Hello and welcome to Science Conversations, a series examining the intersection of science and faith. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and my guest today is Dr.
John Ashton. Dr. Ashton is a chemist working in the field of food chemistry and has a PhD in epistemology.
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth. Dr. Ashton is also a wellknown Christian author.
His most recent book is Evolution Impossible? Subtitled Twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the origin of life on Earth. In this series of Science Conversations, I'm talking with Dr. Ashton about these reasons.
Last time we explored the question, but isn't evolution a fact? Today we're exploring Darwin's theory of evolution to better understand the theory and to see where the evidence leads. Welcome, John. It's great to be talking with you again.
Oh, thanks for having me again, Barry. John, what's the essence of Darwin's theory? Well, Darwin's theory is an explanation for how life came to be on Earth from some primitive life form that was here originally and how it actually changed into all the different types of life that we have here today. The theory is really quite a clever theory.
It was based on a number of observations that Darwin had made that he'd put together. I think one of the things that perhaps we can remember is that Darwin lived back in the mid 18 hundreds, and at that time the world was embracing machines. The steam engine had been developed and new machines were emerging to make textiles, to mill logs, to do all sorts of labor replacing tasks.
And these machines, driven by steam engine, had lots of moving parts, and people were really enamored by the fact that there were mechanical laws that underpinned I think you also had the issue with Sir Isaac Newton too, the concept of the mechanical universe being able to explain the interaction of all the different forces in the universe. Well, that's right. This mechanical worldview was certainly underpinning much of the thought, particularly within academia.
In fact, before Darwin's time, an engineer by the name of Herbert Spencer had noted, for example, that there was a sort of evolution amongst machines. So machines were gradually evolving to be better and better. So, for example, if you might have a steam engine and somebody developed a better pressure valve or a better governor, then that steam engine may then produce more horsepower and therefore it would run more mills.
And so people would tend to buy that new, better machine and the older machines would no longer be bought. And so there's this constant evolution of machines. And so this was a concept that was in people's minds.
The other thing, too is that Darwin was very interested in nature and he made a lot of observations of plants and particularly birds. He was very interested in birds. And one of his observations earlier on was, for example, that when he looked at a little piece of lawn out there.
He identified something like 20 different species of plants all in this little one piece of lawn, but they were all struggling to survive. There were limited resources. There were just this single piece of soil, the same sunlight.
They were all struggling to survive, to reproduce their own species in that little piece of land. And when Darwin saw this struggle of the plants to survive, it triggered some notions for him. And there were many other things that what were some of those other observations? Well, one of the things that happened to Darwin early in life was he was invited to go on a voyage around the world, and that voyage was on the Beagle.
And Dharma was a very young man at that time, but he was cultivating these ideas. He was obviously thinking about these things in his mind about this struggle, about the plants. He had observed the different plants in Europe, in America, as I mentioned earlier, in Birds.
Now, when he went off on this trip, this was an amazing opportunity for a young man at that time to observe different species around the world, different times of life. Now, it just so happened that as he was setting off on that trip, the captain of the Beagle had bought a copy of Charles Lyle's new book, the Principles of Geology. Now, that was another work that had that had come out.
This was 1833 that had come out. And Lyle was again a brilliant geologist. And we can talk about this in a little bit more detail, but later.
But essentially, Lyle believed that the formations of rock on the Earth had formed over millions of years. They hadn't formed as a result of the flood. Now, up till that time, and about that time at Oxford University, geology was still taught in terms of flood geology.
And it was a very reasonable explanation. It was a catastrophic explanation, explained a lot of things. But Lyle had adopted Hutton's views of very slow erosion rates, very slow deposition rates, millions of years of erosion to form the physical forms that we see.
Now, Lyle read this book sorry, Darwin read this book while he was on the boat. Now, a couple of things were happening here. It again described this concept of very long ages.
