Living Cells - Arisen by Chance? - 1503

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. This is my third conversation with Dr. Ashton based upon his book Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. Today we're examining the reasons why a living cell cannot arise by chance. For those listening to this series for the first time, dr. Ashton is a chemist working in the field of food chemistry and has a PhD in epistemology, which is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth. Welcome John. It's great to be talking with you again. Great to be here, Barry. Our topic today is fundamental to the viability of the theory of evolution. So has anyone ever observed cells falling by natural, physical and chemical processes? No, certainly not. Indeed. This is one of the major challenges for those scientists that believe that life can form somehow by itself, by physical processes. There are absolutely major, major problems with them trying to solve this. No one's ever observed life forming by chance. And in actual fact, from our knowledge of biochemistry at the moment, it's absolutely impossible. Absolutely impossible. So if we haven't been able to observe it, has anyone been able to come up with a viable explanation as to how it might occur? Well, no. This is one of the challenges that biology research is still trying to face. How can life form? And there's lots of theories have been proposed, laboratory experiments have been tried, but they're not coming anywhere near close to getting life to form by itself from nonliving molecules. Even in the laboratory, even under ideal conditions, even with intelligent scientists programming the ideal conditions and putting the right chemicals there, they're nowhere near trying to get a living cell to form. So it's simply assumed that life arose by natural processes, is that correct? Well, that's right. You read the textbooks and they'll say that the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago. And they'll say something like life arose soon after. Or even more specific articles will just make this statement. For example, in two nine so the 150 years after Darwin's book was published, there was a major article in Scientific American in the September issue, I think from memory on the origin of life. Now, one of the authors of that article was the professor of genetics at Harvard University. So here we have one of the top universities in the world and a leading professor of genetics at the university. He's writing an article on the origin of life. And what he says is that about 3000, 7 billion put 3.7 billion years ago, life arose, but they don't know how. So this is an assumption that they make, and I think this is important for people to understand. We've got the top researchers in the world and they don't know how life arose they don't know a matter of fact. They raise and talk about the major problems that they've had with experiments. And so this is something that people need to understand that scientists make this statement that life arose and they assume, well, we're here. And because many of them don't believe in God or they don't bring God into the scenario then they say that life must have arisen by chance. It must have happened. But there are other scientists. For example, the scientist that developed the mapped the human genome, Francis Collins, dr. Francis Collins. He, for example, recognized the impossibility and he said God must have created life. And so that's the bottom line. Life and a living cell is powerful evidence for the existence of God for a miracle. It's totally outside science. So the textbooks are just simply assuming that life arose by chance? That's right. They have to. Otherwise they've got God. They don't know how it happened, but they say, well, because we're here, it must have happened. Tell me about NASA's definition of life. Well, this assumption that evolution can explain everything and of course the origin of the first cell is what we call chemical evolution. Now, some people who have been critical of the title of my book say well, evolution doesn't deal with the origin of first life. But there is a whole field there which is called chemical evolution and that is how the molecules first came together to form the first living species. If you believe this. Now, this is so ingrained that this happened that NASA, the US. Space Authority there have defined life as some self replicating chemical system that can undergo evolution. Now, this is very, very subtle. What they're saying is that evolution is such an established fact that we're bringing it into the definition of life. But I think perhaps in a future program we can say that even the evolution, once you have life it can't evolve into more complex systems either. We can deal with that in another time. But I think few people understand the complexity of the requirements for something to be alive even in the most simplest form. It's absolutely mind blowing. And we're going to see that today, aren't we? Yes. We'll talk about how can they be so confident about the time when life arose? Well, all these dates are based on radiometric dating, of course. And radiometric dating in many people's minds now is a given. We talk about so many programs on television, talk about things. Oh, this is so many million years old and this is so many million years old and that happened so many million years ago when they talk about life arising on Earth 3.7 billion years ago or the Australian academic professor Stanley Nimingston at the University of New South Wales. He's another guy that has looked at the origin of life and the chemical origin of life. And again, as he writes there's no known mechanism to explain how the first living organism could form. But again, he puts a date on it that it happened about 3000, 750,000,000 years ago. Now, these