Dr. Hugh Ross Conference Weekend // Session 1 Q&A

so question 1 how many years does each day in creation represent and then also along with that we talked about this earlier can you give us your estimation of how old number 1 the earth but then also humanity has been around ok I think you all heard that question how old is the earth it's five point four four six two billion years plus or minus point zero zero zero one we know what to find place of decimal there's many more reasons why we know it's so accurately the a date for humanity would be somewhere during the last ice age Genesis two states that four rivers come together in the Garden of Eden those rivers are all named Genesis 2 tells us where they flow from and the only place they all come together is now 250 feet below sea level in the middle of the Persian Gulf but during the last ice age that was dry land and so God created Adam and Eve some time during the last ice age they say what's the date range for that 15 thousand to a hundred and thirty thousand years ago you say do we have a more accurate date than that well a scientific date based on DNA is that humans were originated a hundred and fifty thousand years ago plus or minus 150 thousand years so the biblical date is actually more accurate than the scientific date if you want the details we describe it in our book who was Adam but I would actually say that Adam and Eve were probably created earlier in that Ice Age period because Noah also is an ice age event because of how long it took the waters to recede described in Genesis chapter 8 but the first part of the question is how long or each of the days of creation in Genesis 1 I've look at the grammatical structure of the text these days are long time periods and they're consecutive so there's not gaps between the days and the days don't overlap their consecutive days but there's nothing in the Hebrew grammar or the definition for yom that would insist that there would be equal periods of time and the scientific record tells us that the days get shorter as you go from day one to day six so the longest day is day one the shortest day is day six you say well how long is the shortest day about 50 million years how long is the longest day nearly a billion years but the whole sequence is about 3.8 billion years okay here's a question concerning when you spoke about climate if we are designed for more warm climate than cold cold climate why did God do that why not create us to be more apt to both climates well ok the question is why didn't he design us right off the bat to build live in all climate zones well every species of life has a temperature range in which it can thrive the reason we human beings are not constrained by that is we're able to use our technology to design clothing and so when you go to a sports store you can buy clothing that has very good perspiration capability others that are designed to keep you really warm the fact that we're able to design all this clothing is what enables us to be able to thrive in all these different climate zones so yeah if God made us so we could do really well in a cold climate by giving us lots of fat making is kind of like a big round ball where short limbs we would not be able to handle a hot climate you got to be able to release heat efficiently the other thing that makes it difficult for us to build a survive in a wide climate range is the size of our brains okay the human brain is as big as the laws of physics will permit now that might disturb your enjoyment for certain science fiction stories but yeah the human brain is at the very top of what the laws of physics will permit and so the strain for human beings is be able to keep our brain cool enough that it doesn't kill our brain cells 35 percent of your blood flow supports your brain so here's just three pounds of your body and absorbs more than one-third of all your blood flow that's because of everything the brain is doing but it's also designed to try to keep it cool enough that it doesn't cook itself to death and so that's why you have to have a sophisticated range of clothing in order to be able to keep your body functioning keep in mind - God designed our bodies to last for eighty to a hundred years and this again requires a particular design of a body and so I think God did the right thing he made us bipedal which means very little sunlight falls on her body he made a slim which means we can radiate heat efficiently he gave us is we got the best perspiration system of any animal on the planet that allows us to keep our bodies cool in the space of heat and he knew that with our technology we could easily go the other way you can't go from being able to haul handle a cold climate to a hot climate but you can go from being able a hot climate to a cold climate simply through the use of clothing speak to us about climate change and then also your thoughts on the end times as it relates to the condition of the world plus the prediction of the end of the world as we see in the Bible okay that's all covered in the book and probable planet and it is out there at the table it's in Chapter 15 so you might want to just jump straight to chapter 15 because it'll tell you all about the Ice Age cycle and how it is we live in a planet where the ice cycles from 10% to 23% and I explained in that book why that's crucial to be able to have billions of people on a planet one time and the only time that the earth has had an ice age cycle is for the last point zero zero zero five seven part of its history we've had ice ages before but never in icy cycle this is the only time now what drives that ice age cycle are variations in the orbit of the earth and the tilt of our rotation axis and we've been able to document seven different cycles of the variation of either's orbit as rotation axes tilt and typically what these seven plus different