Dr. Hugh Ross, Ph.D. Presents The Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home

good evening and welcome welcome to Trinity Classical Academy and our distinguished speaker evening and we are thrilled and privileged to have dr. Hugh Ross with us from reasons to believe dr. Philips our theology and science chair we'll be praying for us and introducing our guest speaker this evening but I'm so excited and encouraged to see so many of our students as well as so many different people from the larger community here this evening and for those of you that are at a Trinity Classical Academy event for the first time we do our distinguished distinguished speaker evenings for our community and the community at large to help them see that which we are trying to teach here at Trinity as a classical Christian school the mission of our school is to help teach the classical tradition within the Christian faith to produce young men and women of virtue wisdom purpose and courage that being about what we are trying to do for the next generation and I had a few of you asked my goodness I didn't even know Trinity existed here in this area this is our 16th year with students we will graduate our sixth class this year we started with kindergarten first and second graders 16 years ago added a grade every year and are now TK through 12th grade and believe it or not in this building five hundred and sixty students come through these doors in and out every day that we are privileged to serve so we are grateful that you are here this evening students I think you will be mightily blessed by the time this evening please welcome dr. P dr. Phillips our theology and science chair and he will pray for us [Applause] so greetings how's it going everyone yes I'm fairly excited students remember if if you are here tonight as one of my classes be sure to write your name on a note card turn it into me so I can make record of that and bring special blessings to you all right okay so be sure to do that I am very very excited that we're privileged really really privileged to have a a world-class speaker or world-class evangelist a world-class astronomer here with us tonight in dr. Hirose I have a very very special place in my heart for the reasons to believe ministry ministry that he founded in 1986 they just finished celebrating their 30th anniversary because it helped to give me permission when I became a believer as an adult helped to give me permission to be a scientist to hold to good true science and a Christian at the same time 90% of unbelievers or 90% of those who do not believe the Bible is true believe that because they think it is out of sync with science and the Ministry of reasons to believe reason to believe helps to overcome that myth and it was a major a major part in my early Christian walk for which I'm very very grateful dr. Hugh Ross got his bachelor's in physics from the University of British Columbia got his master's of science and his PhD in astronomy from University of Toronto he did some work at Caltech as well and is still ministering to many many of the people at Caltech through a class that he teaches at his church and we were talking earlier this evening about the pleasure and joy of seeing those cuter types of people having their minds and hearts open to the possibility of Jesus Christ and indeed coming to him and realizing that Christianity and science are not only compatible but they are really indispensable to one another and so I really encourage you tonight learn more after tonight about reasons to believe I think I've read all the books on that table and encourage you to do the same pick one or two of them up at least take them home you don't have to be like me and sleep with them under your pillow I think dr. Hugh Ross promised to do some tensor calculus tonight so he's not it's I'm just joking you should I went I would do the same thing tensor calculus meaningless to me but I think you will be you will be enriched you'll be encouraged if if you have never met Jesus Christ and you're here tonight we're really excited you're here because this is the kind of talk that gives you permission to keep your mind to keep your rational thought and become a follower of Christ and so you will be blessed like that tonight for those of you who are believers I think your faith will be indeed strengthened by what you hear tonight when you see that God has indeed given us primary revelation through the Scriptures and he's given us revelation of himself and his glory through the book of nature so let me open in prayer and then we'll hear from dr. Ross Oh Lord thank you so much for your word that is indeed our primary source of truth and we thank you also for the record for the book of nature which reveals your glory indeed Lord we're grateful to you that the heavens do declare your glory and that they shout your glory they shout your presence and we're grateful to you that you have created us imago Dei and given us the privilege and the ability to study your universe and find your handiwork in it to see your prints to see your artistry throughout this we pray your blessings on the ministry of reasons to believe that it would continue to strengthen the faith of believers and to reach unbelievers across the world as it has done for 30 years we pray for tonight's presentation that dr. Ross will speak your words will speak your truth that it will be encouraging we thank you so much for bringing him