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This afternoon, I wish to talk about, uh, two subjects. We are on the theme of the, um, uh... Well, I will talk about it if you'll give me just five minutes to get the right set of notes. Hmm, wrong box. You'll see how confused some can some people get. Mm-hmm. Never mind. I, as I say, I would like to deal with two major topics.
We are thinking of what we may learn from creation around us, about creation in the broader sense, not merely the story of the creation that we have in Genesis one, but creation in sense of the whole created universe, and us included, and what we may observe from creation with the help of science and so forth of the modern kind, and how there is a galore of evidence to confirm our faith in what Holy Scripture says. This morning we talked about cosmology. This afternoon, in the first, uh, part of this particular session, I would like to talk about, uh, the evidence that we have from biology and biochemistry.
And then when we have dealt with that and has had some questions on these matters, to turn from what we can learn from the language faculty with which the Creator has endowed us. For the language faculty is likewise a part of creation and points in the direction that we owe it to our loving and rational and intelligent creator himself. But to come forthwith to the question of what can we learn from biology and biochemistry? And the first thing we can perceive with the help of the modern science is the overwhelming odds against life having originated by chance.
Let's have the first, um, uh, uh, now I, oh, there we are, the first slide, and I quote you here from the most recent, uh, uh, of the issues of the Scientific American, dropped on my doorstep just the other day. And here is the new editor, uh, John Rennie, and in his editorial he comes up, amongst other things, with these remarks. No one yet knows precisely how evolution acted during the origin of life.
That much is honest, anyway. But even if the first cells fell out of the blue sky, that would not erase the action of evolution since then. Now you'll notice the distinction that he's making. I'm not sure his predecessor, like, uh, in the art, John Maddox and people would have admitted the same thing. They would claim that, that, uh, life itself originated, uh, by chance through some process of evolution. But evolution, strictly so called, of course, can only begin to happen when you have, uh, a form of life already started, you see.
Evolution normally, uh, described cannot, uh, begin to explain how the whole universe started anyway. And that is what he is admitting, do you see? No one yet knows precisely how evolution acted during the origin of life. The old experiments that were made, uh, that seemed to suppose that life could, uh, spontaneously arise out of inorganic matter by, uh, strokes of lightning or something happening on primitive bits of chemicals have not proved, uh, true, and modern science has, to a large extent, abandoned the whole notion and comes round to the question that we don't really know how life started.
Let me point out in that connection that in some literatures, you'll read it, the more modern, uh, idea is that, yes, uh, matter can appear out of nothing, can appear out of a vacuum. Eh, uh, sorry for troubling you with this so soon after lunch, but the effort to think it through might help to digest the lunch. Eh, we'll see, uh, they say that there was initially a vacuum, a quantum vacuum, and that particles, if you get a quantum vacuum in the laboratory, you will find that, uh, particles of matter appear and disappear with lightning speed out of nothing, out of the vacuum.
But of course, that is horribly misleading, at least to lay people who suppose that a vacuum means a vacuum, means nothing. Whereas in this theory, of course, a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is a state of energy, when the energy is completely balanced, negative and positive, and therefore nothing is happening. It is a quantum vacuum, but a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It's a field of energy. And in that situation, yes, you can get, uh, quarks of various kinds and nature coming suddenly into existence and disappearing, you'll see. But that's a very confusing notion. It doesn't mean what the Christian would mean by creation ex nihilo, creation out of literally nothing.
It presupposes an energy field. Anyway, to get back to this, he wants to say that evidence from every subdivision of biology and every other scientific discipline supports evolution. Evolution unifies all the diverse observations of biology as no other idea can. That is why I call it a fact. Well, this being a free world, anybody is, uh, is free to say what they think, of course, but normally fact means something that is actually established. He calls it a fact, not a theory.
And of that we should be aware, for so many of our books in schools and elsewhere refer to evolution as a fact. Well, it is not a fact. Hasn't been proved and demonstrated in the normal scientific method. It rests on presupposition and conjecture. It cannot be demonstrated as a fact. That is an important distinction to get hold of. But anyway, what we can see through modern science is the overwhelming odds against life having originated by chance. Uh, here is the, uh, famous astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
Uh, Wickramasinghe was a colleague in the mathematics department of Cardiff, a colleague of our friend John Lennox for some years. You'll see. Neither of these are believers in God of any serious meaning. Fred Hoyle, the famous astronomer, but listen to what he says. A simple calculation shows that the chance of obtaining the necessary total of two thousand enzymes by randomly assembling amino acid chains, the chance of doing that, you've got to have these, uh, uh, amino acid chains, you see, and to get them, you've got to, uh, uh, uh, uh, and by getting these, by assembling these, you come to get the two thousand necessary enzymes.