cycles do is they lead to temperature chaos extreme climate instability so we've had an ice age cycle for 2.6 million years for all except the last nine thousand years the global mean temperature has been jumping up and down by 24 degrees Fahrenheit on timescales of two or three centuries that kind of temperature variation makes it impossible to engage in large-scale agriculture and without large-scale agriculture you can't support a billion plus human beings without large-scale agriculture you can't set the majority of your population free to do engineering art and science and music during the last ice age the whole population was engaging coming up with enough food and everything was on a small scale but for the last nine thousand years we've had extreme climate stability where the global mean temperature hasn't changed by more than three degrees Fahrenheit over those past nine thousand years and I wrote the book improbable planet to make the point rather than taking for granted our climate stability we need to realize it's a miraculous gift from God and we wouldn't have that if God hadn't caused all these cycles to perfectly come into sync but as an astronomer I can tell you it can't last forever at best we can sustain the climate stability for about another thirteen to fourteen hundred years now if you're premillennial as I am in my end times eschatology yet to subtract a thousand years because the Lord reigns on the earth for a thousand years which means we only got three or four hundred years left now that's the optimistic view the pessimistic view would say that climate instead climate stability will end in a hundred years or less so hundred years is a worst-case scenario best-case scenario above 1,400 years and I would also say that the book of jove encourages us to do everything we can to maintain the planet in the condition that god gave us it and so I'm a firm proponent saying yes as Christians we should work for climate stability however I just did a major critique of Al Gore's book above an index equal to an inconvenient truth making the point that he's making the same mistake he did in his original than Inconvenient Truth it's the inconvenience problem that's a an issue he's not taking into account the human beings are sinners because what he's calling for is a huge political movement to force people to give up their economic well-being to stabilize a climate the problem is most people don't want to give up their economic well-being and if we Americans do it the rest of the world is not going to follow suit and so it's gonna collapse but you can get the book hidden treasures in the book of Job or it basically make the point Genesis 1 gives us a command manage the planet for the benefit of all life but it doesn't tell us how job 37 38 and 39 tell you how to do that and what you see in the book of Job it gives us three pieces of counsel on how to do the ecologically beneficial thing for all life at the same time boost our economy so my critique of Al Gore he's calling for economic sacrifice the book of Job says here's some things you can do they'll actually increase your own economic well-being I mean if you put more money in everybody's pocket but a higher quality of food in everybody's plate and the same time stabilize the climate who's not going to vote for everybody's gonna want it and so I was one reason why I wrote hidden treasures in the book of Job and the sequel improbable planet is basically saying God has designed our planet and it's life in such a way then we face an ecological crisis and advance he's provided us with solutions that are ethically optimal at the same time economically optimal those are the solutions we need to seek and hey there in the oldest book of the Bible Wow I'm still thinking on your I'm sitting here reeling on so you're saying optimistically how long again 1,400 1,400 yet more realistically or is it a pessimistic view or realistically about how long a hundred years well I would say the hundred years scenario is more realistic if we're really intent on forcing people that make these economic sacrifices because basically do that it makes things worse not better and this isn't because you're taking into effect Biblical prophecy you're saying this is scientific agreement in the scientific community just looking at the orbit orbital variations of the earth there's no way you can put it off more than 1,400 years that would be a real stretch earlier over dinner we were talking about natural disasters and you made some real key comments just about the natural progression or just the natural disasters and how the Lord uses them even in very specific purposes can you can you talk them a little bit on that when we've seen Harvey we have sure another hurricane get her hit Florida right now well the book is not here but it's more than a theory where I devote a chapter to explaining how everything we refer to as a natural disaster or an act of God has actually optimally designed to be maximally beneficial for us human beings so for example we have the optimal number and intensity of earthquakes with the optimal number and intensity of forests and fires and with the optimal numbered intensity of hurricanes and you can go on down the list everything is optimized and the context of the universe with gravity thermodynamics and electromagnetism now I'll just take time to give you a little hint and what's so good about living on a planet with hurricanes okay what have we didn't have hurricanes like Herman hurricanes packed like as a thermostat and so when the ocean water gets really warm it causes a lot of evaporation which generates this circulation and causes the hurricane to move if that wasn't happening that tropical ocean waters would reach such a high temperature that would kill all the fish and the algae in the oceans and that would be devastating to the