed with this fellow as well. Dr. Ariel Roth.
PhD in Zoology at the University of Michigan and served as chairman and professor of biology at Loma Linda University. He received a number of grants for his research on coral and undersea plants and again another zoologist. And he has written the book Origins linking Science and Scripture.
And he provides very powerful evidence for young Earth creationism. Matter of fact he's another one has a really good website. If you Googled Ariel A.
Roth on creation, his website should come up and he has a lot of PowerPoint presentations there that people can use a lot of photographs. He again is meticulous researcher. Another guy, Dr Werner Git, whom I've also met, he was a former director of the German Federal Institute of Physics for many years.
So again a top research facility in Germany and he is a world authority on information theory. And he published a book called in the Beginning was Information and he argues very powerfully that information theory refutes evolution. And again he looks at the codes within DNA and so forth.
So here again, these are really top scientists and they've put the evidence out there for people to read, to see. But the students in our schools and universities aren't being really told that these resources are out there. Unless they hunt for them on Amazon or something like that, they're not going to find them.
Another one, Dr Andy McIntosh, I referred to earlier with his DSC maths, he's put out his book Genesis for Today. We talked about Dr John Hartnett from the University of Adelaide. He's published, co authored a book on the Big Bang theory called Dismantling the Big Bang in the area of astronomy.
Dr. Danny Faulkner. He was former professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University Of South Carolina in Lancaster, US.
He put out a book, Universe by Design. Again, he's a creationist. And he actually points out that some scientists, such as the Nobel Prize winning chemist Dr.
Ridget Smally, who earned his PhD from Princeton University, he became a creationist. And in his public lectures, he states why he now rejects evolution and supports. So here you've got a Nobel Prize winning chemist rejecting evolution on the basis of what he's come to understand about chemistry.
People don't know about this. We could go on. So you've got crazy statements like the United States Academy of Sciences.
They published in 1999 a little booklet, statements called Science and Creationism a View of the National Academy of Sciences. In their second edition on page 28. The statement claims that scientific consensus around evolution is overwhelming and that no prominent scientists reject evolution.
I mean, what we've just been talking about just powerfully refutes that statement. We've got Nobel prize winners that reject evolution. So I think the evidence is now clearly out there that there are a lot of scientists that support creation.
Thanks, John, for that review. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you've been listening to science conversations.
My guest is Dr. John Ashton, and John has been discussing the work of scientists who believe and who, like himself, are speaking out about the serious anomalies and evolution. Next week, our conversation will be concerned with the evidence for the existence of an intervening god.
This is the second last conversation in this series of conversations. Don't miss it. Bye for now, and God bless.
