evolution is a fairytale for adults
Dr. Stephen Grocott, you have a PhD in physical and inorganic chemistry, but you also come
with a wealth of experience in that field.
Yes, I've been working in the field of chemistry for
40 years, hopefully it doesn't show, but I did a PhD in my 20s.
I
moved into industrial careers doing research and development, in process
development of new chemical processes. I worked for many prominent global companies.
I also had a lot of interactions with universities where I used to co-supervise
PhD students. I have many refereed publications and patents So, a lifelong and enjoyable
career in science.
So,
evolution is a fairytale for adults. Bold statement. Why do you say that?
Well, firstly, I want to stress that I'm not trying to
insult science or scientists here. I am a scientist. I earn my living doing,
amongst other things, a lot of science.
So, I'll explain though
Why I call it a fairytale, because a fairytale
starts with the theory of ones upon a time and finishes with a, they all lived
happily ever after or in some dark version and they all died. So, the origin of
life is a fairytale I maintain because it starts with once upon a time there
was nothing and then it exploded. That’s the so-called Big Bang Theory, which
is becoming under increasing criticism from the secular scientific community.
Then you end up with the next once upon a time, once upon a time a bunch of
lifeless simple molecules joined together, became a bit more complex and then
they became more and more complex and more and more complex. And so, you had
some moderately complex molecules. And then once upon a time, those moderately
complex molecules self-assembled into even more complexity. And once upon a time it became
self-replicating a living organism. And once upon a time when all this was
happening, all the normal laws of chemistry and physics were suspended and these molecules did not start falling
apart. So I call it a once upon a time theory of the origins of life. It is not
supported by observational science.
So
you have mentioned observational science. I wonder if you could talk to us
about that because I feel like I have heard, and I have read in textbooks, a
lot of scientists seem to agree with evolution. So you just speak to us about
that.
The majority of scientist do believe in evolution I
used to believe in evolution but I never Studied it, I never looked at it, I
was just assumed it was true because that’s what I was told I just
assumed it was true because that’s what other scientist were told but when you
look at the data when you look at the science you make the tests, you make the
measurements, you do not see simple molecules self-assembled into complex
molecules, surviving the oppressive forces of time and water and temperature
pushing them back in the opposite direction and becoming more complex. You do
not see that that’s not observational science; you cannot even repeat it in a
laboratory experiment. You cannot conduct a laboratory experiment to make these
molecules that are the precursors to the precursors, to the precursors of
living beings.
So
you saying that because we are not able to test it in a lab today, we are not
able to see could a big bang occur?
So, not so much big bang, so I am not talking about
the chemistry, the molecules other can talk about the big bang. I shall the
digress, you know? (Chuckles) too long. But self-assembly of molecules, they
do not self-assemble under the so called primordial soup conditions. Even
if you invent the most imaginably, wonderfully supportive conditions, you will
not form living molecules. I am going to use a really gross example here:
“ I hate
cockroaches I am going to put a whole bunch of cockroaches, 500 cockroaches in
my blender and I am going to blend it. And apart from being a very gross
thought experiment, what I have just created is a collection of non-living
organic molecules and I shall give it a quick zap with radiation in case there
is any bacteria in there that survives so to kill off the bacteria. But now I
have got the most perfect soup, far, far more favorable for living organisms
forming than you will get in a so-called primordial soup. So I can leave this
blender full of yuck cockroaches out in the sun, the right temperature, the
right atmosphere, the right conditions, everything perfect, I am not going to
form a living molecule. ”
Scientists know that, so why do they maintain that
under less favorable circumstances I am gonna form life. They appeal to time;
time is enemy. The longer I leave this cockroach soup out there, it is going
to get worse and worse and worse.
But
what you're saying, Stephen, is that even though a lot of people in the scientific
community understand that a molecule won't be formed, they're relying on
millions of years or billions of years to make this a possibility?
That's
one of the things that they do rely upon.
Now, as I've just said, when you ask them and you
probe them and they will agree that actually time's an enemy because the
complexity that you're building is not being preserved, it's falling apart.
So
the train's heading in the wrong direction. So, appealing to time and chance
does not help because chance is sending you in the wrong direction. Time is
sending you in the wrong direction.