And so Darwin put together his theory of slow changes. I guess there's a lot to say here in a short period of time, but essentially, as Darwin observed, this struggle for existence in this little patch of soil, when he traveled around, he also noticed that there were changes in species. So, for example, in the islands off the west coast of Africa, he noticed in one particular part there were a lot of wingless beetles.
I think there are about 500 species of beetles on this particular island. And on the windy side of the island, they were predominantly wingless beetles or beetles with the form wings, so they couldn't fly. And it was sort of clicked with him that hang on.
These beetles haven't been able to fly out to sea, so they've got to be blown out to sea, so they've had a greater chance to mate and reproduce. And that's why there's a lot of these wingless beetles here. Whereas in the area of the island where there was very little wind, most of the beetles had wings because they had no problem being blown out to sea, so they were able to mate and reproduce.
So this introduced this whole concept. Well, maybe there were mutations and changes. And Darwin definitely did come up with a brilliant idea.
He came up with the idea that all these small changes over time would eventually produce a significant change. Now, why this was significant was this when darwin was studying his little piece of ground with all the different species of grass, he thought, the species of grass, any species that has the greatest diversity of form is going to have the better chance of survival should there be a change in temperature or rainfall or drought and this sort of thing. The more varieties there were, the greater chance of survival.
And this was the fundamental principle that underpinned his theory. The more diversity, the greater chance of survival. Because what happened then is the forces of nature would sort out the best suited one to survive, and hence survival of the fittest.
So he took the ideas from engineering, he took the ideas from what was happening in society. He saw what was happening in nature and he applied these. And when he saw the mutations of the beetle, right, these little mutations can provide the variation which over time, best suit the creatures.
So Darwin is really giving us a mechanism for evolution. I mean, the concept of evolution had been around for some decades in its modern form. So at this point he is actually giving a rational or a reasonable or even a plausible mechanism for the way in which species could diverge.
Yes, definitely. And he'd seen this. And as he thought about it, when he wrote up his theory, the other brilliant stroke that he had was he was able to illustrate it with a tree.
And so essentially, Darwin assumed that there must have been a common ancestor. So he worked back, you've got all these different species, all the different forms of animals, and he worked backwards and he said, so originally there must have been some common ancestor. And then this ancestor was carrying a lot of variation, a lot of diversity somehow, and there were mutations and it diversified into a large range of slight variations.
And each of these little variations then in turn underwent slight changes, call them mutations. And so we have more variations. And as you can imagine, after a period of time and you have all these successive variations that may pop up after, he suggested, 1000 generations, after a long period of time, and he suggests 10,000 or 14,000 generations.
The new type of animal is so different, or the new type of species could be a plant. Bacteria is so different from the original that is now a new species. And when you repeat this, you then get a new, totally new genera of species and so forth, up through what we identify now as families and orders and so forth.
And so this was the concept then of how life formed, all these different things. And he drew, working backwards from the tree, he noted a lot of similarities between the animals and that then became the basis of evidence for his theory. He really never explained where species came from in the first place.
Well, not where the first species came from, no. And that's why sometimes evolutionists argue, well, that's not our problem. We're talking about from where the first life was from then on, the other aspect that Darwin came up with these ideas, this mechanical model for life now because it's systematic, it's all these small mutations, small changes, and eventually you have something completely different which paralleled the development of machines.
Remembering, of course, that machines have intelligent designers. And we don't want to lose point of that fact that those machines, those new pressure valves, those new governors, those better designed pistons, those better design boilers and heat transfer mechanisms, they were all designed. So the evolution of machines was a result of design.
But anyway, nonetheless, that didn't probably come into Darwin's theory. He was looking at some sort of random process. And so he thought that there was an inherent ability for diversity, obviously, within the species.
And that was the secret to survival. The species that was carrying the greatest diversity in its reproductive system, he didn't understand about genes back then had the greatest chance of survival. Now, the other thing was and they were small accumulated differences that's right, yes.
Over time that would produce it. But the other thing was that Darwin at this time was also reading Lyle's book. Now, Lyle had spent a lot of time studying the fossils in the Alps.
