Join Fred Williams and Doug McBurney of Real Science Radio as they explore the intersections between faith and science. Dive into the mystery of miracles and whether they defy scientific explanation, with a spotlight on Daniel’s story from the Bible. The hosts also discuss the prevailing trends in astronomical research and critique the scientific predilections that often guide mainstream understanding.
There’s no science to explain the story in Daniel. It’s a miracle. Miracles defy scientific analysis. Miracles instead require faith.
SPEAKER 02 :
Design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real
SPEAKER 05 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams. And I’m Doug McBurney.
SPEAKER 01 :
Fred, this morning I went to look on Google for the latest science news. And I predicted before I did my Google search that whatever page came up, I would get at least one story with some made-up astrology. I’m sorry, made-up astronomy. I would get one story on made-up geology. And I would get at least one story on climate change. And sure enough, Fred, the first page that came up was sciencenews.org. And there was a story about neutrinos around for billions of years. There was a story about a tectonic plate that nobody ever thought about before. And then there was a story about how the animals aren’t going to be able to migrate. I’m sorry, not migrate. What did I say? The animals aren’t going to be able to hibernate, Fred. Forget migrate. They won’t even be able to get a rest because of climate change. So Fred, for everyone out there who’s interested in science, be very careful because everything is tainted to the left. And so you can predict that every time, I think, Fred, if you Google latest science news.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, absolutely. And Doug, we’re going to get into one of the recent stories on dark matter. So again, in that same category of really highly accurate science, right? Yeah. Astrology. Astronomy. Yeah. And also there’s a recent story from Fox News on cancer and immunology. You know, Bob is always big on immunology as a treatment for cancer. And, you know, we went decades not even considering that as an option because of the evolutionary mindset. Yeah. So we’re going to get into that story. Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Scientists were trained in college that the immune system was an accidental hodgepodge of leftover parts. Yeah, and so they didn’t put it together. It’s just embarrassing.
SPEAKER 05 :
It is. Yeah, and so, Doug, before we get into these news stories, we were talking off air last week. Our show last week was on the food pyramid and the new government guidelines for, you know, dietary guidelines. Right. And that was a lot of fun. And I didn’t get a chance. I was going to mention there’s the biblical diet that includes fruits and vegetables that Daniel— had used this diet. If you go to Daniel, what is it, chapter 1, verses 12 through 15, and then the rest of the story. And for decades, I misinterpreted that. Doug, I was wrong, and I need to be corrected on air by you, our theological expert, on this dietary viewpoint that I and many Christians have. that this passage in Daniel is talking about how great fruits and vegetables are. In fact, let me read that really quick.
SPEAKER 01 :
And do you have a warning for us? A warning, warning, Will Robinson. There are Bible verses up ahead. For those in the audience who advocate pluralism and diversity, we know here at Real Science Radio that you would do anything in your power to absolutely stop anyone from ever quoting a Bible verse in public. Well, this warning gives you fair notice that raw, unadulterated truth is about to be uttered.
SPEAKER 05 :
I can’t believe how great you remember that, Doug. That’s incredible. You’ve been doing that for probably 30 years. Yeah, I think so. And we haven’t done that in a while. So good job. Good job.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I used to repeat that to other people when I used to tell them about Bob and Yart Live. I would say, this guy, here’s what he says before he quotes the Bible. And so I quoted it so many times.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, so here’s Daniel chapter 1, verses 12 through 15. And basically the story goes on, and they do this test, and guess what? Daniel and his men, and Doug, correct me if I’m wrong, was that that whole Abednego, who were those guys?