scientists are working in this area. They are assuming data from other scientists that are working in the radiometric dating area. Now, these scientists measure the ages of rocks and there are only certain types of rocks that we can measure the ages of. And so these are the volcanic rocks. And so they measure the ratio of isotopes or different elements in these rocks. And so we know from our studies that we can observe today that if we have an unstable radiometric radioactive element, that is an element, that nucleus isn't stable, so it's going to break down and emit particles and change into either another element or another form of that element, which we call an isotope. These things happen over long periods of time. So the half life might be a million years or 10 million years or longer. That means half of it degrades over that period of time. That's right. Yes, exactly. Spot on. So half of the radioactive material will have decayed away and changed in a certain period of time, say 10 million years. And so that's the half life of that particular element, radioactive isotope. Now, what it means is that they analyze the concentrations that we find today of these elements and they, in order to calculate the age, have to assume what the concentration would have been at some period in the past. Because that's how the difference in the concentrations is what they use to calculate the age. So they have to assume something about the concentration of the rock way back millions and millions of years ago in their timescale. And if you don't get that right, then you don't get an actual yes, the important point is that we can't know. We can't know if those assumptions are right. Well, does this whole process work for rocks of a known age? Well, when we get to rocks of known ages, we have major, major problems there because when we get to rocks of known age and again, we can talk about this in more detail another time too, we get millions of years. So even though these rocks might only be hundreds of years old, we can date them and still get ages of millions of years. I mean, there's major problems with dating, and we can talk about this in terms of when we look at other ways that we can estimate age, like from erosion rates or there are other forms of dating where we use, say, carbon 14, which has a much shorter half life of, say, five and a half 1750 years, approximately. So this is a much faster decay rate of decay system. And for the same material, say we can have a piece of rock trapped in a lava. We can measure the age of the lava and we can measure the age sorry, a piece of trapped wood trapped in lava. We can measure the age of the wood by radiometric dating. So this is the same system. We assume that the lava encased the wood. We'll get a very young age for the wood, we'll get a very old age for the lava. Yet we know that the lava would have crystallized about the same time that it buried the wood. There's lots of examples like that. This is a really serious problem because if you've got rocks of a known age that you can't date accurately with these processes, how can you be sure of the rocks of an unknown age? And then if you're relying on those ages to determine the age of the fossil, then the whole science is just in chaos, isn't it? Well, definitely there are major problems because, see, when the fossils were originally dated, they were dated long before we had radiometric dating methods which were invented around about the turn of last century, around about 19 hundreds. But before then, they had estimated the ages on the basis of sedimentation rates, the rate at which these fossils were buried. Because these fossils are buried largely in water deposited sediments. And those erosion rates were based on, again, on guesses and estimations. They weren't based on reliable data at that time. Look, the whole dating scenario that we base the geological column on is based on a very large number of assumptions that we can't verify. And this is an important thing to understand. For many years, I was a truth chemist in a National Association of Testing Authorities accredited laboratory. And my responsibility was to sign off the results because these became legal documents. Now, for us to be registered, we had to use methods that what we call had been validated. They had been validated by using unknowns that had been checked by other laboratories, a number of other laboratories that were then based on known samples. So we had known reference samples that we would check. So we know absolutely what the concentration is in our reference solution. And when we did a reference sample and when we did our analyses, we had this known reference sample layer to check and that reference sample was known absolutely. Now, we don't have any standard reference sample rocks that we can say, right, this rock is 10 million years old. This rock is 100 million years old. This rock is 1000 million years old. Therefore, we can calibrate our system. We don't have those rocks. We don't have standard reference materials to validate the method. And so this is one of the important things. These methods have not really been validated in the true sense. We can't know the ages and we can look at this, as I said, in more detail later, when we look at other methods of estimating ages, like erosion rates, we find that the dates measured by radioactric methods just don't fit. What you're telling me is that this is a pretty imprecise field. You were saying before that most of the fossils were in sedimentary rocks, and yet it wasn't easy to date sedimentary rocks by these radiometric dating methods. No, that's right. Well, we assume that if the sedimentary rock, as say, occurs over the top of some lava flow and then there's another lava flow over the top of it, we can often date the crystal minerals in the lava flows. And so