This article is from
Creation 45(2):36–39, April 2023

Browse our latest digital issue Subscribe

A journey in faith and science

Dr Don Batten interviews fellow agricultural scientist, Dr KeeFui Kon

Dr KeeFui Kon holds B.Agr.Sc. and M.Agr.Sc. (Hons) degrees from Massey University (NZ), and a Ph.D. from The University of Western Australia. His research has involved a wide range of disciplines: plant physiology, agronomy, microbiology, population genetics, and weed ecology and control. Dr Kon joined Syngenta, an agribusiness company, as a weed scientist and agronomist where he worked in diverse roles in research and marketing in Malaysia, Switzerland, and New Zealand. He became the global lead for Rice R&D, receiving the prestigious Syngenta Fellow Award in 2010, the first Asia-Pacific recipient. He has authored or joint-authored 29 publications and three patents.

Recognizing the dire effects of evolutionary beliefs on the church and evangelism, Dr Kon became an accredited speaker for CMI-Singapore in 2016.

All photos supplied by Dr KeeFui Kon

---

As a teenager growing up in Malaysia, the failure of his parents’ dysfunctional marriage traumatized Kon (as he likes to be known). Kon found plants strangely intriguing, and their amazing beauty, intricate complexity, and variety spoke to him of God as their Designer (Romans 1:18–20).

Then his neighbour shared his testimony and the Gospel. But Kon was unsure which was the ‘right religion’. Kon shares, “Watching Ben-Hur was the turning point. The film’s parallel plot about Jesus was compelling. My friend and I concluded that Christianity was the most tenable of the major religions in the multi-religious society of Malaysia.”

He saw that other religions allowed for infidelity in marriage, or their gods were impersonal, or there were tedious rituals trying to please ancestors, or there was no Creator, just a fluffy philosophy.

In his final school year, the biology teacher dealt with two advanced topics—evolution and Mendelian genetics. Kon: “For evolution, I could not connect the many dots from the single-cell organism to multi-cell organism, to ape, and finally to man. But I was blown away by Mendel’s detective work on heritable traits in peas. That inspired my career in agriculture.”

 

 

University in New Zealand

Dr Kon: “While everything was still mushy in my mind, I went to New Zealand to escape the family problems.” He studied agriculture at Massey University, “to help feed a hungry world”. By Easter that year (1976), “the seed of faith in my heart had ripened, and I committed to Jesus as Saviour and Lord.”

Kon grew spiritually, assisted by a Bible study group led by a science teacher, where they studied the reliability of the Bible, science and archaeology included. Kon found the consistency of the Word of God most compelling:

Some 40 authors, spanning over 1,600 years on three continents, wrote in three languages the 66 books of the Old and New Testament. Although many of the authors’ paths did not cross, they wrote narratives, prophecies, and poetry that reveal the primary themes of creation (Genesis 1–2), corruption (Genesis 3), redemption (Genesis 4–Revelation 19), and restoration (Revelation 20–22). They focused on the good news in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is the Redeemer of man and creation. Jesus is also the future coming Messiah.

The evolutionary lecturers at the university constantly ‘challenged’ the Bible and Christians. For Kon, “Mendel’s experimental science and the consistency of the Gospel in early Genesis” were bulwarks during this formative time.

In his fourth year, Kon had friendly exchanges on evolution and creation with a lecturer in soil microbiology. “Thankfully, he didn’t mark down my essays despite their lack of evolutionary ideas.”

Kon served in the Christian student fellowship where he met LihJu, but she had to move away for work. After almost two years of long-distance courtship, they married during Kon’s masters’ studies in soil microbiology and plant nutrition. Soon after their first son was born, they returned to Malaysia, where Kon joined Ciba-Geigy (now part of Syngenta).

University in Australia

After working for two and a half years in crop protection, Kon said his “attraction to plants became a love-hate relationship with weeds.” In the 1980s, there were few weed scientists in Malaysia and he thought he could contribute more to crop productivity with weed science expertise. He resigned and the family moved to Perth, where he pursued a PhD in weed ecology and control “with a special focus on the prediction of weed resistance to herbicides.”

He managed to keep evolutionary slogans out of his doctoral thesis. Natural selection, yes, but evolution, no; they are not the same thing (see later).

Weeds develop naturally in crops. Kon cited Genesis 3:18–19 in the thesis preface:

Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Weeds are plants that reduce the value of a crop’s yield and/or quality. Inappropriate management practices assist weed species to adapt quickly to resist weed control measures. A classic example is the flat dicot weeds in lawns—they have resistance to the lawnmower.