Right? The random chance is not a million to one against, or a billion to one, or even a trillion to one against, but P to one against, with P minimally an enormous super astronomical number, equivalent to ten to the power of forty thousand. One followed by forty thousand zeros. Here is a man who does not believe in God, but has come mathematically to the conclusion, he has a whole book on the mathematics of evolution, come to the conclusion that the chance of getting li- uh, the possibility of getting life by chance is, you see, uh, this enormous astronomical number to one against.
The odds we have thus computed are only for the enzymes. And of course, correct arrangements within many other important macromolecules of life besides empire- uh, enzymes must also be considered. Uh, the molecules histone four and cytochrome C are two such examples, each with exceedingly small probability of being obtained by chance. If all these other relevant molecules for life are also taken account of in our calculation. The situation for conventional biology becomes doubly worse.
The odds of one in ten to the power of 40,000 are horrendous enough, but that would have to be increased to a major degree. Such a number exceeds the total number of fundamental particles observed through the universe by very, very many orders of magnitude. So great are the odds against life being produced in a purely mechanistic way, that the difficulties for an earthbound mechanistic biology are, in our view, intrinsically insuperable.
You may remember in our first session we lit- listened to Sir Roger Penrose talking about the accuracy required to establish the law of, second law of thermodynamics. There wouldn't be enough particles in the universe to write the number down of enormous odds against it being by chance. Now here is Fred Hoyle talking about the origin of life. There wouldn't be enough particles in the universe to write the number down, the odds against it happening by chance. The conclusions we have reached in our book are derived from known experimentally and observationally tested properties of the universe, including not least among them the property that living cells can replicate.
The rival theory of chemical evolution, of primitive life, and of the evolution of life to progressive higher levels entirely through random processes is an uneasy combination of dogma and wishful thinking. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a very strange situation when, even since this was written some men- some decades ago, in many parts of the world, schools and school textbooks have been told- told the kids that life could have started by chance from inorganic matter.
So here is Sir Fred Hoyle on it, and as you see, he says it's impossible on conventional evolutionary theories to account for the origin of life, uh, having started here on Earth. His particular solution is, or was, that life therefore came in from outer space somewhere, brought in by a comet or two or something. But as anybody could see, that is but to push the problem further back and back, for if it came from outer space, how did it start out there anyway? Yes. So, uh, uh, there we have it, and uh, we may call that, if you like, the statist- statistics and the origin of life.
It is statistically impossible, virtually impossible to think that life started by chance. Now let's go to the next concept of irreducible complexity. This has been made famous by, uh, Darwin's, uh, uh, by Behe's, Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box, and I suspect that many of you have read it, so that I have no need to dwell too long upon the, uh, the thing. But Michael Behe has called attention to what he's called irreducible complexity. The simple analogy that he uses to explain it to the likes of me, who need a good deal of explain- explaining, i- is the mouse trap, you'll see.
You have a mouse trap, and it's a piece of wood, plain piece of wood, or any other material you like, and there's a bit of, uh, wire, metal or something, it comes over as a hammer to smite the, uh, uh, careless mouse, you see. And of course, that has to be on a spring so that it will come over, uh, with force enough to cut the mice amidships. And, uh, then it has to be kept open, so it has a thing to keep it open. What time the mouse, moved by greed of cheese, uh, approaches the bait, you see. And then it is so arranged that as the mouse starts to nibble the cheese, it upsets the equilibrium, and a hammer come down and smites it, you see.
Now, in that simple thing, Michael Behe says you have an instance of irreducible complexity. You see, you can't start off with a plain bit of wood some hundred million years ago and catch one or two mice. And suddenly, ten million years later, a bit of iron comes from nowhere, falls out of Jupiter or something, and comes down and rests on the bit of wood, and you catch a few more mice. And then the spring out of your grandfather clock suddenly bursts, and by accident, uh, uh, it too arrives on this bit of wood where there's a bit of iron, and somehow or other accidentally they get together, and now they make a a a hammer on a spring, you see.