we assume that the sedimentary layer is going to be somewhere in between those two dates. And so, yes, it's all by inference. I think that is reasonable to assume that the age of the sedimentary laying between the two lava flows that we can but you got to get the right date for those. But if we can't date those lava flows accurately, then it's meaningless trying to date those sedimentary rocks. And I think what you've raised is a very important point. We have looked at radiometric. We have looked at lava flows that have historically been observed. They're only 50 years old, 100 years old, 200 years old. People have observed these lava flows coming out of the volcano. Geologists have then subsequently gone and taken samples from those lava flows. We've then dated those in the laboratory, and we get them as millions of years old, but yet we know they're only hundreds of years old. And that's something we can know. Why? Because we physically observed those events happening, and people wrote them down. We had the dates. We had the actual dates. When that happened, we've got really, really serious problems. There's huge differences, as I said, between when we date samples by carbon 14 dating, when we date them by the standard radiometric methods, when we look at erosion rates, when we look at deposition rates. We get all different numbers. I'm hearing you say that we can't really be sure of the age of a fossil in a sedimentary rock. No, not when we go back to really, really ancient times like this. But what happens is this. That for the theory of evolution to occur from this, whatever first primitive life form was in their sequence, for that to evolve into all the complexity, now, they need in their minds a very, very long period of time. So that's why they're very, very happy to jump on these results that give these very old ages. And rather than look at them critically and say, well, hang on. What are the assumptions here? They grab those dates. They hang on to those. Whoa, that's really good. But it's interesting. And again, we can talk about some specific examples of this later. There are some classic examples saying the origin of the evolution of humans, where we say, well, these particular types of humanoids should be about 2 million years old, and they've gone. And they've dated the layers above and below where those fossils were found, and they've said, Whoa, these are too old. They've come out at, say, whatever it is, two and a half, 3 million years old. Oh, no, that can't be right. They have gone back several times and radiometrically dated the rocks until eventually they got a date that fitted in their mind the evolutionary model of around 2 million years. Now, this is documented and I actually talk about in a later chapter in my book, Evolution Impossible. This is document in the literature where they went back and they kept on radiometrically dating the rocks until they got an age that matched in their mind the date that they wanted to fit their evolutionary tree. It just blows your mind to think that this then is science and this is in our journals. And yet they ignore completely the other evidence that when we look at the biochemistry, the whole lot of the evolutionary claims that they're making are absolutely impossible, can't happen. So even if we could date the fossils accurately, that still doesn't tell us how life arose by chance, does it? No, definitely not. It just gives them what it does, is it puts it back into the dim, distant past in their view, and they don't know. Now, some people have recognized this, haven't they? And we've come up with a theory called Panspermia. What's that? Oh, okay. So Panspermia is the hypothesis that life on Earth started by somehow some primitive minute life coming here from outer space on a meteorite or maybe a comet crashed into the Earth and had a lot of ice and water and was carrying some sort of little primitive life form from somewhere else in outer space. So this is really an acknowledgment that the evidence for the origin of first life is pretty weak or nonexistent? Yes. I think the researchers that understand the biochemistry of a simple cell understand that it's so complex and the requirements to form the structures in the simple cell are so complex and so numerous that when they do the probabilistic calculations, they can see it's absolutely impossible and for life to have formed by chance on Earth. So they say, well, maybe it came from our space. But no matter where in the universe you are, if we assume that the same laws of physics and chemistry that we observe here on Earth operate in other parts of the universe, and that's really an assumption that science does make, then you're going to have the same problem of life rising. No matter where you are, you're still going to form the same molecules. You still involve the same elements. We've got 90 or so stable elements that life can form from, and we still have chemical reactions that are bound by the structures of these particular elements. They can only react and bond in certain particular ways. We still only have certain physical elements available magnetism and heat and different forms of radiation available to us and gravity. So no matter where we are, we've got the same physical and chemical factors that can influence the formation of life. And we know from our studies here on Earth that these chemical reactions are limited no matter where it is in the universe, still can't form. So if there's no observational evidence for the naturalistic origin of a living cell, is it possible to say that it cannot happen? For example, just because we haven't observed it doesn't mean that it can't happen, does it? But is there evidence to show that we can't happen? Well, yes, when we look at the requirements of a cell to form. So when you look at most of the textbooks, they say