whole world so thanks because what tornados Arbour me hurricanes do they form over open warm tropical waters and they move north so they take the heat of that tropical ocean water and basically dump it on the continental land masses that are towards the north what actually makes our continental land areas warmer than they'd otherwise would be which is a good thing some other benefits you get is that they dump rain in places that otherwise would not get adequate rain now I know you're thinking about Houston they got a lot of rain in a very short period of time well let me take you to India and China especially India the people in India realize if it wasn't for typhoons and typhoons or hurricanes just another word for hurricane but wasn't for regular typhoons they call it a typhoon season the typhoon season which is enabling them to feed at billion plus people because thanks to the water delivery from the typhoons they're able to grow an abundance of food on the Indian subcontinent so the people in India are much more grateful for hurricanes and we are here in the United States because they're trying to feed a much larger population some other benefits we get from hurricanes as they dump a lot of chlorophyll on these shores of the continents which is actually in a major contribution to sustaining the ecosystem that lives at the seashores if you want more get more than a theory I kind of document all the benefits we get from hurricanes to a sufficient degree that when you have dinner tomorrow night you're gonna want to thank God for hurricanes and the other thing I'd point out is that we have exactly the right number and the intensity and incidentally the Hurricanes were ceasing seen today are kind of normative yeah we're getting a couple of big ones but if you look at it over a several centuries overseeing going on here in North America is not out of the norm you expect to get hurricane seasons like this not once in a while shift gears on you what is the what's the explanation for the lifespan of humans being so many that we read in the early testimony of Scripture and then all of a sudden now down to 70 80 by strength sure well the book is out there it's called navigating Genesis and there's a chapter in there explaining why it is of people in the days before Noah could live to be eight for nine hundred years and what a document in navigating Genesis is that humanity did not become global until the scattering of the nations after the flood you see that in the table of Nations Genesis chapter 10 Genesis 11 talks about how people persistent and rebelling against God by living in one place only God's intent was that we would become global but humanity was resolute and saying we're gonna build a city and a tower so we will not be scattered over the face of the earth and notice God adda forcibly scattering humanity over the face of the earth what was the rest of that question just the explanation of the long life always been Psalm 90 the 7080 bustering okay if you got humanity living in sedimentary Plains that means are going to be isolated from igneous rocks igneous rocks are loaded with uranium and thorium and the decay of that uranium and thorium works to shorten your lifespan now every human being on planet Earth today is exposed to igneous rocks every time you drive a freeway you're exposed to igneous rocks every time you get close to concrete you're exposed to igneous rocks but in the days of noah and adam and eve humanity was living in such a way where they're not exploiting those rocks for civilization so they were protected from that but what I documented navigating Genesis is a discovery by two astronomers a British astronomer Wolfen Dale and a Russian astronomer Oerlikon and they've been working for 35 years now and have been documenting how there's one supernova explosion that's responsible for over 95% of the killer cosmic rays we experienced and they've been able to show that that supernova exploded less than a hundred thousand years ago and exploded close to us in fact they have even identified the remnant of a supernova rupture the remnant is 25 degrees across in the sky which tells us it was really close to us now here's a scenario in the days before Noah that supernova hadn't yet exploded and so humanity was not exposed to those deadly cosmic rays whereas after that time they were and we still are exposed to those deadly cosmic rays and so take away the cosmic rays take away the igneous rocks and you can easily have people live eight or nine hundred years but given the cosmic rays near these rocks nobody's gonna make it much past 120 years as it says in Genesis chapter 6 verse 3 but what I also documented navigating Genesis we humans today have the longest average life span when you look at the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 it's mentioning the very few individuals that did not get murdered by the fellow man and so they were the lucky ones that died of natural causes they lived to be eight or nine hundred but the average lifespan was more like thirty or forty years because murder was totally utter control just to explain the lack of archaeological evidence for people living before the days of Noah means that the human population had to be really low and given their capability for reproduction at that time living eight or nine hundred years it means that the murder rate had to be above ninety five percent which means 95 percent of all human beings had their life terminated by being murdered by their fellow man which gives you some reason why God had to intervene with this flood humanity was in dangerous self extermination and so he delivered humanity from wiping themselves out and you can read about the propensity for murder in Genesis chapter six is particularly evident in the original Hebrew this question reads what about the errors in radiometric dating