SPEAKER 01 :
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Thank you. Hananiah, Mishael, and I always remember the third, I always forget the third guy. Anyway, they had their Hebrew names and they had their Babylonian names. Yeah, so long story short. Azariah and Mishael.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. Well, long story short, they looked a lot better. I mean, their appearance was superior. And so that was an argument for, hey, you know, fruits and vegetables and… you know, seeds and grains are really good for you. Well, it turns out, I was going to mention that, and I didn’t get around to it, so we talked about it off air last week. You have an interesting take on that that I wanted you to share with the audience, and I believe your view is correct, and I have to go back and correct my BibleEvidences.com website on the medical evidences section in the very last paragraph on dietary guidelines because I believe your take is accurate. Let’s hear it, Doug.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it’s not just the Daniel story, Fred. It’s also the fact that in the beginning, before the fall, everyone ate a vegetarian diet. In fact, all the way up to the flood, everyone was supposed to be eating a vegetarian diet. And so it’s natural to assume that in the beginning, creation was perfect and… So a vegetarian diet must be better. And combine that with Daniel, and a lot of Christians have this idea that a vegetarian diet must be superior and that the Bible presents it as such. But that’s not necessarily the case, especially in the story of Daniel. So first of all, Fred, the Bible version that you just read from says, it’s slightly inaccurate on what Daniel ate. He didn’t eat vegetables or fruits or grains or a variety of anything. He basically ate chickpeas. In the old King James, the word is pulse, P-U-L-S-E, which nobody knows what that is anymore. But back in medieval times and even back in ancient times, that meant leguminous plants like peas and chickpeas and lentils. It was basically the cheapest, lowest quality food that you fed your slaves if you didn’t need them doing all that much work. It was like the food you would get in prison. back in the ancient days.
SPEAKER 05 :
And it was called pulse. Pulse. That’s the actual Hebrew word. Well, that’s the English word. Oh, excuse me.
SPEAKER 01 :
The English word translated from the King James. Yeah. So whatever the Hebrew word was, I don’t know, because I don’t speak Hebrew, but the English word was pulse. And at the time the Bible was translated, pulse was pulse. These leguminous beans, basically chickpeas, probably, because they’re in the Middle East. So it’s probably chickpea.
SPEAKER 05 :
This is a new thing, James, by the way, but I just checked, and it also uses vegetables in the NIV, and I’m sure many other translations.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, which is slightly incorrect. because it was lower than vegetables. It was like chickpeas. And it has protein, so it’ll keep you alive, but it doesn’t have a lot of vitamins, so it’s not like you’re going to be sharp, and it’s not like you’re going to be able to do a lot of work on this type of diet. It’s not very… a not very nutritious diet. You could ask Bobby Kennedy about that. Or you could even ask your mom. Hey, mom, if I eat chickpeas all the time and just drink water, she’ll be like, that’s not good. That’s not good, Freddie. Don’t do that. So your mom would tell you. Yeah. So basically, Daniel ate beans and water, Daniel and his three fellows, for 10 straight days, and they looked better than everybody else. Why? Is it because chickpeas and water is a great diet? No, it’s because God miraculously preserved them because of their faith. And why? Because God promised Israel that if they were faithful, he would miraculously preserve them. Not just preserve them, he would miraculously cause them to abound. Fred, I have a quote from Exodus 23, 25, the heart of the law. You all know the law. Thou shalt not kill, right? You shall not bear false witness. You shall not commit adultery. We know all that, right? The 10 commandments, the big 10, but there’s a whole bunch of other stuff in the law And in Exodus 23, 25, God told Israel, And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread and thy water, and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. There shall nothing cast their young nor be barren in the land. The number of thy days I will fulfill. So God promised Israel that if they were faithful, he would miraculously bless them. They wouldn’t have any miscarriages. They wouldn’t get sick. They would always have food and water. So God promised Israel miracles as a reward for their faith.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, and if you look at what it says, please test your servants for 10 days. And if I would have thought a little bit longer on that, 10 days, even if you really believe that, you know, just a strict vegetarian diet is going to be better than, like, say, a mixed diet of vegetables and steak and those kind of things, 10 days is nowhere near long enough to establish that you’re on a healthier diet. So that should have been a clue right there that it was a miracle and had nothing to do with vegetables necessarily being more healthy, which we’re not saying that they’re not. But this was an invalid argument for me to use as an evidence in the medical section for the Bible. This isn’t really a… evidence that this diet this is a dietary guideline to eat vegetables and fruits and the translation was wrong anyways yeah well i wouldn’t say the translation was wrong because legumes are vegetables yeah that’s true it’s it’s misleading but to say fruits and vegetables because if i would have heard pulse i would have been inclined to look it up well what is pulse