that life arose in the seas, in the primitive seas, on the Earth, in some sort of soup or concentrated pond life form, they generally have it in aqueous environment. But as the geneticists researchers pointed out in their article in Scientific American, the requirements of the cell require very long chain molymers. So in a living system, we have these, what we call biopolymers. These are very, very long chain molecules and these have to have formed from simpler molecules. And the way that they form is by removing water out of the oh bonds to connect those bonds directly and with water then forming. And Le Chatelier's principle tells us that that isn't going to happen in a water situation. Water will tend to break those bonds. You're not going to lose water, have a chemical reaction that gives up water in an environment so rich in water. And this was recognized even in the Scientific American article in Two Nine. The lead author there from well, the, the co author there from Harvard University pointed out we've got a major problem here for life arising in water because these biopolymers aren't going to form then. But not only do you have to have one biopolymer forming, you've got to have millions of these identical biopolymers forming all at once, but they're not all the same composition. So you've got to have 100,000 of this one, another 100,000 of that one, another hundred thousand of that one, all of these giant molecules forming. Now, one of the things where they've tried to do this in the laboratory and again, the Scientific American article pointed this out under ideal conditions in the laboratory, we can produce some of the simple building blocks from even simpler building blocks. But when it comes to biopolymers trying to form biopolymers, that is these longer chain molecules, particularly the proteins that are going to encode information under ideal conditions in the laboratory, using ideal, highly reactive forms of these molecules, we can only actually, even then, only form very small biopolymers, nowhere near the size that are required. And again, that's pointed out in the Scientific American article too, which was a major review article on this problem of the origin of life. Now, of course, they say that it happened and they're trying to solve it, but we're only up to trying to form biopolymers. And we can't even get past that stage under ideal conditions in the laboratory with intelligent scientists directing their chemical reactions. But then we have to even go further than that. We've got to form the genetic code. We just can't form random biopolymers. We've got to form biopolymers that encode for information, that encode for specialized proteins called enzymes. So they have to be sequenced correctly, is that right? That's right. The structure of the elements in these molecules has to be of a specific order. And then we've got to assemble all these things. We've got to not only have these molecules there and available in the quantities of millions of these long biopolymers, but then they've got to assemble, they've got to somehow randomly assemble into a complex cell. And if we looked at the structure of even just a cell membrane, that's easy to draw. You have your little cell and you draw a little line around it and that represents a membrane. But if we drill into the structure of that membrane, that membrane is composed of layer upon layer of highly specialized molecules that are different with little connecting molecules in between them. There's a whole of amazing structure just in the cell membrane itself. And then of course, then we have all the components inside there. So how can this structure form by itself? That's another major problem. And then even if we get that structure, it's dead. We got to make it alive. So you're saying that the first task is actually to get the structure in place, but that is still not then alive. How is it made alive? Well, structure in part isn't the first part. It's about the third or fourth requirement along this chain. And after stage one, it's all virtually impossible to occur by chance. So we're up to our fourth stage. Our last stage is then we've got to make this alive. Now, to make it alive in the simplest cell we know you would require hundreds of chemical reactions to be in a state of disequilibrium or none equilibrium. In other words, just out of balance. So that reaction A is producing ingredient B at just the right concentration to be used to form ingredient C in just the right concentration to produce molecule D and so forth for hundred of reactions. And the moment that we reach equilibrium, the cell dies. Matter of fact, if we have these chain reactions, we've only just got to get one of those parts in equilibrium or out of balance and the whole chain stops. What happens is we produce too much of one and we have a side reaction occurring or we don't produce enough and then the reaction stops. It's to balance 400 or so chemical reactions and to start the CYP. All these have to start up all at once, all out of being just out of balance by just the amount. Write them out all at once. We can see immediately it's absolutely impossible. Are we able to make these reactions occur? You're saying that we can't no, we can't bring a cell to life. Maybe I should rephrase that. So are you saying that it's impossible for these reactions to occur by chance in the sequence that they're required? Absolutely. We can do some calculations on this, but absolutely. So we can take, say, a living cell and we say an E. Coli cell, a very common cell found in the human digestive system. And we can just put a minute drop of toluene on the outside of the cell. What's toluene? Toluene is an organic solvent that is very powerful in dissolving things. Now, that toluene will just make a little hole in the cell membrane. Tiny little hole. Right. Because