He originally, I guess, trained in law, but he was very interested in geology, and he had become enamored with the concept of long ages. And I think in a way, too, as from a lawyer point of view, he was looking at some way to break away from the control of the church. And to do this, he was looking at some way to perhaps prove the Bible incorrect.
So he's looking at the record in the Alps from the perspective of a person who's trying to develop a case that would disconnect science from religion. Oh, definitely. I would say so at that time.
Now, I don't want to judge him, and it's a while since I've read what he has written in this particular area. But Lyle certainly had disbelieved the Genesis story and the Flood story. And he had adopted the view, as I mentioned earlier, that the formations of rock that we see, the structures like the canyons and mountains and valleys and the different rock layers and the fossils that they contain in places were formed by slow natural processes over a long period of time.
Now, of course, they're all going to be natural, but slow, essentially slow processes, slow gradual erosion, slow deposition, slow burial, these sort of situations. But one of the things that he did notice was this, and he reported on, and that is that the fossils higher up appeared to be more complex in their design or structure than the fossils in the lower layers seemed to be simpler. Now, Darwin, of course, thought, right, this fits perfectly with my idea that life has become more complex over time.
It has developed more complexity in order to survive better. And so the fossil record seemed to confirm what Darwin proposed. And, of course, extending this sometime after he published his original book I forget who it was now, but one of the famous writers at that time, huxley.
Huxley. Yes, Huxley wrote argued that humans had evolved or originated from apes. And Darwin then took some time to develop that theory and write extensively that humans had evolved from apes or gorillas or some common ancestor very close to those, and hence they would find the missing links in Africa.
And, of course, that explains why biologists and zoologists, anthropologists have spent a lot of time in Africa. But I guess to sum up this put together this picture that now meant that biology and the origin of life had a mechanical model that biologists and scientists working in the biology area, they could apply the principles of this mechanical model to science, just like the physicists and the chemists. And the engineers were able to use the laws of physics, chemistry and engineering to progress their areas of study.
And I think that with the long ages proposed by Lyle really cemented the theory in the minds of many of those people at that time. So the tree of life that Darwin used also looked at the fossil record. So he's putting the fossils on this tree of life, so he's trying to give us a explanation of the fossil record as well, but in return yes, yes, exactly.
And I think the two came together as well. We find that Lyle had already written this work. Darwin now explained why there were these differences in the different layers up the scale, at least from their perspective, it appeared to explain that now we need to remember that this was a totally different picture to the Bible record, a totally different picture.
So in the Bible record, we have that God created all the different types of life that are on Earth, that there was a massive extinction during the flood and that there were certain survivors after the flood of plants and animals and people, and that modern life since the front is relatively recent, only thousands of years. Now the theories that Lyle and Darwin were putting forward were totally changing it. They were saying that life had a mechanical origin very different from the Bible and that life on Earth was millions of years old.
He didn't say that the fossil record was complete. He didn't have all these gradations between the animals and plants in the fossil record. But he believed that in the future that evidence would be found because if evolution were to be true, then you would expect all these intermediate forms both in plants and animals.
Well, that's very true. There were a number of issues that Darwin back in his day recognized were major problems. One of those was the missing links.
There weren't these intermediate species, particularly when we get to more complex life forms where it's easier to observe that there are the missing links, they just weren't there. So that was a major problem. The other major problem was that there were very, very complex animals found very low down in the fossil record in the Cambrian.
The Cambrian, in fact has later been found to contain really most of the major filer or representatives from most of the major filer that we know of. So why were these highly complex animals like Trilobites Nautiluses way down there at the bottom of the fossil record? That was a major problem and in actual fact it was a major doubt for Darwin. The other thing was how did structures like the eye evolve? These were issues that Darwin wrestled with he didn't have an explanation for.
But I think the overriding factor was that two things, it provided a mechanical model for the biological sciences so they could now compete with the other physical sciences in terms of looking for mechanisms to explain changes in biology. And the other thing was too, it now challenged the authority of the Bible and the authority of the church. And I think that was a motivating factor behind a lot of people.