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, exactly, right? Yeah. Well, here’s the thing, Fred. There’s no science to explain the story in Daniel. It’s a miracle. Miracles defy scientific analysis. Miracles instead require faith to be understood. And at Real Science Radio, we appreciate real science because it’s an understanding of real science and real life. And real life drives the observer to a point where all of us, Fred, eventually simply can’t explain things anymore. If you haven’t gotten there in your life yet, it just means you’re very young and inexperienced. Eventually you’re going to get to a point where you realize this is all very scary and we don’t know as much as we think. And I don’t think I can handle this anymore. And when you realize you don’t have all the answers and that you can’t do it yourself and the government can’t make it okay and science can’t make it okay, you know that’s at the point where God is waiting right there for you and he’s faithful and he’s capable and all you have to do is have faith in him and he will sustain you. Not necessarily by miracles these days, but he will be there for you because he’s faithful. He’s the author of humanity. And like we said in the previous show, Fred, God’s the author of humanity, not the author of human services. Well, actually, he is the author of human services from actual humans.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yep. Okay, so Doug, did you see the recent video? Now, this is from Sabine Hassenfelter. She’s got a very popular YouTube channel titled, and this particular YouTube episode was titled, Is Dark Matter Just Normal Matter? Oh, yes. So, you know, that piqued my interest, so I watched that video. And, Doug, she’s not claiming that standard cosmology is overturned. But instead, she’s pointing out that secular physicists are revisiting an old idea that maybe dark matter isn’t a brand new particle at all. That’s something we’re trying to find. But it could be just ordinary matter in an extreme state, like macroscopic clumps of strange quark matter. She references a paper in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society from last year titled Strange Quark Matter as Dark Matter, 40 Years Later, a Reappraisal. So, Doug, my takeaway from this is it’s not that dark matter is solved. For me, it helps expose the state of science in astrophysics that we’ve been talking about a lot on this show. So the takeaway for me is this. After decades, secular astrophysicists and astronomers still don’t know what it is. And the leading candidates keep shifting. To me, it reminds me of Walter Remind, the engineer Walter Remind, when he said years ago, it’s like fog adapting to the landscape.
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Yeah, right.
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They can do about anything they want. And that’s the state of this science right now.
SPEAKER 01 :
And that’s the whole Big Bang Cosmology is, I’m not sure if Remind was describing just Big Bang Cosmology. I think he was.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, his was more with natural selection, how you can adapt to anything.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right. And no matter what the atheists say about them being two independent fields of science, Big Bang cosmology and natural selection biology are intertwined. So anyway, don’t even try with that. But it is. And do the cosmologists not realize… that there’s going to be another 40 years and that everyone’s going to be able to look back 40 years, 50 years, 100 years later and look at what these guys say, because it’s like Bob said, Fred, the person who advances the fastest and the farthest in evolutionary and big bang cosmology is the person who can tell the biggest, most fantastical lie with the straightest face. But don’t they realize that somebody’s going to check? Here we are 40 years later, and where’s the dark matter? Fred, this reminds me, we did a show with Robert Stadler.
SPEAKER 05 :
Remember that show?
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s right, a Harvard PhD. Back when getting a PhD at Harvard… Was difficult. I mean, it meant something, right? He did the show about high-confidence science versus low-confidence science. Remember, he laid out the six criteria. High-confidence science is repeatable. It’s directly measurable. You can do prospective and retrospective studies, minimize bias and assumptions, and make reasonable claims. Well, if you compare cosmology and astrology, I’m sorry, astronomy, modern versions of those, well, I mean, well, just cosmology and astronomy in general, Fred, you can’t do perspective studies. We can’t rerun the early universe. We can’t directly sample dark matter. We can’t directly sample any matter from a whole bunch of the universe because we can’t get there, right? We have to basically infer a lot of information indirectly from models and even observations that require a lot of assumptions, Fred. We run this through Dr. Stadler’s filter here.