That's no good. The thing has all got to be there to start with, else it doesn't work at all. It is thus what we call irreducible complexity. And Behe and others have called attention to examples of this in nature. Here is our dear friend the giraffe, and the evolutionary explanation of giraffes and their extraordinary length of neck is that, uh, the giraffe saw the leaves up aloft, which are on the top of the trees, and decided they would be good to eat, and stretched their necks to reach them, and gradually stretched them and stretched them and stretched them and stretched them, and the neck eventually got high enough.
But then evolutionary theorists say among themselves, that won't do, because if evolution is true, there is no purpose behind it. Purpose-driven evolution is untrue to the theory of evolution. It can't be that the giraffes saw these green leaves at the top of a tree and said, what a pity my neck isn't long enough. See if I can do some exercises and go to my chiropodist and stretch my neck so I can reach the leaves. No, that would be purpose, wouldn't it? And the theory of evolution rules out purpose by definition, though a lot of evolutionists, when they forget themselves, talk as if there were purpose behind it.
We can tell, says some, uh, lecturer on BBC four, we can tell how this could come about because this was necessary for... But that supposes purpose. That's false to the theory of evolution. It must be that Bob Giraffe, having had an ordinary neck, uh, do you see, like some people got a lot of neck, and uh, do you see, a- a- a- and those that managed accidentally to get a longer neck survived the more easily because the longer their neck came to be, the more leaves they could gather, do you see? There's no purpose in it. It is just that those that happened to, by accident, to get longer necks survived, and therefore longer necks began to be bred through the progeny of such giraffes.
But that, of course, is a simplistic, uh, uh, idea, isn't it? Absolutely simplistic. Because if the giraffes started with small necks and they gradually grew larger so that, and then they could reach the leaves at the top of the tree, what happened when the giraffe having to drink, bent his long neck downward to the water to start drinking? If you can't imagine what would happen, you try to do the same. And, uh, uh, put your forelegs first and drop your neck down into some basin of water and keep it down for as long as you need to ingest a pint of water. We're trouble with the blood pressure, ladies and gentlemen.
Could you imagine the troubles the poor old giraffe, if by accident it had produced a long neck, would have had with his blood pressure when he put it down like that? Upon examination, you can't read it from where you sit, but all these conditions, necessary mechanisms, are built into the dear old giraffe's neck and to its brain and to its arteries, so that it can lo- uh, bend its neck down and drink without destroying itself and suffering from a stroke and being in bed for the rest of its life, you'll see. Some arteries, it says here, approaching the head, branch into the rete mirabile, which is a device over here.
Others bypass the brain. The whole thing is engineered with a very complex engineering system, so it can have a long neck and bend the neck down to drink water and not suffer serious physiological damage. It's an example of complexity. If this other weren't here, it just had a long neck that could reach the trees, when it bent down to drink the water, it ceased to be. Yes. And, uh, uh, another example of, uh, that same kind of thing is, of course, what Behe calls attention to in his book.
This slide comes from a different book. Uh, that is the cascade mechanisms in the human body. This is an example of what happens if you, say, cut your finger on a surface wound, and the marvelous cascade of chemical reactions that then takes place automatically. You'll say if you cut your finger and it started bleeding, and there were no mechanism to stop it bleeding, you'll bleed to death, of course. So when you cut your finger, there is a set of chemicals that will come and make the blood clot in the old hole that you've made, to stop the blood going on forever and bleeding you to death.
It's a marvelous mechanism that causes the old blood to to to clot when it gets to the hole. Ah, but you say there's a difficulty there, isn't there? Because if the blood was always in the condition where it could clot, well, you'd be dead before you were alive. If you see what I mean. Aha. Because the clot would be in your brain or in your lungs or somewhere, and you'll be dead anyway. You can't have the blood in the condition that already is clotting. So it's got to be in the condition where it isn't clotting. But as soon as the old finger is cut, something's got to happen to it, so it starts clot- uh, uh, uh, clotting.