They wanted to challenge the authority that the church had at that time and the way to do that was to destroy the or to challenge the accuracy of the Bible. Now, up until the 1990s biologists tried to identify these proposed evolutionary pathways for the tree of life based on the fossil record. And this particularly involved the Homologies, the similarities between creatures based on their skeletal similarities or their physiological similarities.
Yes, but that's all changed now. What's the current focus in evolutionary biology today? Yes, so Darwin, for example, noticed that, say, elephants and draps had the same number of vertebrae, therefore they would have had the same common ancestor and similar sort of many mammals have the same structure of their arms and so obviously mammals would have the same common ancestor according to Darwin's theory. And so when he proposed his evolutionary trees and biologists up to the 1990s, essentially when they were drawing up the evolutionary trees to extend on Darwin's work 100 years earlier or so, then they used these physiological or structural similarities.
But then, of course, we had the massive ability to study DNA, which developed in the latter part of last century and particularly reached an economic situation in the 1990s where it now became economically feasible to study the DNA of different creatures. And they began massively mapping the DNA sequences in different forms of life. And so now what they've done is they're looking at these sequences within the DNA and mapping and attempting to map the origin of species according to the similarities of the DNA in different species.
But this has led to major problems in that it leads to a very much different tree of life to that which we would expect on the basis of the structural similar, the physical structural. So, you know, there's been articles published in the science journals destroying Darwin's tree of life. So really the whole situation now has paced a whole lot of question because they start to get sort of similarities that intuitively just don't follow in terms of one creature evolving into another on the basis of the genetic similarities.
It just doesn't seem is there any link between the two? Are they finding any link between the skeletal homologies and the DNA? Well, they find some, but there are many just absolutely totally weird exceptions. And as I said, the two trees are very much different. They don't overlap as one would expect.
And so this is, I think, some of the early signs that there are major problems with theory. These were some of the early signs that, hang on, there's something different going on here, this isn't really working. And that's what scientists really should have recognized.
These two trees should have overlapped, but they're not overlapping. But people talk about them pretty well at the general population level and in most documentaries, as if they do. But when you look at the science literature now, the trees are actually quite a bit different.
So what is the modern synthesis? Well, there are major problems with the modern synthesis for the theory and we'll talk about this probably in a week or so's time, in that we now know that these different structures are a result of changes in the genetic codes. And so you've got to actually change the DNA code to produce these different physiological changes. So if you want your fish to evolve into an amphibium, you've got to produce massive changes in the genetic code.
So where do these changes come from? Mutations can't produce these codes. So there's massive problems now that the so called new synthesis doesn't work either. So this is why we're leading up to the point Darwin's theory was a brilliant theory, absolutely brilliant theory, but the evidence is just not there that it actually is the explanation.
The more we've looked, the more we drill into it, the more we realize it doesn't work. It doesn't fit what we observe. It's a brilliant theory, but it doesn't fit what we actually observe.
And this is the important point. People used to be on the top of that tree of life as the most advanced form. Where do we fit? If we look at the DNA evidence, is there any change to that? Well, this is interesting.
I mean, there's many, many species that have much more complex DNA than we do, like wheat. A seed of wheat or rice has far more, probably five times more DNA complexity than we have. This is one of the should we put the wheat above us on the tree? This is one of the fascinating things.
And of course, I guess the big issue, too, is that you see and I mean, this really disappoints me, the insistence that we evolve from apes. And I think I read or from perhaps a common ancestor of both. Yes.
Or a common ancestor of both apes and gorillas and these sort of things. And I read an article recently where I think was in some American country, they wanted to sort of have a bill of human rights for sort of ape like creatures. But I think this is something that we need to drill down into.
Apes and humans are very different. Now, let's move on to just the DNA similarities between humans and apes and just dwell on this for a moment. There are similarities, and this is used as a confirmation that we are closely related.
What do you think? Well, I remember seeing a picture of a display of Lucy that was in a very prominent museum. I think it was in the United States somewhere. I remember seeing the picture of it in a book.
