Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
I've been interested in history for some time, and particularly the role of Christianity in history and the faith of important historical figures. And one thing that I appear to be noticing at the moment is that when we sort of go onto the computer, onto the Internet, and you google the name of historical figures and articles come up often on Wikipedia and so forth, it's a commonplace to find information, find a lot of the aspects of a person, of famous people's lives that were Christians is omitted or diluted down, or it might just, for example, say that they were of a particular religion. So, for example, I was doing some reading recently on Frederick Woolworths, and I think it was Frederick, and there were two brothers that founded the large shopping chain in the United States.
At one stage, the Woolworths building over there was the tallest building in the United States, and they were very strong Methodists. And I know they paid tithe and their faith in God and tithe paying, in some of the literature that I'd read sort of 50 years ago, was one of the aspects that they attributed to their success in business, was that God blessed them. Whereas if you look up and read about them now, there's just a brief mention that they were Methodists.
And it's interesting that this sort of information is being lost. Another example would be the example of Clint Walker, the film star that used to star in Cheyenne. Again, look up about him.
It mentions very little about his christian faith. And yet later in life, he suffered a very severe ski accident where the ski sock went right through his chest and right through his heart. And he was a very strong man, of course, very big man, was able to break the ski stock off and was with friends who carried him to where they could get an ambulance and then get him to hospital.
And he prayed to God that if God saved him out of that, he would witness for the rest of his life and give talks about the miracle of God saving him. And it's interesting, less than a week later, he walked out of hospital, and even though the stock had gone right through his heart, and yet, when you read up the modern accounts, that sort of information is missing. The other thing that's of a concern as a growing concern, of course, everybody is looking towards utilising artificial intelligence, and there's a number of different programmes that are now freely offered on the different computer support systems now that's being in use.
But one of the interesting things that is evolving from this is that the artificial intelligence is using consensus information and the big worrying thing is that we were arriving at truth on the basis of the most popular information. So whatever the largest number of people believe will be picked up by artificial intelligence and then sort of reported. And I think I can see, I believe what will happen is there's a gradual move away in many areas where whatever the popular belief is, even though it might just be a belief and not actually based on evidence and truth, and what is actually happening, that these will actually become accepted as truth, just because that's what most people believe.
And one of the real areas of this is the difference between faith and science. And what we have is a huge amount of evidence that science supports faith. Science is supporting the account of the Bible, science is supporting the overall evidence that we are here as a result of the will of a supernatural creator God, a supreme superintelligence power that was able to create this universe and create life as we know it.
And of course, one of the challenges is if we have an amazing being who is outside our spacetime system. In other words, he's not material. This being is outside this material existence that we know as the universe, because he's the creator of this.
He's outside time because he created time. The whole concept of time, matter, energy, the different force fields that we have, electric, magnetic and so forth, the nuclear force fields. All these concepts he created, but he also created life.
The amazing biochemistry that we are now discovering within living systems, whether they be algae, bacteria, plants, fish, mammals, insects, vertebrates, also vertebrates, all sorts of all the different types of life we find amazing biochemistry, amazing biochemistry that is extremely complex. It's extremely complex in terms of not only the chemical reactions that are taking place that involve very complex molecules, but the complex reactions that synthesise and produce these complex molecules that enable life to function. And it's absolutely amazing.
And to me, it seems overwhelming that that amazing being creator could communicate with us. I mean, if he created us, created particularly humans with a mind. And we can see, the human mind can understand logic, mathematics, and do synthesise the information around it and put together theories.
And so we have the development of scientific theories. Animals and these sort of things can't do that. They're programmed largely in their responses that they do, whether it's looking for food, mating, self preservation, all these things, they're sort of pre programmed in.
And we see this right from the insect world on, even down, probably in the microbial level to an extent there. So it's programmed information, whereas we, as humans, have definitely a concept of will, and we can process information and we can make much more complex choices about things. And so it seems very logical that that being could communicate with us.
And that's what the Bible says. The Bible says that we were made in God's image, that God wanted to have a relationship with us, this amazing supreme being. And if that was the case, then as I've been saying, he could reveal himself to us.
I think, again, when we look at history, when we look at the structure of the Bible, there's overwhelming evidence that the Bible was inspired by this being, that this being spoke to people either physically, audibly, through their minds, and they preserved this experience. They wrote it down and over the years it was collected. And we know that in the Bible there's, I think from memory, there's 44 different authors in the Bible that contributed to this.
And that's all in harmony. It fits together. And also, of course, when we look at it from history, the parts of the Bible that we can definitely cheque independently by history with other external historical records, they all line up.