Oh, but that's not enough, is it? Because if on the way round from your heart down your arm, it started clopping, uh, clotting when it was in the higher part of the arm, you'd be dead again. Have the arm amputated or something. It's got to clot. It mustn't clot till it gets at the hole. And then when it gets at the hole, it blocks the old blood from going, uh, away anymore, and then a whole mechanism takes up of bringing the necessary chemicals there to fight any infection. And when they've done their job, here come the chemicals that start to heal the wound with genuine flesh, you see. And when that's all happened, the old scab falls off the top, but then the blood has got to go back to what it was before.
That is a mechanism so complicated that if the biochemists, uh, put it in chart form to show what happens to the time the wound is made, to the time the wound has healed here and gone back, there are all these intricate chemical reactions and reactions, this bit of cell doing this and another bit coming along and cutting it in half and shunting a piece here and taking a piece away there and adding this substance, and eventually all coming together. Over uh twenty reactions and processes that all have to happen, and if they were not there and happening prob- pro- properly, if they, any one of them went wrong in a healthy body, that body could be in very serious trouble.
To suppose that cascade of highly organized reactions, timed and so forth and so on, would be happening by chance is absolute and sheer unadulterated. It all had to be there, else the first human being that suffered a serious wound would have bled to death, and that would be the end of that. So there is this question then, first of all, of statistical improbability mounting to impossibility, that life should have started by chance. Here is the next bit of, uh, of, uh, uh, irreducible complexity.
Now let's go on to information theory, as it is called nowadays. And here is a model of the DNA in the cells, a complicated model of what goes on in the cells. When old Darwin was theorizing about evolution and the small permutations that he thought could take place and thus build up over millions of years. Darwin knew virtually nothing about what is inside the cell. It has not been science that has, uh, uh, uh, it's not been simply faith, arbitrary faith, that has cast doubt on evolution. It has been the progress of science that has made evolution look silly.
Because now we know, thanks to the scientists, what goes on in the cell, or we know a little bit. There is a vast amount yet to be discovered. But inside the cell, there is what could be likened to a vast factory with all its subdivisions and a, a, and an impossibly complicated mechanical system inside the cell that, uh, uh, carries the necessary information for the birth and development of a human being, plant, animal, or what have you. So now we come to what is called information theory.
And this is Wilder Smith talking about it in nineteen eighty one. This is already twenty years old science. By means of a double helix system of four letters, entire books filled with information could be written by merely altering the sequences, just as we write books by varying the sequences of the letters of our alphabet. In this manner, the double helix system, that that picture I showed you of that model of the, uh, the the uh DNA in the cell. In this manner, the double helix system within a human sperm and a human egg contains the total coded building instructions for synthesizing the complete human being.
On paper, using our alphabet system, this human genetic information on one human zygote, that's the union of sperm and egg, would fill over one thousand volumes, each of five hundred pages. A total of five hundred thousand printed pages of the necessary information to start from the zygote and eventually form a child or a human being. The egg and s- and the cell in general is a masterpiece of miniaturized information story and retrieval.
One such zygote, one sperm, one egg, joined together, contains the entire information and instructions required to build an entire human being, and also that required to synthesize all his and her offspring. Now, that is extraordinary, isn't it? What do we mean, therefore, by this information, the term information, when we talk about information theory? We must try not only to keep awake, but to, uh, uh, uh, understand that when the engineers use the term information, they're using it in a specialized sense. We talk about information when we say something to somebody else, and we hope that somebody else gets the idea and absorbs it.
That's the impartation of information. But when the scientists talk about, the engineers in particular, talk about in- uh, information, they're thinking in engineering terms. Okay? If you want to make a key to open the lock on your front door, and the engineer sits down and decides how you'll have to shape that key. It'll have to be a dent here and a bit sticking out there and another bit here and different sizes and so forth, in a different order on the key. And in engineering terms, you call that the information that has to be put on the key to do the job. Do you see? Information. And the DNA in the human cell is carrying information like that, and you consider how spectacular it is.
The information carried on the DNA controls the growth of the embryo into the fetus, controls the material, the shaping of the bits and pieces, the skull and the arms and the legs and the nervous system. Controls the timing of each, no good making eyes if you haven't got a skull to put them in. Controls the whole, uh, uh, fetus until the time of birth, will control that too. Will control its growth afterwards, all through life. And lo and behold, if that, uh, child, uh, marries and they have a child, that information is carried on to the next lot. That is interesting, isn't it?