the possibility that God created the fossils also the lack of dust on the moon why the center of the Moon and Earth are still extremely hot after billions of years etc okay let me see if I can pick those up one at a time all this is covered in my book a matter of days and I checked it's out there so you can get all the details in the documentation in that the first one was regulated by the heirs and radiometric dating okay I don't even know what that means there just blame that to me well I think it's chapter 13 in a matter of days there's a whole chapter on radiometric dating first of all I make the point each radiometric tool has a range where it gives reliable dates as basically anywhere from a factor of six of the half-life so when they say that carbon-14 gives an unreliable date it will give an unreliable date for anything younger then above 1,400 years or anything older than above 40,000 years so from 1,400 years to 40,000 years it will give you reliable days beyond that it won't and also there's been critique that uranium dating gives errors well it will give errors if you're dating something less than 1 billion years the half-life of uranium 238 is 4.4 1 billion years so it's great for something that's between say 1 billion years and 9 or pardon me about 30 billion years that's where it's going to give you reliable days but if you're trying to date a Bible manuscript with uranium 238 you're gonna get an absurd date it's way outside the range the other point is you only get a reliable date with radiometric dating if the sample is pure and so there have been people who critique radiometric dating by saying look there's this Greek urn that gives three different dates well it's because the Greek Earnest papyrus which is going to give you one date there's a limestone crust on the Pyrus which form later is going to give you a different date and then you get an average of the two which is going to give you a third date but each of those three dates is accurate if you make sure you're looking at the pure component of the sample they might describe all this in a matter of days and really people who are trying to dispute the radiometric dates all of them claim that at the time of Noah or at the time of Adam's sin now or both the radiometric decay rates were accelerated by a factor of a million to a billion times but that conclusion contradicts what the Bible states the Bible states in seven different places the laws that God established for the universe do not change particularly Jeremiah 33 where God says of the Jews you're changing your mind all the time I'm God I don't change as proof that I don't change look at the laws that govern the heavens and the earth as they are changeless saw my changeless and as an astronomer I can tell you we can directly measure the laws of physics and stars and galaxies we're measuring the misery we're in the past and they're the same as they are today - better than 16 place of the decimal there is no change in the laws of physics which means there is no change in the radiometric decay rates which means it really do give us reliable dates and one of the ways I've found of persuading people of this is the ice cores in Antarctica because those ice cores have layers that are laid down every year and in those layers we can see that dust signatures of volcanic eruptions that happen in reported history which proves that the layers are annual but in those layers we also see who radiometric decay products and by looking over hundreds of thousands of these annual ice layers we can demonstrate that indeed the radiometric decay rates are reliable in the dates that they get and then was reward to the question or was that it did you answer the the fact above the moon that the heat and the moon and the Earth's core okay now the other one he was mentioning was about the dust on the moon just to be fair young earth creationists now recognize this is a very bad argument but it was an argument that was popular 10 and 20 years ago where they said we can measure the amount of cosmic dust falling on the earth and if that was to go on for four billion years there would be two to three hundred feet of dust on the moon and when the astronauts landed they only found 60 millimeters well as I point out the matter of days if you actually read the paper they were citing it was a guy by the name pedr pedr s'en who put up a filter on top of Mauna Kea Hawaii and he measured the dust coming through and he said of all the dust coming through his cosmic dust you would get to nor feet of dust on the surface of the Moon if the moon were four billion plus years old but he says we know that all the dust is not cosmic does most of it is recirculated terrestrial does and so what he called for in the paper was taking a satellite measurement of the amount of dust above the Earth's atmosphere and when that was done they're able to recalculate the amount of dust you would get on the moon if it's four and a half billion years old and the answer is it should be an average of 60 millimeters thick which is exactly what the astronauts measured when they went to the moon Wow just exactly that amount the other thing was about the heat and the core of the earth and the moon and the argument was well if the earth is for that billion years old it would have cooled down yes it would have been hot in its interior but it would cooled down well what they're overlooking is the amount of radiometric isotopes in the core of the earth it's much bigger than what we thought 50 years ago and that radiometric decay of uranium and thorium of potassium is easily capable of explaining the heat flow that's coming out of the earth and likewise the heat flow that's coming out of the planet Mercury and the planet moon do I cover the whole list yeah I think you did good okay all right how you doing you're doing all right fine you