Do
you mean that over time things degenerate, they don't improve?
It's called the second law of thermodynamics or the
law of entropy, or the law of decay, or the law of randomness. It's in an
exorable law of chemistry and physics, no known exceptions. So, people try to
appeal to, well, if I control the environment, I can create complexity.
Yes, that requires a designer and it requires a lot of intelligence and it requires
the right systems, the right specified complexity.
That
comes about by a designer.
It
doesn't come about by accident.
No
known exceptions.
Is a designer the only alternative to the
evolution fairytale?
It's the only one that I think fits the field of observational
science because I can... I can't prove creation, I can't prove evolution. I
can't prove that a flying spaghetti monster didn't create the universe.
So
why can't you prove those things?
Because they sit in a field called forensic or historical
science. So, take a forensic movie. You know, they do a DNA test and they say,
"Ah, this person was the murderer because their DNA has been found at the
crime scene." And it may be unlikely but there are other explanations for
it. They happen to have walked past there in the past or somebody had contact
with them and had contact with the weapon. I mean there are other explanations.
You cannot prove it. So that's forensic science.
But even the best forensic science points to a divine
creation, a super intelligent being that created these systems for these not
self-assembly but directed assembly of molecules into such complexity that you
had a living organism.
So
you're saying that forensic science focuses on what has already occurred and is
trying to piece that together?
Yeah, forensic scientists, science is actually getting
into the field of history. So science can't prove that Abraham
Lincoln was assassinated. Science can't prove that. That's historical. If
there were eyewitness accounts who recorded it at the time and it was
independently verified by other people, you can prove it. Science can't prove
that. Science can't prove what I had for breakfast last year. That's history.
If I wrote it down at the time, if I videoed it and date stamped it, then
that's history. That's not science.
So,
it sounds like, Stephen, you're actually excluding all other options and just
focusing on the possibility of a designer. Isn't that a bit narrow-minded?
It might be considered narrow-minded. And I think
people should be open-minded but not so open-minded that their brains fall out.
Yeah? You look at the data and you use the data, you
use the observations, you use the repeating of the experiments to narrow and exclude
hypotheses. And what you are ending up with is one possibility. And many people may
not think it's the God of the Bible, but they do acknowledge there is a divine
creator. There is a divine footprint. Life happened about, not by chance.
Even the late almost Nobel Prize winning physicist, Sir
Fred Hoyle said the chance of even a single complex molecule precursor to life
forming is the same chance as if you filled the solar system wall to wall with
blind men each with their own Rubik's cube, and they all came up with a solution
at the same time. He says it's a non-sense of the highest order that this
happened by chance. And by the way, Fred Hoyle was not a Christian, but he
recognized on the basis of science that there was another force at work here.
It's not a force of science, not a force of nature. It was a divine footprint.
So
you are saying that you're actually following a scientific procedure where you have
multiple hypotheses and you work through your data until you come up with the
most likely answer. And for you, that is a divine creator?
Correct!
So, I've eliminated other possibilities. This is the
only one that I see fits the science and fits the data. It doesn't prove it
because it's not in the field of observational science until I can repeat
the events that led to living organisms.
Now, as a believer in a divine creation, I can't go
and repeat those. So I can't prove it using operational science.
As a believer in evolution, before I changed my viewpoints, I could not go
and repeat the experiments that led to more complex life and life arising. And
I could not refer to an observer who was there to watch the first fish emerges
of amphibian and over millions and millions of years turned into a philosopher.
That was not observed so it's outside history and it's not seen in experimental
science.
So
Stephen, I wonder if you could talk me through your journey from evolutionist
to creationist. What is some of the evidence that has brought you to believe that
evolution is a fairytale?
That's a ripper question. I might even go back a little
bit further than that.
When I was doing my PhD, I was working in a laboratory
with some very intelligent and capable fellow PhD students. One of them
happened to be a believer in a recent creation, a young Earth. He was a
Christian and he used to ask and challenge me and my colleagues with these
scientific questions. I could never answer them. I never had answers to the
challenging questions that he gave me.