But the Bible, of course, goes back to the creation of the world and goes back to evolution. Well, the claim of evolution is the scientific theory to try and explain us, but we have so much evidence now that evolution, some sort of random, blind mechanical process, can't explain the complexity of living things. And one of the things that evolution is really struggling to explain is the origin of language.
It's a huge problem for evolution theory. Matter of fact, I was looking at this fairly recently and I think I noted there were over a dozen and maybe it was quite a bit more. But at least a dozen different theories were listed on Wikipedia as trying to explain the origin of language in evolutionary terms.
But it's very clear that God gave us language. Now, one of the other fascinating things is the story in genesis of the Tower of Babel and how God then confused the language. Everyone always spoke one language, but God confused the languages again.
And part of this was, you can see, was to counter some sort of worldwide system and dictatorship by dividing it all up. And of course, there's a massive move today against this in terms of globalisation. But the human voice, again, is powerful evidence of creation.
The systems are so complex, it's impossible to have evolved. So if we just look at the human voice consists of sound made that we make, and it includes our talking, singing, laughing, crying, and of course, screaming and shouting and humming and yelling. And so we produce all these different types of sounds.
And of course we could produce other sounds like clicks and whistles, but also we can change the level of sound. Now, of course, the mechanism for generating human voice is essentially the result of three different parts, and they have to work together. We got the lungs, which sort of pump and produce the airflow and air pressure to actually vibrate our vocal cords.
And then there's the vocal folds within the larynx or the voice box, and these vocal folds, what we call the vocal cords, commonly then vibrate and use the airflow from the lungs to create these audible pulses. And so the muscles of the larynx have to adjust the length and tension of those vocal folds and that fine tunes the pitch and the tone. Now, the third main part, of course, is what we call the articulators, and these are the other parts of the vocal tract that are actually above the larynx or the voice box.
So that's the tongue, the palate, the cheek, the lips, et cetera. And what these do is they articulate and philtre the sound emanating from the voice box, and they can also interact with the airflow and affect the airflow, of course, with the shape of our mouth and lips and so forth. And so we can strengthen and weaken the sound.
Now, it's amazing, as I'm doing this, as I'm talking now, I'm actually doing this. So all these muscles are moving and the huge number of muscles here that are moving, but I'm producing this speech, but I'm not thinking about moving any particular muscle, I'm just talking. So we do it subconsciously.
But what we don't realise, of course, is that there's all these muscles that control all these different things, all these different components in the lungs, in the vocal cords and the articulators. And this produces this amazing, complex speech that we have. And of course, when we become deaf and lose the ability to hear speech, it's really isolating.
And also people who are born with a speech impediment or the inability to speak properly, the people who are dumb, it's very difficult. It's very frustrating for them to communicate. One of our close friends had a daughter who was born dumb, and it was quite a struggle for her, and deaf as well, to learn to speak.
Or maybe she was just born deaf and had to learn to speak, was very, very tricky. But it's amazing what the human voice can do. So we can produce a highly intricate array of sound and our voice can be modulated, we can change it to suggest different emotions, such as anger and spice, fear or sadness and happiness.
And also, though, as we're listening to someone, we can often get a bit of an idea of how old they are, whether they're male or female and so forth. So we can gauge a little bit of information, often about the person just from their speech. And of course, people who are gifted with singing can actually create music.
And of course, adult men and women have actually different size vocal cords and they have different size voice boxes. And so as a result of this, the male voice are usually lower pitched and have much larger vocal folds. It's interesting that these vocal cords, where they're attached to the back, right at the back of the larynx, nearest the spinal cord, and to the front, they're attached the side under chin.
They actually have now no outer edge as they bend into the side of the breathing tube. And it's interesting, they have. Again, when we start drilling down into the intricacies of these things, we find that they've got a three layer construction, they've got a ligament, and then they've got the particular muscle that can shorten or bulge the folds.
And they also then have on the sides what they call a vestibular fold or a force vocal cord, which has a small sack between its two folds. And the differences in these vocal fold sizes means that men and women generally have differently pitched voices. And also there are other genetic factors that cause variances between within men and women's own singing voices.
For example. So, for example, in men you've got your bass, bass, baritone, baritone, your barretta, tenor and counter tenor. And of course, women, you've got contralto, alto, meso, soprano and soprano.
So again, we've got this huge range of variation. And of course, these variations result in the different accents. But it's amazing too, as I watch my grandchildren growing up, you can see that children, it's amazing how quickly they can suddenly learn to speak.