Their second son was born in Perth during Kon’s last year of study there. The family moved back to Malaysia for Kon to work as Weed Control Group Leader at Ciba-Geigy’s state-of-the-art Rembau Field Station. His team conducted over 100 trials per year to evaluate new agri-chemicals, testing them on oil palm, rubber, rice, corn, and vegetables.

For a few years prior to retiring from Syngenta in 2022, he led a data science team to help biologists attain proper standards of scientific experimentation through hypothesis setting, protocol design, trial execution, and data analysis. This emphasis addresses the vital need for reproducibility in science.¹

Involvement with CMI

While in Perth, Kon connected with Creation Ministries International (CMI). He invited a Thai student to attend a CMI event with him, and used the occasion to share the Gospel with him. He also discovered Creation magazine, which he shared with team members of the Weed Control Group.

Kon says that believing the authority of the Bible about the events of early Genesis “has allowed me to live without contradictions.”

A fundamental distinction

In 2014, CMI invited Dr Kon to pursue speaker accreditation to reach out to the churches in Singapore. He says:

I spent two years learning the essentials of science from molecular biology to cosmology; I found it fundamental to differentiate experimental science from historical science.² Experimental science is observable through the scientific method based on hypothesis testing. It must be repeatable over time and reproducible by others. However, historical science deals with unique events that happened in the past, a bit like forensics. While pieces of evidence are collected from a crime scene to recreate an historical narrative, the most crucial evidence concerns eyewitness accounts. Similarly, both evolution and creation are historical science. Evolution is not supported by any eyewitness account. Biblical creation relies on the Chief Eyewitness, the Creator God, who conceived creation before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). Hebrews 11:3,6 tells us that:

3: By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

6: And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Is evolution necessary for scientific progress?

Promoters of evolution often claim that without evolution, science would not have progressed to give us the many innovations on which modern living depends. Dr Kon:

After working in my company for over 33 years, I can testify that my agricultural research did not depend on evolution. Evolution supposedly creates new features, leading to new types of organisms, by means of mutations, which are random changes to existing genetic information in the DNA. That is, mutations must create new complex features. We see no such mutations in herbicide resistance.

Weed scientists have found mutations that confer either target-site or non-target-site resistance. Target-site resistance affects the binding of the herbicide and its access to the target enzyme. Non-target-site resistance involves reduction in herbicide absorption or movement, or increased herbicide inactivation through sequestration or degradation. All mechanisms involve modifications to existing features. For example, loss of control over the production of an existing enzyme that degrades the herbicide can result in much more of the enzyme, which will then degrade the herbicide. Mutations, therefore, don’t produce the addition of the genetic information specifying brand new features that are needed for protists-to-palms evolution.

The repeated use of a narrow range of weed control methods selects for a resistant version of the weed species. For instance, the repeated use of a single mode of action herbicide like glyphosate results in the selection of resistant weeds. This then greatly complicates the weed management program, especially in soybean or corn that have been genetically modified to tolerate the herbicide.³

Natural selection in herbicide resistance is observable and reproducible, but it simply eliminates the susceptible and selects the resistant. It creates nothing. It is not ‘evolution’, although I find many evolutionists today speaking of examples of natural selection as if it is the same thing as evolution. It isn’t.

Biblical creation involved the supernatural power of God. Thus, it involves faith. But so does evolution, which is founded on the magic of matter coming from nothing and stupendously complex life arising from that matter. I’m thankful that God calls us to a reasonable faith (Matthew 22:37, 1 Peter 3:15).

Doctoral studies—some details

Dr Kon studied brome grasses (Bromus spp.) in southern Australia that had spread from pastures to invade cereals. He explains:

When the pasturelands were rotated to cereals, they became weeds. Brome grasses commonly compete in large numbers through a single flush of germination after the opening rains. This has been their primary mechanism of survival and reproduction in crops. They already had tolerance to the cereal-safe herbicides on the market. Removing them was possible only by growing a non-grass rotational crop like lupins. Here, either a pre-emergence herbicide (applied before the weeds emerged) or a post-emergence herbicide (applied after the weeds emerged) works to kill the weeds, but not the lupins.

My professor and I were interested in predicting the development of tolerance to these herbicides in the wheat-lupin rotation system in Western Australia. We used a model to predict the time to resistance based on the genetic parameters, seed biology, and selection pressure through cropping practices. Such predictive science was new and the Grain Research Council of Australia funded the project.