I used to feel uncomfortable that I as a scientist, I
did not have an answer. And I also used to feel uncomfortable when I saw how some
of my peers dealt with him. They didn't answer his scientific questions, they
didn't deal with the science. They attacked him as a person and they attacked
his beliefs. Sometimes it was nasty, sometimes it was just a bit humorous. But
I remember feeling uncomfortable. I can't answer these questions. From a
science perspective, I cannot answer what he's telling me.
So, what did I do about that? I
went on a great searching journey.
No!
I flushed the questions because they're uncomfortable because
I didn't wanna think about them. And it wasn't until much later that I was
forced to think about these questions and think, my goodness, there's structure
and order in the universe that didn't come about by accident. There is a divine
creator and the divine creator I see is the God of the Bible.
What
are some of those pieces of evidence that you have personally found so
compelling as a scientist to believe, actually, this couldn't have come about
by chance?
Yeah, there's some neat ones.
My favorite element in the periodic table is actually Helium.
It's the second lightest element. I like it 'cause
it's in helium balloons and they're fun. I like it because during my PhD we
used to have a cylinder of helium and you take a lung full, don't do this at
home by the way. You take a lung full and your voice becomes like Donald duck because
the velocity of sound in helium is different from the velocity of sound in air.
But it's a fun element. But here's where it comes into age of the Earth.
Helium is effectively is an alpha particle, alpha
radiation we've heard of when parent radioactive elements decompose or decay
through alpha particle emission and alpha particles just to helium atom with no
electrons. The alpha particle picks up a couple of electrons like that. It's
really easy and it becomes helium. Now when this decay happens inside a rock, into
inside a mineral grain, that helium is trapped in there. Now helium's a small element
and it diffuses, it leaks out very quickly, which is why your helium balloon is
got metal coating on the inside because if it's just a normal rubber balloon, it'd
be flat in no time at all. So, helium leaks out quickly.
Now, you can calculate how fast the helium, or in fact
you can measure how fast the helium leaks out of the mineral grain and you can
calculate how much helium should have formed in there because you've got the
daughter elements that led to it. And you find in these mineral grains there's
miles too much helium. All of the helium should have leaked out over the
millions and billions of years but most of it is still there.
And
so, what do you infer?
The mineral grain must be young. - Much younger. - But
if I have a different paradigm, I'll say there must be a process I don't
understand because clearly the mineral grain is old, therefore there's some way
that the helium's still in there. It leaked in. That's been proven not to be
correct. There must be slower leakage back in history. That's a wild
assumption. Unsubstantiated. There are no explanations for this other than the
helium shows, this must be a young mineral grain, not millions of years old.
So,
that was one neat piece of evidence that I really liked.
What's
another piece of evidence that you have personally found compelling?
All the molecules that I've ever built fall apart if I
don't put them in the right environment. And I'm talking about some pretty
simple molecules. So they fall apart. So, precursors to living organisms, unless
you preserve them in a careful way, they disintegrate. Another neat one is something
called chirality or optical activity.
Now,
let me explain that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So I've got a left hand and I've got a right hand. You
know, I've got thumb, index finger, all the way through to my little finger. So,
they're not identical though, they're mirror images of each other. I cannot put
one hand on top of the other, superimpose them exactly 'cause it's the wrong
order. I can superimpose them when they're mirror images. Now a lot of
biological molecules come in left hand and right hand. So for instance, the
proteins in our body, the amino acids in our body are left-handed exclusively
amino acids. But when I make an amino acid in a laboratory starting from
simpler molecules, I end up with a 50/50 mixture of left and right.
So, how on earth did biological systems only come to
be comprised of only the left-handed? That doesn't make sense. And if I get a
soup, even starting with all left-handed, over time and it doesn't take very
long, it starts decomposing, converting into some right-handed and before you
know it, you've got quite a lot of right-handed ones as well as left-handed
ones. And if I take a peptide, a lot of amino acids strung together, and I
substitute one of the left-hand, and one's for a right-handed one, I'm gonna
damage its function. And often the damage to the function is sufficient to kill
the organism. So, it's just, I don't even know how to put it into words. It's
a fairytale to believe this happened by accident, that these unstable
molecules formed equal mixture, then you only got the left-hand ones, and they
all survived and it didn't revert. I mean, I'm sorry. It's too big a construct
for me. It takes more faith to believe in a natural origin of life than for a
designer.