it's just dissolved some of the material there and it makes a tiny little hole. Now, just the fact that we make that tiny little hole disrupts the energy balance in that cell. So it puts one of the little ATP reactions out of balance. And now that that is out of balance, the whole cell ATP is the energy producing. Yes, that's right. It's one of the processes that is part of the energy generating system in the cell. And that becomes disrupted because we've disrupted the cell membrane in an unnatural way. We've broken a chain of reactions there by doing that. Now all the components of the cell are there, all the ingredients, all the complex chemicals are there. But we can't make that cell alive again. We can't start it up. No way can we, because what we've got to do is put hundreds of biochemical reactions back in a state of disequilibrium. That can't happen. And mind you, this has to happen very quickly too, because those cells will begin to break down very quickly. So not only do we have the problem in nature of the cell forming by chance, but if it doesn't start up and become alive very quickly and develop these self sustaining, self repairing mechanisms, it's going to break down. So that's why the origin of life is a major problem. Look, see earlier on. And there's other things we haven't touched on too, such as the code, the DNA code. The cell has a code to encode for all those different components in the cell and that requires these to make the protein. The proteins are made up of amino acids and amino acids. You have little nitrogen group connected to a little carbonic acid group and a little chain carbon chain molecule hanging off the side. So a fairly simple molecule. And these molecules occur in a sequence and they actually encode information because of their structures. They can have quite different properties and reactions and they sort of behave like letters, in a word. And so they encode information, but they have to be in a particular order for a code to work. So you just can't write down the random letters in an alphabet azhijq. It doesn't mean anything. It's got to be in a particular order, say when to mean what you're saying is then the complexity of the task is stupendous. Yeah, well, yes, that's right. Now, earlier on, scientists thought that maybe there was some property in nature that enabled things to self organize and maybe these codes could form by chance. And there was a professor at Dean Kenyon, he was professor of Biology at San Francisco State University, and he wrote the first textbook attempting to explain how these codes could form. Because you not only have to have the molecule come together, but you've got to have these proteins have to have a meaningful structure. They're not random. Earlier on they thought that they were just simple repetitions and therefore they thought, yes, life is going to be made up of these simple repetitious building blocks. But it's not. The life is extremely complex and involves these very complex codes that make these complex molecules like enzymes that direct other chemical reactions. It's unbelievably complex. So they thought, okay, there must be some property in nature that enables these codes to form. And these are some of theories they're trying to put forward now to propose how life started, like on the surface of a crystal on a clay and all these sort of things. They were trying to look at how can somehow natural processes self order into some meaningful structure. So the atoms of a crystal come together and form a meaningful structure, like a salt crystal in water or sugar crystal or whatever. But we know these obeys certain simple structures according to laws of crystallography and they are very simple. They're nowhere near the complexity of the structures in the huge biopolymer molecules that constitute the codes in living things. So they thought, okay, there must be some organization process there. And Dean Kenyan co authored the book Biochemical Predestination and it was a major textbook then on this. But later on he came to realize, hang on, how can you order the amino acids into a complex code? There's no way, no, there's no biochemical system that can do that. And then of course, since then, and of course as a result of that, he became a creationist. So Dean Kenyan, he went from the world authority on how life could form from non living molecules to become a creationist. And because he recognized it is absolutely impossible for the codes to make these enzymes, to make these structures within the molecule can't form by chance. Absolutely impossible. They are so complex and that's why again, Francis Collins, when they determined the genome, they're the human genome, the same thing, god must have created those codes. There's no way they can erase by chance. So to me, as we understand the biochemistry of life, we are looking at prima facie evidence of a super intelligent creator God who created those codes and somehow started the first cells going because they're outside the physical processes that. We know today. Now, scientists say, okay, we will discover the process, but we know a lot about energy, nuclear reactions, the structure of the atom, chemical reactions. We know a lot now about the biochemistry. There's no way that chemical reactions can form a living cell, no way by themselves. So science really has a major explanatory task to undertake. Yes. And again, scientists that adopt an ideological position that you can't have intelligent design, that everything has to occur by natural processes, and we need to understand that that's an unscientific position, that's a purely philosophical position. That's their belief system. They are sticking to that and they are pushing that particular agenda. Now, it's interesting, if you go on YouTube and Google some of Dean Kenyan's talks, such as Dean