here ask your blessings on him now and in Jesus name we pray and give this evening to you amen ladies and gentlemen dr. Hugh Ross well thank you for inviting me here and as you heard the introduction I was born raised and educated in Canada and my pursuit of astronomy began when I was seven that's when I started reading five books a week in astronomy and physics kind of upset my parents they tried to get me into biology and other things but I went back to astronomy and physics and I didn't really get to know Christians until it was 27 years of age they're hard to find in Canada especially where I was being raised in fact Caltech was the first place I really got to know a Christian personally but it was my astronomy that persuaded me there had to be a God why because in astronomy you've got what's called the Big Bang creation model and the Big Bang creation model says the universe as a beginning and there's a beginner that's responsible for that universe and so it's have motivated me to begin looking at the world's religions and it was through a Gideon Bible that I eventually gave my life to Jesus Christ and then at Caltech I got to know Christians and they told me how to find a church I never was able to find a bible-believing Church in Canada but they're all over the place here in California and I've been on the pastoral staff of a church between Caltech and JPL for the last 42 years and it was that church that helped me found there's organization reasons to believe and reasons to believe is all about new reasons to believe because one thing I've discovered as an evangelist it's much easier to engage people on something that happened two or three days ago and so we use the new reasons to believe as a bridge to bring people to the traditional reasons to believe in Jesus Christ as creator Lord and a Savior and if you go to our book table you can pick up one of these cards it's a quick summary of what we consider to be the most effective scientific evidences for persuading people have never been to church who don't know Christians that indeed the Bible is the Word of God and that the Christian faith is correct so take that with you I've encouraged you to think of someone you can get that away too there's also a tear-off there where you can fill out your name and contact information if you hand that in we'll give you this free DVD where I basically tell a story if I was strana me in physics brought me to faith in Christ and also features me answering questions that skeptics raised so that's a free gift as you walk out and again I would encourage you not only to watch it but to think of someone you can get that away too now what I'm going to be talking about tonight comes from a Bible study I did four years ago where I went through the major creation texts of the Bible and when it discovered is every one of those texts links the doctrine of creation with a doctrine of redemption how we human beings can come into a relationship with a creator of the universe and also found some passages that tell us that God begins his works of redemption before he creates anything give an example 2nd Timothy 1:9 the grace of God that we now experience was put into effect before the beginning of time or Titus 1:2 the hope that we share in Jesus Christ was given to us before the beginning of time so even before God created space and time he was already beginning his works of redemption now as a scientist I said if that's really the case it would seem to imply that everything that we see in the universe the earth and Earth's life and every event in the universe earth and Earth's life would play a role in making possible the redemption of billions of human beings and so that launched a three-year study the scientific literature to put that to the test and that's what resulted in our publishing this book why are the improbable planet you'll see it out there and that's really what we're talking about tonight and what I've discovered in the process of that three-year study is that my peers and astronomy all accept what's called the anthropic principle then we look at the universe we see it's been fine-tuned to make possible the existence of life but what you'll see in the book and probable planet is that the amount of fine-tuning in need not to just to have life but to have human beings it's exponentially greater but the greatest exponentiation of all is a fine-tuning design you need for billions of human beings to hear the message of salvation and respond to that message of salvation in thousands of years as opposed to millions of years so I'm going to give you a little brief synopsis of that three-year research study tonight and I'm gonna try to focus on the things you're most familiar with events in the history of Earth and Earth's life that happened in the recent history of the earth rather than the deep history but hey as an astronomer I really like the deep history stuff but you like to get the book to get that I'm just gonna do this isn't time tonight and in the book you'll find hundreds of different miraculous interventions that the Creator performed and make possible the redemption of billions of human beings tonight I'm just going to address three of these and the three I'm going to focus on are the following in order for billions of humans to be redeemed the earth has to be in an Ice Age cycle moreover we have to be at the end of an ice age cycle where the interglacial ran now has features that have