And really, it was ridiculous. It was sort of like, as I recall it, it was sort of like a female bikini model, but with fur all over and a monkey face. And this was sort of a portrayal of the intermediate species.
And I think it may have even been a supposed model of Lucy. And this sort of portrayal in museums sort of put into the minds of people, yes, we evolve from apes. Look, it's just like a really super hairy human being with an apelike head.
When we look at, say, the classic example of Lucy, which for many years was hailed as, look, this is the intermediate species. This is showing the evolution of apes to humans. Back in the was shown that Lucy was very, very different from either apes or humans.
Matter of fact, Lucy was as different from apes and humans as apes are from humans. So it was a totally different species. And a couple of world leading anthropologists published work on this and studied the know, the structure of the pelvic area and the way the bones are socketed into the pelvis and this sort of thing.
No way could Lucy stand upright as she is often displayed in models or drawn, it would be extremely difficult for her to stand that way. And again, these findings were published in journals like Nature New Scientists. But again, we have lucy is still talked about as an intermediate species, but she's very different.
She was just a unique type of ape. When we look at the DNA similarities, when the ape genome was sequenced, or it might have been the chimpanzee genome was sequenced in around about 2005, there was a great sort of publicity about the similarities. And people were talking about, well, there's 96% similarity, 98% similarity.
But since that time, more detailed studies of the similarities have revealed that something like 25% of the sequences in chimps and humans are different. They're quite different. And that's a massive difference, isn't it? That is a massive and other people have also done studies and said, yeah, the similarity is not more than 85% at the most.
And one of the things we need to understand is how do we measure these similarities? If you look at the code itself, just as we would write it out, there's no similarity. I mean, how do you pick similarities? What they try to do is look at sequences for particular physiological functions and so forth within the structure of the genome. And as I said, when they do this, and now that they've drilled down, we understand more about how DNA works and the codes within the codes, the similarities are nowhere near the near what evolutionists would like to claim.
But how do we explain any similarities at all? Well, of course, this is where I think the intelligent design comes in. So many people say, well, there's many of these creatures, they have five digit on their hand and so forth, similar forearm structures as we start before, similar blood chemistry and these sort of things. They have livers and pancreases and so forth, and hence we can use them to study human health issues in some instances and the effects of different medicines and so forth.
But these similarities, when we think about it, really represent amazing intelligent Design. Like, if you the hand is a brilliant system, absolutely brilliant system. You think of the diversity of what you can do with your hand and what people do with their hands, from climb up rock faces to get into very difficult parts, to repair your motor car and undo some tiny little thing for surgeons to be able to operate on a brain or some delicate part of the body.
All these amazing things that we can do with our hand, hold on to things, support our weight, all these sort of things. If you're a designer, why not use that design? And we have that all through industry and engineering. And the classic example is, say, the VW and the Porsche, they're very similar because they had the same design.
Know Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry Porsche. They designed those cars, you think VW? Yes. An air cooled horizontal engine and in the rear and so forth.
But Porsches and VWs are very different. I mean, tell the Porsche owner that he's just driving a let's see what his reaction is. But there were many characteristics that were similar because the original VW design was a brilliant design.
So the common design argument, or common designer, rather, works just as well as the common ancestor argument. Oh, definitely, yes. And see, where the common ancestor argument falls down is you've got to have a mechanism.
See, what we're doing is we're observing something, right? We observe these similarities in the bone structures and that's fine. That's a fact. That's what we observe.
But how do these similarities arise? Why is it that the forearm of a monkey and a horse have a similar bone structure? Why is it now, does it mean that the monkey and the horse evolve from the same common ancestor? If that was the case, we have to have a mechanism that demonstrates that evolution we know that those structures are produced by genetic codes, so then we have to have a mechanism. How do we change the genetic codes appropriately to make those changes in the structure, but yet follow the same pattern? And to this present time, there's no known mechanism whereby that can occur. Mutations can't produce it.