Kenyan, the Darwin of our time, and listen to some of his talks, he is challenged and he says now, and the interviewer says, now, what do your colleagues feel about this? And he points out that a number of his colleagues don't want him to talk about these issues in the classroom. And this to me is a major moral problem that we have in science education today. We know from biochemistry that it is absolutely impossible for the first living cell to have arisen by chance, by natural processes. It's a miracle. It is outside science as we know it in terms of physical naturalism. But this impossibility can't be readily discussed in the classroom. And to me, this is just morally wrong and the evidence that points to the fact that it is absolutely impossible. Dean Kenya has pointed out a number of his colleagues and the organization weren't happy for him to talk about that in the classroom. 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 explaining why a cell cannot form by chance or naturalistic processes. When we come back, John will focus on the probability issues and chance formation of cellular life. 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 radio at three. Abnastralia.org Au that is Radio at the number three ABN, Australia. All one word Au. Our postal address is three abnastralia 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. In this part of the program, John will tell us why probability is a massive problem for the chance formation of life. John, we've noted the chemical and biochemical problems for the formation of life by chance, tell us about the probability of proteins or gene sequences arising with specific encoded information by chance processes. Right, well, this is a major, major challenge for chemical evolution. And as I was saying before, Professor Dean Kenyan from professor of Biology at San Francisco State University recognized this, that the structures of these proteins are such that they have to have meaning. So let's take the phrase a stitch in time saves nine. We use particular words. Now, those words see the letters in particular order. So time we've got the T, then the I, then the M, then the E. If we had Mtie, it doesn't mean anything to us, does it? So the order is very important. Now, there's 21 letters in that phrase. If we jumbled up those letters, it doesn't mean anything. So it's only going to mean a stitch in time saves nine, if that is in that particular order. Now, there's 21 letters there and there's ten different types of letters. So if we, say, took a young child, say a one year old, and we gave them 21 copies of each of the ten letters, so it's 210 letters, and asked them to put them in order. Now, the possible combinations that they could have there are, believe it or not, ten to the 20 combinations, that's ten with 20 zeros afterwards. Now, what that means is that if we gave that little one year old as much time as the earth is old, four and a half billion years, and it put a new supposed age of the Earth. Supposed age of the earth, yes. Or that people talk about four and a half billion years and every second they moved a letter into place and formed a new word, there still wouldn't be enough time to cover all the possibilities. Now, of course, one of the things could happen is maybe on the second go, it could arrange the letters in that happening. But we know from probability, if that happened, the next time getting it in second go is not likely to happen. And every person who buys a lottery ticket knows this. Even winners, they win the next time, they don't win. Very rare for a person to win a major lottery more than once. That's the way probability works. Now, when we look at the structures of these components in cell, there's hundreds of complex molecules with codes in just these simplest cells, and these are huge molecules. Now, some of these proteins, if we look at something a little bit more complicated, like, say, an amino acid sequence of, say, with 100 little bases in it, these moles, to order to form in the right form, these amino acids are joined by what we call peptide bonds. So in order for them to work in the enzymes and the codes, they have to have a particular type of bond type called a peptide bond. But there are other types, there are non peptide bonds that can form. Now, if we have these hundred molecules here together and they're going to form a linkage, the chances of all those hundred amino acids being linked by the correct bond is, say, for each one, there's a one in two chance, right? It's sort of like heads or tails for each bond. But once we have 100, between 100 of those molecules to form the long chain molecule, you've got 99 bonds. So 99. So if you've got a one in two chance or a half to the power 99, turns out to be one chance in ten to the power 30, approximately. So that's one chance in a quadrillion quadrillion of just that bonding being correct, let alone in the correct order. And that's only one short protein. Now, we've got another problem here, too. We've got the problem of chirality, or the fact that all these molecules can exist in two forms. They have a particular molecular structure. That means that one, you can arrange the structure with the same chemical composition, but two physical structures, one, say, representing the left hand and one the right hand. So if you look at your right and your left hand and you hold them opposite to one another, you can see that one is sort of like the mirror image. You can imagine if you held your right hand up to the mirror, it would look like your left hand, but they're different. You can't put your right hand in a left handed glove because they are mirror images and molecules are the same way. So both your hands have five fingers and so forth and the same structure, but one's the mirror image of the other. And that's what occurs in molecules. And