Enough information, as you say, to fill five hundred thousand printed pages if you spelt it all out in our language. And the point it raises is, where does the information come from? The analogy I use, uh, for this kind of thing, it goes back to my youth, you see, and I'm getting old, and you know how old people are. But you see, as I've said before, i- in the early days of washing machines, I can't see any woman old enough to know about it here, but in the early days of washing machines, do you see, they were big tubs, and there was a thing that went round in the middle, and you put the water in and the snowflakes, or whatever they were, and then there was a slit on the side at the top of the machine, and you had a bit of plastic, a square bit of plastic, you see, and when you looked at this plastic, it got notches in the sides, a series of notch one side, a series of notches at the other side, and those series were different notches at different spaces, you see.
And now, if you wanted the linens, the program, I mean in the, in the machine for the linens, you turn the old bit of square around this way and you put it in like that, you see. And lo and behold, that, so to speak, told the machine what to do. Do linens for Mrs. Smith, and do it well because she'll want it well. Uh, do linens, you see. If at the end of that you, you wanted not the linens, you wanted the woolens and the coloreds, you took that square bit of stuff out, turned it round, put it upside down, had another series of notches, and you put that in the machine. And lo and behold, that told the machine to do woolens and coloreds. Now, if you had taken that bit of plastic and showed it to me and said, what do you think that is, goody?
I would have said in my wisdom, that's a piece of plastic. And you'd have said, what else is it? I said, there's nothing else there, there's nothing but plastic. I would have been right, wouldn't I? Nothing but plastic. And I would be horribly wrong. Because there was nothing but plastic. It was carrying information for the machine and its control. That's what those notches were. It wasn't just plastic. It was carrying the ideas of the engineer for the whole system of washing machine, plus the controlling mechanism, started life in the mind of the engineer, as concepts.
And then when he saw what was needed to, for the machine to be able to carry out these programs, he put, as the engineers say, the information on the plastic. Would be important to distinguish between the information and the plastic, wouldn't it? It isn't just plastic. So was it that a human being, or any other animal or vegetable for that matter, was given by the great engineer, in whom all things were created. The whole concept and the information had its origin in the mind of our blessed Lord. In him were all things created.
That is why scripture calls our Lord, he is, he himself is the beginning. Creation didn't begin when the first brick was laid for the foundation. Creation began in the mind of the creator as a thought that's non-material, that is spiritual. Information is non-material. The thought of the creator that was then implanted on matter. And you think of it, the chemistry carrying the information through the zygote, that the miracle takes place.
I want, in the short period left to us of this session, to point to another area of creation and ask what information it supplies us with. That is the, uh, uh, question of the origin of human language. This is an exceedingly important area for the simple reason that, from one point of view, language is the highest thing in human development. Even in evolution, if you take his point of view and think that evolution, uh, language evolved, then language is the highest attainment of a hu- of the human species.
You will see, therefore, to account for it is obviously an exceedingly important thing. Science itself would not be possible without language. How do we humans get language? Now, the old-fashioned evolutionary view was that we arrived at language by the evolution of animal cries. Huh? A little lamb was eating its grass, uh, doing nobody any harm, moved around the side of a rock and saw a lion and went, bah!
You will see, out of sheer fright. Well, when that had happened a few thousand times, and lambs had gone bah on sight of a lion, all the other lambs learned to recognize that bah meant there's a lion coming. You see. And so it was thought, perhaps, that human language evolved from that rather humble beginning of animal cries. There are very few, perhaps, serious linguists that would like to maintain that very simplistic view. But don't take my word for it for the moment. Let's read the, the words of a very famous evolutionist, champion of evolution.
This is Professor Gaylord Simpson. Uh, do you see, it's a bit old now, but it's, we'll come to the more moderns in a moment, Nineteen sixty six: Human language is absolutely distinct from any system of communication in other animals. And he an evolutionist. That is made most clear by comparison with other animal utterances, which most nearly resemble human speech and are most often called speech. Non-human vocables are, in effect, interjections. The difference between animal interjection and human language is the difference between saying, ouch, and saying, cool, fire is hot.