But if there was a designer that says this is a brilliant design, I'm going to use this in a number of ways that fits as well. 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. We've got a good idea of Darwin's theory now. After the break, I'll be talking with Dr Ashton about the problems with the modern synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution.
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My guest is Dr John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. In this part of the program, I'll be talking with Dr Ashton about the problems with the modern synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution. Now, John Darwin had views on embryology.
What were they and how did Ernst Hackel relate to these views? Yes, well, Heckl actually proposed that evolution was actually demonstrated in the embryological development of an organism. So he actually illustrated one of his works with diagrams of the embryos at a particular development. Stage of, say, a fish.
I think there was a salamander and a rabbit and a human and a couple of other species. And essentially what he showed was that during the stages of development they went through the sort of evolutionary changes such as it was believed that all these animals had originally evolved from fish that are evolved into amphibians, that have then evolved into reptiles and then subsequently into mammals and so forth. And that when these embryo were developing they went through these different stages.
So for example, there was a stage when the embryo had gills, for example. And Darwin actually believed this. He looked into this himself and he believed that this was the case and that it was actually evidence for evolution.
Now, this survived for a long time. I mean, it's something that's fairly difficult to check but in the mid 1990s it was checked. I think it was dr.
Richardson and a team actually took photographs of the embryos of the same creatures that Heckl had originally drawn and that Darwin had originally adopted, etc. And demonstrated, say, for example, in humans. At no stage does a human embryo develop gills.
At no stage. It just doesn't happen. The embryos don't go through these stages that are mirroring their historical evolutionary development.
It just doesn't happen. But yet I noticed that textbooks as recent as two five still recorded that the embryos of mammals at some stage have gills. I think there's a major university textbook that is used internationally to teach biology students and this is one of the really fascinating things that has come out of this.
If we use this example of Heckel's images and so forth and the concept that embryos go through this evolutionary development in their own development, it has been demonstrated that it's been proved wrong. The evidence has been published in leading science journals, in specialized science journals. It's been article published in the journal Science which is perhaps one of the top science journals in the world back in the 1990s.
But yet this refutation of this idea, this supposed evidence that supports evolutionary theory, the refutation of that evidence hasn't got into a major teaching textbook used in our universities today. And that's a very important issue that highlights a number of areas that have come up with the theory of evolution where scientists have discovered evidence that refutes the theory but it doesn't get passed on. It might get published initially, but it's not getting passed on.
We talked about the earlier one, for example, with Lucy how it's definitely not an intermediate species on the developing into humans. But these concepts, they're not being edited out of the textbooks. The textbooks aren't being adjusted.
I understand that we've known since the 1920s that the embryological evidence didn't really support this concept. So it's taken quite a while for that to get through to the textbooks. Well, yes, the evidence just didn't seem to there.
But the first systematic review with photographs and so forth. That definitely refuted. It wasn't published till, I think, 1997.
But the issue is that the evidence refuting evolution is out there, but it just isn't being taught to the students. And students are being taught evidences for evolution that in many cases are no longer valid. Well, that requires explanation.
Perhaps we won't have time to sort of explore that. I know that we'll be coming back to that throughout the series, but I'm just wondering if the embryological evidence isn't supportive of the theory, how convincing is theory really? And what are some areas where alternative explanations are actually better supported? Well, the whole theory now, because we understand more about DNA and the DNA code and the role that the DNA code has in determining the structure and physiology of an organism, we know that to produce these changes in the code would require massive amounts of mutations. Massive mutations? Massive mutations to the code produce any significant new organism.
It doesn't happen over 1000 generations or 10,000 generations, as Darwin might have thought. They're bred E. Coli through 50,000, 60,000 generations.
There's fruit flies as well. E. Coli? Yeah.
So it doesn't happen when we look at the structures of the code. It's too complex. It doesn't work that way.
The only way we can really account for these changes is deliberate intelligent design. Deliberate intelligent design. There is no known mechanism and we'll talk about this in more detail later to explain the new codes that would be required to form the new species.