SPEAKER 05 :
his criteria. And you know, before I wanted to start this, I wanted to make it clear what astronomy and cosmology are, because they’re almost the same thing. You know, astronomy.
SPEAKER 01 :
No, this is good, Fred. You have to, we should stop at some point when you’re discussing scientific things And you can’t assume that everybody understands what these terms mean. And even Fred, when I saw what you wrote here, it clarified for me what they mean.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. Very good. So astronomy is the broad science of studying objects in space. Now, how those objects behave, that would be more astrophysics. And then you’ve got cosmology. It’s a specialized branch that studies the universe itself as a whole. So you can think of it like this. Astronomy equals studying the things in nature. Cosmology is studying the universe as a system. So I wanted to run those. So cosmology slash astronomy. And run those through Dr. Stadler’s criteria first. So first one, repeatable. No. No. Nope. Directly measurable. No. Prospective versus retrospective studies. No. Can’t rerun the universe, just like you said. And here’s his fourth one, minimizing bias and assumptions. Do I have a lap track? No. No, you wrote not just no, but heck no. It was really strong for Fred. And then finally, reasonable claims. Now, I didn’t say a firm no on that because I’m sure some people think they look at this stuff and it’s a reasonable claim. And I’m biased like everybody else. Yes, me too. And I say mostly no on the last one because these scientists, they’ll tell you that the evidence is overwhelming for dark matter, including some in the creationist community. And it’s because the way light bends in galaxies and galaxy lensing and stuff like that. And that’s all interesting. And that is information that we take in. So even if you give them a soft pass, let’s just say reasonable claims, we’ll give that one to them. That’s a soft one out of five, Doug. Where it puts it is in Dr. Stadler’s criteria is very low confidence science. You know, at some point I want Real Science Radio to have like an RSR truth meter and all these different scientific claims we can have our meter, you know, like the New York Times election meter. You know, where do we fall on that? And so many of the things in cosmology, they’re going to fall on the very low confidence level. It’s the nature of the beast, but Often this science gets oversold to the general public and the creationists. And we like to point those things out. Now, I don’t think this doesn’t make astronomers dishonest or it’s a bad field or anything. I don’t want to imply that. It’s just inherently low confidence science. And so, again, we think that too many people in these fields, they get too much of a podium.
SPEAKER 01 :
They always get the podium.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. And so, Doug, you remember the ICC conference we attended a few years ago.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh yeah, absolutely. I remember that I had to man the booth while you went to go watch Danny Faulkner’s presentation. It was awesome.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. And you know, Dr. Danny Faulkner, he has some really good stuff from an astronomer’s point of view that aligns with what we believe and what the Bible teaches us. So we’re going to agree on 90% of stuff, but there’s the 10% that we’re not. And he’s a big fan of dark matter. So, anyways, he was granted a paper at ICC to present on dark matter and dark energy. You know, even though the creationist community, they’ve heard his arguments for years, and there was really nothing that new in his presentation, his talk seemed to primarily focus on dark matter as not merely a rescue device for the Big Bang, and because historically… Some evidence and discussion predates dark matter being baked into the Big Bang framework.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so Fred, I got to stop you right there because a lot of people in our audience, they might not know because I didn’t know until we were researching for this show. But many creationists, even I at times, have said that dark matter was basically created out of nothing just as a rescue device for the Big Bang. But in fact, in 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, He was looking at the coma cluster of galaxies. He noticed the galaxies were moving way too fast for the amount of matter that he thought he was seeing. They shouldn’t remain gravitationally bound. According to Newtonian physics, he knew that they should fly apart, but they didn’t. And so he concluded that He postulated that some unseen dark matter must exist. Something has to be providing this extra gravity. And at the time, Fred, his claim was pretty much ignored. But decades later, in the 1970s, another astronomer, astrologist, Vera Rubin, Theoretically confirmed his idea. Really, Fred, through nothing more than some very creative mathematics to explain how stars rotate with galaxies. So while it’s fair to say that the theory of dark matter was not created specifically to rescue the Big Bang… It’s not fair to say that it’s not used today to do so. And that the Big Bang defies observation without these fantastical mathematical elements and assumptions of dark matter.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. So Danny Faulkner says that creationists shouldn’t reject dark matter just because of Big Bang associations.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. So here’s, I guess this is my issue here. is even if dark matter wasn’t originally invented to save the Big Bang, it absolutely functions today, from what I can tell, Doug, as a rescue pillar for standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
A pillar, you say?