You see the difference? This is but an interjection. Animals are a reaction to feeling heat. This thing is a very sophisticated, logical, grammatical statement with noun, verb, and complement. Darwin's study and many later studies sought to trace the evolutionary origin of language from the pre-human source. They have not been successful. This is an evolutionist talking, one of the leaders, world leaders in evolutionary theory. And as a recent expert in the field has said, the more that is known about it, that is communication in monkeys and apes, the less these systems seem to help in the understanding of human language.
Moreover, at the present time, no languages are primitive in the sense of being significantly close to the origin of language. You can find the most primitive Stone Age tribe that you could possibly find on the face of the earth. You will find that its language is not primitive. In fact, some of those earlier languages are marked by a complication that the more modern languages have smoothed out over the centuries. They are exceedingly complicated. There is no evidence that human language has evolved from simplistic notions into the more sophisticated thing that, uh, languages are.
The oldest language that can be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view. Now that is important because stars and suns and moons are important, ladies and gentlemen, and cells are important, but language open to us all, we use it every day of the week, most of us, it, you see, aha, that is a phenomenon that has to be accounted for, and it's a very important thing that we should, uh, grasp the exceeding wonder of what language is. Don't listen too much to people who say, oh, that's only words. Pray remember that the great creator of the universe is referred to as the Word.
God has given to us, his creatures, this inestimable gift of language, that we might communicate with him who is the word. Yes, but um, here comes Professor Noam Chomsky. Now he was a very well-known atheist. He was also a Marxist, or virtually a Marxist. No time for God. Listen to him on language. It is perfectly safe to attribute this development of innate language structures. We'll talk about them in a minute, what it means to have a language, the innate structure.
It's, uh, it's perfectly safe to attribute this development to natural selection, so long as we realize that there is no substance to this absurd- this assertion. That it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena. There is no evidence. This is Chomsky talking, atheist, Marxist, expert in language, that to attribute the rise of language to natural selection and evolution, there is no evidence for it. It's only a statement of wishful thinking.
Well, what do we mean, therefore, by language? Chomsky has called our attention to the fact that in order to have language, you have to have an innate language faculty. You'll see. Eh, and that doesn't just mean, uh, uh, you can learn French or Spanish or something of the sort. Just let's think what language is. Let's have an overhead to think about language. Oh yes, that's right. Yeah. This is some profound thought that I managed to come up with a- after some ar- hours of intensive analysis, you see.
Language, what does it mean to to have language? Well, here are uh uh two people, you see, Peter and Mary, and they're engaging this as activity, which is loving. But the question arises, uh, who loves whom? And we call, in grammar, the one who does the loving the subject, the one who is loved the object. That is an exceedingly important logical distinction. At the basis of language is logic.
The ability to distinguish logical things, and so perceive what the subject is, who the subject is, and who the object is, and what the activity is. It doesn't matter which language you speak. Different languages use different methods of, um, uh, expressing that logical difference. English does it by word order. The subject stands first before the verb and the object after the verb. In this heartwarming statement, Peter loves Mary. And we indicate who the subject is by putting Peter first and who the object is by putting Mary after the verb.
That is, Peter does the loving. Whereas if you alter the order in English, Mary loves Peter, it indicates that Mary does the loving. We, in other words, in English, indicate this logical distinction. Who is the subject that's doing the activity, and who is the object who is suffering the activity? Um, ha ha. This is meant to be serious, not laughable. Ha ha. We indicate that by word order. Latin has a different s- system altogether. Consider these two words, Petrum amat Maria. That does not mean Peter loves Mary.
This thing here means loves. This doesn't mean Peter loves Mary. It means the very opposite, uh, uh, do you see? Mary loves Peter. In Latin, it's not the order of the words that indicate that logical concept. It's case ending. So the subject is in what we call the nominative case, Maria, that's nominative. The object is in the accusative, that's Petrum instead of Petrus. And it's the endings of the word that indicate which is subject and which is object. Peter loves Mary would be Petrus, not Petrum, Petrus amat, and not Maria, but Mariam. So different languages have different ways of expressing this logical distinction.