And so the bottom line is there's actually no known mechanism for evolution. Now, sometimes people say, look, you can't be right. They say to me, you can't be right.
But and I challenge them, look, just go on to the University of California, Berkeley is one of the top universities into the world. If you go on to their Evolution 101 website, they have a number of questions and research issues there that you can search for and you'll see that what they state there is that one of the main challenges for biologists to research today is how evolution can produce new types of organisms, can produce new forms. They don't know, they don't have a mechanism.
Students think that we have a mechanism. Students think that there is a known mechanism behind Darwin's theory, but there isn't. And we now know from our studies of mathematics, and we can talk about this in more detail later, that it is actually impossible on the basis of what we know now.
So Darwin's theory was a brilliant theory in terms of appearing to explain, in terms of a mechanical model. But when we drill down to the actual biochemistry and now understanding now DNA and genetics, it doesn't work. Are you saying then that mutations don't add up to new information and new species? That's right.
Well, we can talk about this in more detail. There are corrective mechanisms. There the amount of mutations required are absolutely huge to produce a significant new change.
The other thing is, too, the big emphasis of Darwin's theory was natural selection. Natural selection doesn't produce new codes. See the wingless beetles? They were there.
That was not new code, that was the loss of information. What natural selection does is it actually reduces code. See, natural selection actually drives everything in the opposite to evolution.
Now, many students have the concept, oh, natural selection, this is how we produce the new. So natural selection is not a creative thing. No, natural selection destroys code.
And this is the important point that we need to understand, that natural selection destroys code. So you have a diversity and what happens is you have a change in the environment or some predator comes in and what happens is he chomps up all the little creatures that don't run fast enough and the creatures that do run fast, they survive. That's natural selection.
But all the interesting codes that were in those little creatures that didn't run fast enough are now lost because they've all been chomped up. Those codes are lost. Natural selection destroys codes and natural selection has to have something to work on, doesn't it? So this brings us back to the whole origin of life issue.
And I know that in the next talk, in our next conversation, we're going to be looking at the origin of the first cell, or the supposed origin of the first cell. So all the aspects, when we look at Darwin's theory, it's something most children can grasp the concept and it's just been inculcated into our culture. Just about every documentary that you have.
And I was watching the awards of a fishing championship, and they were weighing this swordfish, I think it was, that had been caught, this very large swordfish. And they were saying, admiring the design they were talking about how fast a swordfish can travel through the water. And they were saying how its body has evolved over millions of years to be so streamlined in its muscles and fins in just the right place and right proportion to be able to gain these tremendous speeds in the water.
So here we have a fish catch. Commentator is espousing sort of evolution, but we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? Because if there's no known mechanism for evolution, then we have to go right back and have a look at the origin of life and see if that's possible. Because if that's not possible, all of the discussion and debate about diversification of species and so forth might be just unproductive.
Well, that's true. The origin of life is a major issue. Many evolutionists don't consider it their problem.
They say, well, we don't know how life first started. That's for the biochemists or maybe it came here from outer space. But I think one of the big issues for me is this that evolution, the Darwin theory, was a very clever theory and a lot of people adopted it.
A lot of scientists took it up at the particular time and it really put the church on their back foot because science appeared to be based on evidence that was reproducible evidence. And sure, when we went all around the world there were these reproducible, the geological column was there, there were these layers of fossils and they seemed to get more complex when you went up. And so there appeared to be this evidence.
What they didn't realize was that hang on, there are no missing links. The intermediate species aren't there. Secondly, back in those days the age estimates were based on guesses.
They didn't really have good data. And secondly, we had evidences for catastrophe. We had evidences that the past wasn't uniform and people didn't grapple with that.
And I think what had happened was that the church didn't have the expertise to counter this and they attempted to, but they were really in many ways, I think, bullied by the science at the time that seemed to have the upper hand. And we got to the stage where back in two nine, some of the churches even apologized at the sesqui centenary of publishing of Darwin's book, apologized to Darwin. And many churches have now adopted some form of theistic evolution.