can go all night here we go this is about the flood mentioned the creation continents what do you say happen to the Earth's surface after Noah's Flood okay people who believe that the flood of Noah was global rather than universal to all humanity I mean I was sharing with people this morning the text you want to go to is second Peter 2 and 3 where it says of the flood second Peter 2 it wiped out the world of the ungodly people so as the world being godly that was destroyed not the entire planet and the second Peter 3 says cosmos --tote was covered those two Hebrew Greek words Cosmo today means the world at the time the event took place Peter was contrasting the world of Noah with the world of Rome both are less than the whole planet but he's making the point the world of Noah is not the same as the world of Rome and we had clear evidence that humanity had not yet inhabited Antarctica and Greenland at the time of Noah therefore there's no need for governed of for God to flood Antarctica in order to wipe out the world of ungodly human beings but those who take the view that the flood was global an extent also try to say that's when all a tectonic plate movement took place and so as I've read their literature they're saying before Noah's Flood there was a supercontinent Pangea and then during the five months of the flood it split apart and formed the seven continents we have on the face of the earth today well what they haven't taken into account as that requires about seven to eight thousand horizontal miles of plate tectonic movement and no people who make these comments really haven't felt a good-sized earthquake I'm from Southern California we feel in quite frequently in fact I remember one time where we were right on top of an epicenter of a magnitude six point one earthquake it moved our house by two inches and destroyed the furniture inside her bedroom we actually saw this piece of furniture fly across the room and shatter on the office of wall but because of her housing standards our townhouse was totally intact no damage at all we just had to replace the furniture that was two inches multiply that up to 7,000 miles and squeezed into a five-month window in fact it is such that in order to generate that kind of energy human beings would immediately incinerate and disappear likewise all life and the text tells us that did Anthony that the Ark was floating on relatively tepid water and so the continents we have today are exactly the same as a continents we had in the days before nor with very minor adjustments Hawaii is a little bit bigger today than it was before the flood because volcanoes are continuing to RuPt last question can you give us a teaser for the two messages that you'll do tomorrow okay a teaser for the two messages tomorrow okay the first message was going to be on what the animals teach us about the gospel of salvation how God uses birds and mammals to teach us five critical spiritual lessons it actually explains how it was that Joel was able to discern the Gospel message before any Scripture was available to him because he was in this intimate contact with birds and mammals and explains why so many people today don't believe I mean what's interesting is that the rise of atheism correlates with the rise of urbanization as people get cut off more and more from wild birds and wild mammals atheism belief and the fact that there is no God Rises whereas people I have that contact know that there must be God mater fanta they have sufficient contact they actually know the outline of a plan of salvation so we're gonna talk about that and hopefully I'm gonna encourage you to get outside once in a while and actually have contact with these animals I've done that I've gone to the wilds of Canada where humans have never been in over 50 years and you get to see how animals behave when they're not damaged by human sin they want relationship with us I was amazed at how these wild animals would first observe me and then they would come towards me and they want to contact with me I remember waking up on my pup tent one morning and they're right there inside the pup tent wanting that kind of contact and I can tell you other stories I had a cousin who was in a small rowboat out in the Georgia Strait and 50 foot gray whale came up right beside his rowboat he thought he was going to get capsized but the whale was very gentle did not capsize it and as soon as my cousin began to stroke the back of the whale it was very calm and suddenly the whale disappeared five minutes later came back with his calf and pushed the calf up so the calf could get that kind of contact anyway I got a few more stories I'll tell you tomorrow okay the second talk is gonna be called cosmic reasons to believe in Christ and Spacek a talk I'd develop because I'm involved in this atheist video dialogue or atheists around the world will engage me via video and there's this woman in Ireland who said I've read one of your books I understand how you science to prove that there's a God but how do you use science to go from God to D ISM deism to theism and theism to Jesus Christ without reference of the Bible just using science I said there are three ways that I know that I can explain it to you quickly I gave her all three ways tomorrow my last talk I'm gonna give you one of those three ways how you can use where we see in the universe to show not only must there be a God but it must be the Redeemer with God Jesus Christ of the Bible how we can use cosmology to establish that Jesus Christ indeed is our advocate and our Redeemer and so plan of salvation for the animals the plan of salvation through the stars in the galaxies that's tomorrow thank you amen you

Channel: Grace Church St. Louis

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Length: 34min 35sec (2075 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2017