My goodness me, it is an important distinction, isn't it? That Peter is said to love Mary is no guarantee that the opposite is true. Mary loves Peter. I've known of actual cases where it wasn't true. Josie. Ha. And what are we getting at? Well, let's understand what language is. It's not whether you speak Russian or French or English or German. All those languages can express the basic logical concepts, but before you can express them, you must have them. You must have the ability to think, to conceive of these different logical relationships, and then express them in a way that's suitable, whether it's Japanese or or Icelandic.
The basis of language faculty is logic and ability to distinguish it. And it is an amazing thing how soon a child can cope with quite sophisticated logic. If you are a good boy this afternoon, mummy will give you an ice cream for tea. That's not bad going for a four-year-old, is it? That's in asking the child to conceive of a hypothetical situation, if you are good. Very hypothetical. A condition that might not even exist.
And you expect a four-year-old to understand that kind of logic. That is a marvelous thing, isn't it? You try it on your dog Fido. If you are a good dog today, I'll give you a bone. You might as well save your breath. It ain't got the inner logic faculty. Do you see? So it's invalid, they say, to bring in the idea that, uh, this thing before you could be designed. That destroys the whole notion of science. That's talking nonsense, isn't it? In the first place, let's use the analogy of a Ford motor car that, for some reason and somehow, we can't tell how, landed in the middle of a Stone Age tribe in the middle of Tu Buctu.
And the owner went off, do you see, and left the engine running. And the locals didn't see him, either he's coming or he's going. But there's this thing now in their midst, and it's making a noise. And the dear people, they get round it, and they notice some funny writing on the front, and eventually they learn the language and find out it says Ford on the front of the car, and they say, you know, oh, that's Mr. Ford. Listen to him. Him. And when the running engine is running nicely, they say, Mr. Ford likes us, he's making a nice purring sound like our cat. And when the thing backfires, oh, he said Mr.
Ford is getting angry with us, surely. Was in their pre-scientific age, they can't think of anything else, but there's a person inside the engine, a Mr. Ford. But of course, then they they grow up and they become sophisticated, and their children go to university and learn some science, you see. And then they take the whole thing to bits and find out, no, there's no Mr. Ford in the machine. Ain't Mr. Ford making it go. We can explain the whole thing by internal combustion and sparks and things. We can explain it from start to finish. We don't need to bring Mr.
Ford into it whatsoever. We've now got the scientific explanation of this thing. And then they decide in their wisdom there isn't a Mr. Ford, and there never was. Sound? Now you see, they've decide, they've, they've been able to explain how it works. But deciding and finding out how it works is no evidence that there was not a designer, namely a Mr. Ford. You won't find him by looking inside the engine. The engine wouldn't have been there. If you want to explain how the engine came to be, how the cylinders were designed the way they are, and how the sparking plug went off at the right time, for that kind of thing, you'll have to bring in a designer who's not in the machine, but was outside it and invented it and made it.
And for teachers to tell kids that because you can understand how things work, that we don't need to bring God into it, is an abysmally low fault in logic. That is important, isn't it? Is it scientific, therefore, to look at the nature and look to see whether it is designed or not? For you who are scientists, I recommend this recently published book by William A. Dembski, who's a mathematician, scientist and mathematician. This is the book written for the general public.
Uh, just say I found it a bit difficult, but where I got to the mathematics, I said wheelbarrow and passed on, uh, do you see, to get the, uh, to get the general drift of it, you see. And he demonstrates that the detection of design in nature is not an unscientific thing. It's not indeed a matter of faith. It is the methods for detecting design in nature are as scientific as anything you could possibly wish for. That is a very important result. And if you are concerned with these matters, I, I highly recommend the book too, if you want it, uh, uh, uh, more severely scientific.
He wrote an earlier book published by Cambridge that puts out the thing in very strict scientific terms. But it is not true that to look for and to see design in nature is a matter of faith and not of science. It is as rigorously scientific as anything you could wish for. It will tell you that nature is designed and that you can detect it si- detect it scientifically. It can't tell you who the designer is, you'll see. That is another thing, isn't it? Creation shows God's power and deity. It can't show you his heart. For that, we shall have to turn to God's self-revelation in scripture and in the person of Christ.
But it is not unscientific to detect, um, design in, in, in nature. And so one final example of that, and that is what is called abduction. Now, all of you may not be scientists, but some of you, I guess, like Agatha, Agatha, Agatha Christie novels. Whodunnits, in other words. Uh, love the detective science, do you see? Now, it is the fact that when you get forensic science and other sciences like archaeology and history, they have to proceed by the method we call abduction.