They say, well, maybe God was behind this. But what we need to understand is at the present time that Darwin's theory needs a mechanism and there's no mechanism. We now know on the basis of science that it's absolutely impossible and the churches should not have apologized.
They should have said, well, we want more evidence, we want more evidence that the theory really does work, we want more evidence. Next time we're going to look at the fact that the origin of the first cell or first life is really impossible on naturalistic lines so that the reality or the supposed fact of evolution is not demonstrated. And that makes this distinction between science and faith that people like to propose that there are two different domains, that one is dealing with facts and the other one is just dealing with blind faith.
Reflect for us over a couple of minutes on this supposed distinction between science as a fact generating mechanism and faith as just blind faith. Well, that's right. At the present time we know that life is a miracle.
There's no known way that nonliving molecules can form a living cell. And I mean every cannery is based on that. We know that in that can it's not going to become alive if the contents are dead.
But what is life and particularly what are thoughts we can understand? Life sciences deal with the physical world and measurements that we can make. But there's a difference in terms of when we make measurements. What do those measurements mean? On the other hand, faith and the biblical record talks about people's encounter with the supernatural God.
Now the Bible talks about God being spirit or non material. And when you think about it, our thoughts are non material, aren't they? I mean, do your thoughts have mass? Do your thoughts have volume? Can you cut your thoughts up? No, they're non material, but your thoughts are very real. So there's a very, very spiritual aspect to the reality of life.
Now, science can't get in and measure that area. And the Bible, though, talks about this encounter with God, with an intelligence, with a designer. And to me, the biblical account of our origins fits the data.
And in fact, many scientists who believe made very great discoveries. Because I'm reading the Bible, the Bible gives us a picture of origins. It gives us a picture of design.
When we look for design in the human body, that's when we've made the greatest medical discoveries, when we've said that the human body evolved, we've had major problems with medical discoveries. So the whole thing about science is that it assumes that the universe is orderly and works according to laws. And so you have to assume that this just didn't come into existence by chance, otherwise you wouldn't have the known laws that we have.
Well, that's right. Paul Davis so really, Christianity is providing a basis for science, isn't it? Oh, very much so. Christians need to be very, very proud of the insights that are in the Bible about how we are, how we came to know.
Even Paul Davies, the great physicist, points out where did the laws of physics come from? These are things we can talk about later. But we know that these laws there these laws follow intelligent mathematical principles, the laws of physics and chemistry, which underpin biology. Everything points to an intelligent designer.
Everything points to an intelligent first cause. If my mind originated by chance, then can I really trust it? Well, this is it. We don't know whether our thoughts are all that random.
It certainly makes a mockery of logic, in my view, anyway. And our being able to understand anything and have a basis for knowing the Bible gives us a very sound basis for knowing. And I think one of the things we can look at is some of the issues of radiometric dating and some of these other discoveries.
Have they really disproved the Bible? What do they really say? There's so much misinformation out there about what these scientific measurements are actually saying. That's the issue. We can make the measurements, but what do the measurements actually tell us? And if our minds are really determined so what I'm saying to you now was determined by my genes and my heredity and the environment that I'm in, what does that say about science? Can I really say that science can be trusted if it's the end result of determinism, where everything that I say and I do has been determined by my genes or my background? Where's free will in all of this? Yes, those issues are very difficult issues for science and I think the issue of the mind is a major problem.
Evolution has no explanation for the origin of the mind. Darwin's theory can't explain the origin of the mind. He didn't attempt to.
John, that seems a good point. To close off our conversation today, thank you for coming in. It's been wonderful talking with you.
I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you've been listening to science conversations. My guest has been Dr.
John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. Today, in conversation, I'll be talking with Dr. Ashton about Darwin's theory of evolution.
We've tried to understand its central claims and to evaluate them based on the available evidence. Next time, I'll be talking with Dr. Ashton about his claim that it's impossible for life to arise by chance processes.
Remember to join me next time on Science Conversations. Until then, bye for now, and God bless.