we have left and right handed form. Now, all the biological molecules that are involved in these structures are all the left handed forms, matter of fact, from memory. For example, snake venom contains these amino acids in the right handed form, and that's why it's venomous, that's why it's poisonous. And so all these molecules have to be in this form. Now, there's a one in two chance that they can form either the right or left handed form. So again, if we have these molecules and we've got 100 of these amino acids here that have got a form and come together by chance, you've got to have only left handed ones come together by chance. So you've again got a one in two, heads in tails type chance. One in two, again to the power 100, is again approximately ten to the power 30. So we're now up to ten to the power 60 chance of just those amino acids forming together to form that hundred chain sequence, just all being joined by a peptide bond and all being joined in the left handed form. Now, there's only ten to the 80 atoms in the universe. We're getting up to pretty close to the chances of finding a particular atom in our galaxy. Matter of fact, I think there's about ten to the 60 atoms in our galaxy, or is it our solar system anyway, something like that. So it's a sort of chance of finding say you've got one atom with a red dot on it. The chances of finding that atom first go is about the same chance of that particular molecule only 100 chains long forming. But that doesn't mean that it has meaning that the amino acids are still just random. We haven't put them in a meaningful order. So that's just like putting those 100 letters together. They don't necessarily read anything. They don't necessarily make a meaningful sentence. They're just random letters together. So once we start putting order in these things, so that that hundred sequence represents a specific code that has a specific meaningful purposeful function, then the probability just blows out astronomically. Matter of fact, we can do some of those calculations for a simple gene. And one of the calculations that I've seen, the probability comes out at about one in ten to the power 90. So that's like the chances of finding an atom with a red dot. If there are a number of universes the size of our universe with the number of atoms in our universe, if there are as many universes as there are atoms in our universes, the chances of finding that specific single atom out of all those universes is about the same chance of one of these genes forming with a meaningful code. And that just blows the mind. And that's just one, that's just one gene. Out of hundreds of genes that are responsible for the simplest cell, the simplest cell that we know of, microplasma genitalium, has about 270 genes in it. 270 of these specific codes are there. And we know that the chances of it, of those codes forming is like now is like one in finding a specific atom with a red dot in it, an atom out of all the atoms in as many universes as there are atoms in the universe. My mind is working hard to digest all this information. Well, this is it. It blows the mind, Barry. It blows the mind. And philosophers have actually looked at this. What is the definition of something being impossible? A number of people have looked at this, and I think a well recognized definition of something being impossible is if the chance is less than one in ten to the power 150. And that's pretty close to if there's ten to the 80 atoms in the universes and you've got ten to the 80 universes, then the chances of finding a single atom in all those universes is one in ten to the power 160. So that's pretty close to the definition of what we would call impossible. We actually say impossible occurs a little bit before then. And so, realistically, we've got that cutoff point when we do the calculations to calculate these codes. And this is in the standard biological literature where scientists have attempted this. Some science at Massachusetts Institute Technology, for example, I think, have done calculations along these lines, a number of looking at statistical biochemistry. We look at these areas. Now, this field has been around too since the 60s, hasn't it, when the mathematicians started to look at the probability issues, yes. But since then well, that's right. They saw evolution was impossible back in the 60s in terms of but the biologists have been slow to accept that. Well, yes, they had rejected it. But now that we understand a whole lot more about genetics, we understand a whole lot more about the role of these codes in generating enzymes. And of course, just recently, with the Encode research that was published the other year, where we see that there are codes within the codes themselves. Now, that's staggering, isn't it, to think that whichever way you read the code that you've got a different code. Well, yes, there are codes within the codes themselves that it's absolutely impossible for the human brain to be able to write these codes, the codes that are encoded. For matter of fact, I was reading not so long ago a statement by Bill Gates, who we know owns Microsoft there and is very familiar with code programming. And he was saying that the code on DNA is just more complex than any human computer code that we have devised. And again, that statement came out before we had the Encode research. And we all know that if you get just a single bit wrong in a code, it can sometimes just destroy the efficacy of the entire program. Well, that's like even with the phrase the stitch in time saves nine, you have more than a few letters, and that's only 21 letters. You have more than a few letters out of position. And most people wouldn't pick the phrase. Maybe one or two out of yes would get enough. But once you have more than a few half a dozen letters out of phrase, people get very