What
would you say to someone who says, "But surely with enough time, with
enough time, we could come to a point where they would all be left-handed or
where the helium would leak to the right amount. Or maybe it's just an
anomaly." What would you say to someone that said that?
I'd say to somebody, well, on that basis of thinking, if
you keep withdrawing from the bank for a long enough time, you're gonna become
rich. Now the process is going in the wrong way. You keep withdrawing from the
bank, you become poorer. And these molecules get poorer and poorer over time. They're
unstable.
Time's an enemy.
So, complexity goes to simplicity. The only thing that preserves complexity is
a designer, is an overarching system to control it. Living organisms can
self-replicate, they can preserve complexity. But to get to a living organism, you
go through this incredibly complex cascade, upwards cascade of processes. And
along the way, along that journey, the forces are pushing you back down the
hill constantly. It's inexorable, it's pushing you in the wrong direction. So
by the time I've and I'm trying to make a 50 amino acid peptide, by the time
I've got to 10, the first one's dropping off. By the time I've got to 20, it's
split into two tens. By the time I've got to 30, it's split into six fives. I
don't have it anymore. I don't even get to the 50 and that's only one of millions
of complex molecules that needed to be self-assembled. So time's an enemy.
So
you've spoken a lot about evidence from your field of chemistry. Is there
anything from another scientific field that you'd like to bring in?
This might sound a little bit arrogant, but the
Chemical Institute of which I'm a professional member, I've used to say
chemistry, the central science. And I sort of feel that it pervades everything.
So, maybe I'm just gonna give you a divergent or a peripheral chemical
argument.
Sounds good.
I use one biological system that has, died, Fossils. Now,
I've already mentioned that proteins are made of left-handed amino acids. So
that's all you get. Now we can measure the rate at which the left-handed turn
into right-handed and you end up with a 50/50. That's easily measured and it's
over a short period of time. And it gets worse with temperature and with acidic
waters and soils or alkaline waters and soils. So under the perfect
environment, even in a freezer, you know? In years you're seeing the decay, some
of the lefts becoming rights.
Now you dig up a fossil and you're finding protein
fragments in soils and in fossils and in rock strata you can find protein
fragments. Over thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, the left has
become a mixture of left right is what you should see. Instead what do you see?
When you dig up something that's supposed to be millions of years old, it's
dominantly left-handed.
Why
would that occur?
Because it's not millions of years old. There is no other explanation. So what do non-creator
believing scientists, scientists who exclude the divine foot in the door, how
do they explain millions of years old and they only see left-handed stuff? Well,
they've got all these theories that are all proven wrong. They say, "Well,
it must be contamination. It must be recent contamination." No, you can
prove that it's not. It must be preserved for longer than we thought. Well,
that is a possible hypothesis. Let's do an experiment under the best possible
conditions. How do we preserve the left-handedness? And you find there is no
chemical system which preserves that left-handedness for millions of years.
So again, by process of elimination, and I think it
was Sherlock Holmes who had allegedly said that when you've eliminated all
possibilities, the one remaining possibility, no matter how ridiculous it
seems, must be correct. Now that is gonna make some people uncomfortable. But
you know, the only thing that grows while it's comfortable is a potato. We grow
by discomfort.
So, if the viewer or listener is uncomfortable at what
I'm saying, and maybe even if they're angry at what I was saying because I used
to get angry when I used to hear this, I encourage them, you think you've got a
fine mind? Use it. Look at the evidence, look at the data. What makes sense? When
you see your name written on the sand, in the sand on the beach, you know
there's a designer there. Living organisms are vastly more complex than a few
billion grains of sand. Think where did this come about? There are no natural processes
that lead to it. Therefore, I'm Sherlock. There's only one possibility, there
is a divine creator.
Is
there, in closing, anything you'd like to add?
Yes!
Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I mean, I do
love talking about science, but more importantly than that, how this viewpoint
has changed my life, turning it on its head, I just encourage people to think
through the issues that we've talked about because they are life-changing
consequences to the paradigm that you have. Thank you.
Thank
you, Dr. Stephen Grocott, for your time.