Not deduction, nor induction, but abduction. What does that mean? That means that in life you are faced with some facts, and your job is to account for the facts. How best to account for the facts? So you consider all the surrounding details, and starting with all the surrounding details, you think about them, classify them, see their implications, and you argue from all these details what would be the best explanation of the original fact.
That's what we call abduction. Because a forensic science scientist is dealing with something that happened in the past. You couldn't be there to televise it. You're dealing with a thing in the past. You can't put the past through a computer or something. You have to deal with the, uh, the past thing, try and explain what is the best explanation for that happening in the past. That's not unscientific. Forensic scientists use it every day of the week, archaeology uses it, historians use it. No reason why scientists shouldn't. So let's play Agatha history, Agatha, whatever she is. Mrs.
Smith, uh, you'll see. Let's, uh, uh, let's, you join with me in this detective clue. There's no money at the end of it, but there will be a tea. You'll see. Here is a f- a a accident. You come across it, you'll see. Car found at the bottom of a cliff, and the owner inside is dead. Now that's a past fact. It's happened. You weren't there. There's no computer record of it, no photographs of it, how it happened. How will you come to the best explanation of what caused this thing? You'll have to proceed by abduction. So here's number one possible explanation.
The man parked too near the edge, forgot to put the handbrake on, half dozed asleep, the thing rolled over while he wasn't looking. Possible explanation, isn't it? There are men like that. I'm one of them. Ah, do see. Aha. Oh, but wait a minute. There's another fact that rather goes against that explanation. What's that? Well, when the brakes were, uh, examined, they were found not to have been connected properly. Oh. Oh, well then that wasn't the man's carelessness. Perhaps that was the garage man. He'd taken it in for a test, you know, and like some garages do, they hadn't done the thing properly and forgot to reconnect the brakes. Oh, well, that's an accident then.
Second possible explanation. I thought, wait a minute, there are four, some more facts. The brake cable has been cut. Oh dear. We hope that isn't the garage man. That looks as if it's deliberate. Oh. And there's the other factor that they found out there's drugs in the man's bloodstream, in the corpse's bloodstream. What does that mean? Come on, you experts. Well, it could mean, it could mean it was suicide, and if he'd, uh, uh, taken the drugs and all that and, uh, cut the thing and allowed it to go over the cliff, hoping folks wouldn't find out about the drugs, and that would be regarded as an accident.
Though it was, in fact, deliberate suicide. But wait a minute, the man had no motive, had no motives for suicide, had the most beautiful wife in the world, had a Mercedes-Benz and one hundred fifty thousand a year and all that. Had no motive. And what's more, when they took fingerprints and DNA things, they found DNA samples that didn't belong to the driver at all, somebody else. What are we doing? We're trying to explain a fact of the past by gathering all the information around it we can and working out from that backwards to what will be the best explanation of that thing in the past.
Forensic scientists use that method. They're looking for design, aren't they? Looking to see whether the thing is an accident or designed. We don't say forensic scientists, they can't be scientists. The archaeologists use it. They came across a bit of stone. Now, is this an or- a bit that accidentally fell off the cliff as a flake of stone, or is it designed? And they look at the marks on the stone and say, ha ha ha, this is deliberate, this has been chiseled and flaked and deliberately made as an arrowhead. What with only that little information to go on. We don't say the archaeologists are not being scientific, and of course the historians are constantly doing it.
That's their job, to explain the past by the various theories based on the information. And if we do it in science as Christians, and look at the evidence around and ask ourselves, what is the best explanation for how this came about? That is not unscientific. That is a point to be made, or find the shouts of the atheists all over the literature. Once you talk about design, you've destroyed the whole of science. That is absolute nonsense. And we're not for destroying science. We are for science, for the scientific method, but we are for noting that science, the scientific method has its limitations.
Yes. And, uh, uh, uh, finally, uh, the Ford motor car thing, no, we don't need that yet. The Ford motor car thing, uh, shows us that we can rightly investigate the engine to see how it works. That's the job of science, isn't it? But when we have found out how the universe works, it would be foolish to say, because we know how it works, that we know where it comes from, or that there was no designer.