SPEAKER 05 :
A pillar.
SPEAKER 01 :
Not just a rescue device.
SPEAKER 05 :
A rescue pillar. This is a pillar, a rescue pillar for standard cosmology and, you know, the modern dominant framework of what scientists believe about space and the universe. And this isn’t just creationists like myself and you, Doug, complaining. There’s a well-known open letter on cosmology, and we’ve been talking about this for years, and it’s at cosmologystatement.org. In fact, that website, it was down for a while, and we were— reproducing it in a real science radio. Now they have it back up. And it’s signed by a ton of secular scientists. A lot of these guys signed this thing, and it bluntly says that modern Big Bang cosmology relies on a growing list of hypothetical, unobserved entities, and it explicitly names inflation, dark matter, and dark energy as prominent examples. So when you put this together, mainstream researchers are still reopening a 40-year-old dark matter idea. And creationist astronomers like Dr. Faulkner argue dark matter isn’t just a big bang patch historically. Yet professional scientists themselves warn that standard cosmology leans heavily on unobserved entities. And Stadler’s framework reminds us, the more assumptions and indirect inference, the lower the confidence. And I guess you end up with, you know, a simple and sobering conclusion. Dark matter may be a real inference from certain observations, but the nature of dark matter remains unknown, unobserved directly, and continually reimagined. Where have you heard that before, Doug? That’s like right out of the… Can I use that? It’s like right out of the Democratic talking points.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I was going to say that. We’re going to reimagine. Every two years, they’re reimagining everything on the left. Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
And so this isn’t even in the vicinity of high-confidence science. And it’s a sign that we’re dealing with a field that conclusions can outrun what the evidence can support. And, Doug, you know, we have to be fair. So let’s compare that to what we think is more likely is like a plasma universe scenario. And I’m not completely sold on that because we suffer a lot of the same shortcomings. But one of the things that we can check off on Dr. Stadler’s criteria is, in a sense, repeatability and, in a sense, prospective studies because they can reproduce these galaxy formations in the lab.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, yes.
SPEAKER 05 :
I’m pretty sure that the standard cosmology folks cannot do that. They cannot reproduce how a galaxy forms without creating some fudge factor. Again, I don’t even know how they would do it in a lab. How would you create dark matter? You can’t. No, no. But you can create galaxy-like structures in the lab using plasma and electricity, magnetism, all of those things. You can create spiral arms, galaxies. It’s amazing. It’s really interesting.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Isaac Newton did not comprehend electromagnetism. He didn’t know about electricity. And so the Big Bang cosmology is stuck in this idea that gravity is all there is. Well, just because Newton didn’t know about it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. There was electricity back then, even though Newton didn’t know about it. So because they’re building their cosmology, you know, evolution and Big Bang cosmology really grew out of a visceral hatred for Isaac Newton. They hated Isaac Newton because Isaac Newton believed the Bible was true. He believed that God created the universe relatively recently. But because they hate Newton so much and they basically had to design a theory to discredit Newton, they’re kind of stuck in some of the things that Newton was ignorant about. He didn’t know about plasma and electromagnetism and how the universe could have come about By all of that. And so they’re stuck and they end up with dark matter to explain. You know what dark matter is? It’s trying to explain what Newton didn’t understand. And if Newton would have had enough time, he would have figured it out without making up dark matter and fudging the math.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
And it’s a big deal, Fred, because we hear all the time that astronomy and geology, too, All the propositions that we see in our latest news headlines, this is all some kind of settled science.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hey, we’re running out of time in this broadcast, so go to our website to catch the rest of this program, realscienceradio.com.
SPEAKER 02 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real. That’s what I’m talking about.