confused and it would take a very bright mind to pick up what it was saying. So when you get these codes that involve thousands of letters in their code, the complexity is absolutely enormous. But the other thing there's more. You see, you also have to have a code reading system. And this is where Bodge is saying, look, the probability of those codes arising is just beyond astronomical. It's in the realm of impossible. We have to define what is impossible. We've got to have a cut off point. Maybe you can argue where it is, but I think it's a very reasonable argument as a chance less than one in ten to the 150, because given the time that is claimed for the age of the Earth, these reactions have to take place. There's only a certain speed at which these reactions can take place. It's just and you need enzymes to speed up the reactions too. That's right. And even if one happens you've still got to form the next on and you're back to square one in terms of probability. And while you're wanting the next one to form by chance there's all these environmental factors that are breaking down the first one that is formed by chance. But the problem is that you just don't form one by chance. You've got to form millions. And this is the other thing that I think it's just so hard for our human brain to get about that in the components of the cell, the simplest cell that we have there are actually millions of biopolymers are required in the simplest cell. Millions of biopolymers, probably tens of millions in fact of biopolymers are required in the simplest cell. And many of those biopolymers are nucleic acids that have specific codes. And this is why it is just so hard for the human mind to get round this concept of these. But even if we have the these are just forming the molecules. We've got to still assemble them somehow. We haven't solved that problem. How do they assemble themselves into a cell and then we haven't made it alive? Then you have the problem of actually the cell reproducing itself. Well, that's right. And that's the reproductive system comes in and this is where you have the code reader system. You've got this code but then you've got to have the little code reader in factory to make the components from the code. And as Eugene Conan, one of the world's leading biologists points out at the time how can you have a code reading system form that reads the code just at the right time and be assembled? There a code reading system that works to read the code. I mean, how long did it take? During the Second World War, the British had a whole lot of their top brains working to crack the German codes because the Germans had a code to make a reader system that could read the code. And yet we're expecting we have highly complex codes within the DNA codes within codes and we have a code reader system that can read these codes and then make those assemble proteins according to those meaningful codes. It blows the mind that we can then assemble those proteins, that little system. But what's more, there's more in that the code to make the code reading system is encoded for in the original code. That really blows the mind, doesn't it? That defies naturalistic explanation. Absolutely. And this is why the cell, when we drill down when we understand the biochemistry of a living cell we have powerful evidence right in our face, so to speak, under the microscope of the evidence of God a powerful supernatural creator a supernatural force created life. Life is supernatural. There's no physical explanation for life. Life is supernatural. These scientists that are clinging to their naturalistic materialistic worldview can't explain life. Life is supernatural, and that's exactly what the Bible tells us. That brings up the whole explanation as to why people continue to believe in a naturalistic origin of life in the face of all these difficulties. And maybe we can have a look at that a little later in the series. Yeah, sure. Yes. This is so sad. People claim hang on, if you reject evolution, you're going to knock back scientific research. To me, that is a whole lot of codswallop. It's absolutely ridiculous. If we recognize that a supermind designed the system, we are intelligent. Matter of fact, the Bible says we're made in the image of that supermind, we can begin to apply logic to the systems around us. I believe that scientific research would progress so much faster. Matter of fact, the mechanical view came about in terms of the fact that when we look at Descartes, he believed that God set up the system and that God was a mathematician and therefore the laws and the principles of nature would follow mathematical laws. And that led to Newton embracing that concept to discover the laws of physics. The major discoveries in science were based on and actually developed and were discovered on the basis that we believe that the system that we live in, our universe, was created by an intelligent God who therefore used logic and would use logical laws. And that led to the discoveries. And the same thing. Once we believe that God created life, I think it will really progress our medicine, our biology and everything. John, that's really very difficult stuff to digest quickly. I'm going to have to think about some of those things. But thank you so much for the conversation today. I look forward to the conversation next time. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you've been listening to science conversations. My guest today has been Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of life on Earth. Today in our conversation, Dr. Ashton has explained why a cell cannot form by chance. Next time I'll be talking with Dr. Ashton about his claim that new types of organisms cannot evolve by random mutations. Remember to join me next time on Science Conversations. Until then, bye for now and God bless.