They get to an age around twelve months, and then suddenly they're speaking. One of the fascinating things that I think about the human voice is the ability to sing harmoniously and produce musical sound. And we know in the world there have been some amazing singers that can produce amazing array of sounds and so beautifully and consistently.
And one of the things that researchers discovered is that the analysis of recorded speech samples have found peaks in acoustic energy that essentially mirror the distances between the notes that we use and the twelve tone musical scale that has been adapted in western music. And so it's quite fascinating. Then we know there's a lot of mathematics associated with the music scale.
It's quite fascinating that our speech is, and the music scale actually is a mathematical scale that mirrors this mathematical separated pinks that our human voice can produce. Even if we just look at the human larynx or voice box, there's just so much to its construction and the shape of it and all these different folds and the vocal cords, the different muscles that are playing a role in adjusting these folds and the shape that they produce. And how, again, our brain, once we've learned to speak, can automatically change the shape of all these muscles that are in our face and associate these with to produce the sound that we want.
When we think about how we speak, it's largely controlled by our muscles, the muscles in the larynx. And of course, they're divided into intrinsic and extrinsic muscles. And the intrinsic muscles are divided into respiratory and phonatory muscles.
That is, the muscles that are associated with speech, the latter ones. So the respiratory muscles move the vocal cords apart and serve breathing, while the fanatic muscles move the vocal cords together and serve in the production of voice. And it's interesting, the fanaticary muscles are divided into abductors and tenses.
And so we've got quite a number of muscles. So you've got the crichothyroid muscles, which lengthen and tense on the vocal cords. You've got the posterior crichocarinoid muscles that abduct and externally rotate the cartilages and again, abduct the vocal cords.
Then you've got the lateral muscles there, the transverse muscles. Then you've got the oblique attenoid muscles. So there's a whole range of muscles there that all have to be, again, work in harmony for us to produce the sound.
So it's amazing. And then, of course, we've got the nerve supply that supplies the nerve to these muscles. There's all these different nerves.
We've got, again, the vagus nerve, of course, controls swallowing. Then we've got the laryngeal nerves and the cricothyroid muscle. Which part of that controls the cricothyroid muscle? So again, when we look at these muscles and the role they play, for example, if we get injury to one of the laryngeal nerves, it produces hoarseness in our voice and it can lead to longer term damage to our voice as well.
So again, we've got. These are amazing effects that all have to be coordinate to produce the sound. So again, as the manipulation of the larynx is used to generate a source of sound with a particular fundamental frequency of pitch, this source of sound is altered as it travels through the vocal tract.
And as I mentioned earlier, we have the position of the tongue, lips and mouth and pharynx all sort of play a role in generating all different types of sound. And one of the things that impresses me is that all this whole system is encoded for in the genetic code of our DNA, all the codes to produce all those different muscles to produce the actual structures of the cavity of our larynx, our lungs, the different passages and so forth, the muscles that can control our lips and tongue and so forth. There's all those nerves that control those muscles.
There's all those connections in the brain that's all programmed in our code. It all works together and we're able to produce speech. Now, evolutionists wanted us to believe that this whole process just arose by blind, random chance chemical mutations, as there were muturations occurring in the DNA chain being damaged or some sort of chemical mutation.
And we see it's absolutely impossible to produce this amazing coordinated arrangement of different muscles and cavity shapes that enable us to produce speech as well as the nerves, the blood supply to the muscles. All these components are there encoded for in the DNA in a language that just involves, as I mentioned many times, just four basic chemical bases that we abbreviate, act and G. And so to me, this is just powerful evidence for this amazing supernatural creator who designed us and designed us to communicate not only with each other, but also with him through prayer.
We can speak, we can think a prayer, but we can also speak a prayer. When God came as Jesus Christ, people were able to speak to him, and he spoke to people too. And of course, we have the miracle of the resurrection that was recorded in history.
And we know that the life of Christ changed the world. It changed our calendar, it changed our dating system. And of course, many people want to eliminate that and change that, but it doesn't change the historical fact that this person miraculously came.
God came as a person to live amongst us, to show us, and was miraculously resurrected and then appeared to many after that, and appeared as he was taken to heaven. And of course, he tells us that in the same way, after death, there will be an end to this world. And we too, that choose to believe in him, also will be taken to be with him and live with him forever.
This is a wonderful message of hope that the Bible gives us. And we have this amazing evidence from science that supports the existence of this supernatural being and the fact that he can preserve miraculously through the influencing the minds of men. The history of this world that's been recorded in the Bible, you've been listening to faith and science.
And remember, if you want to relisten to this programme or earlier programmes, just Google 3ABN Australia.org.au and click on the radio and listen button. I'm Dr.
John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