never existed before and likewise the Ice Age of preceded the interglacial has had features that the earth has never experienced before and number two it's only possible if the Sun is exactly middle-aged and number three we need extreme climate stability for this to be possible no the earth has had ice ages before although if you actually looked at the history of the earth ice age events are rare for 90% of Earth's history there's been no ice on the planet at all not even at the poles so it's been ice-free for 90% of its history however only in the last point zero zero five seven part of Earth's history have we had an ice age cycle our planet has never had an ice age cycle except for the very recent history of the earth now some of you might not be familiar with a term so let me just focus on North America right now we're in a warm interglacial but notice we still have ice 10% of Earth is covered with a thick layer of ice so for example in North America almost all of Greenland is covered with thousands of feet of ice and you see some ice pack on the Canadian mountains and in the northern Canadian islands now that's the interglacial if we go back 26,000 years 55 percent of North America was covered with thousands of feet of ice and this is the the whoopers scene it's a cycling between 10% ice and 20 to 23 percent ice covering the planet but I'll share this with you a cognate that had the biggest Ice Age cycle impact as North America no other continents had such an extreme from 10% to 55% ice coverage in the cycle a cycle is roughly a hundred thousand years so you have a 10,000 year warm interglacial like we're in right now where there's only 10% ice coverage then you get about 90,000 years where he got 20 to 23 percent of her planet being covered with ice and so this shows you the last eight cycles and only the last eight cycles has the periodicity than a hundred thousand years there was a short period of time before that where was 41 thousand years but notice it was 41 thousand years the warm interglacials only lasts two thousand years the warm interglacial in right now is the longest period warm interglacial our planet has ever had it's about fourteen thousand years all the previous ones were shorter than that so we've been blessed with an extra long warm interglacial now what I want to review for you the next few minutes is why it's critical that we be living in an ice age cycle in order for billions of human beings to live here on planet Earth and that later we'll talk about why it's necessary to be in an Ice Age cycle so that US billions of human beings can actually have the kind of technology and civilization where billions of us can hear the Gospel message and respond to that gospel message of salvation through Jesus Christ okay reason number one in order to grow enough food to feed billions of human beings we need to be in a warm interglacial where our great agricultural planes are being watered from the melting of ice left over from the last ice age north america is a prime example of this all the great rivers of North America are being fed by the melting of glaciers left over from the last ice age and when that ice is gone we're no longer gonna be able to grow the quantity of food that we can grow here in North America but this is also true of the other great agricultural plains so for example we have the greatest food production in China in India but that food production is possible because of the great rivers of flow out of the ice pack of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau and it's basically ice that leftover from the last ice age that's melting Europe for example is a big ice pack or the elf sand or the caucuses and the melting of that ice allows the irrigation of the great European Plain and here in North America our prairies are being melted likewise from the melting of that ice this particular map shows you the extent of the last ice age so this takes you back 26,000 years and that blue part shows you the boundary where the ice was at least 1500 feet thick now the ice actually extended a lot lower fact most of California was covered in ice in the last ice age it just that it wasn't 1500 feet plus thick but all of Ohio was covered with thousands of feet of ice a second benefit is when ice from the previous ice age begins to melt what happens is you now have a dew neuting of the high plateaus and the melting of the ice causes a powerful wind to blow off of those high plateaus and dump very rich dust upon the lower agricultural Plains and this actually works to fertilize it one reason why we can grow as much food as we can grow in the Chinese and Indian Plains here in North America and the great European Plain is that they get fertilized with every Ice Age so every hundred thousand years you get a fresh dump of fertilizer some other benefits as the glacier begins to retreat the retreating of the glaciers as the glaciers retreat and particularly the last ice age you have the heaviest ice pack that's ever existed in the ice age cycle and it retreated very rapidly it's the most rapid retreat we've seen in the ice age cycle and that rapid retreat carved out lakes over all the places were thousands of feet of ice resided also cause great rivers to form and and also carved out great relief I mean for example think of you cemani Valley and Yosemite Valley was carved out during the last ice age it's a relatively new phenomena when you go to Yosemite Valley but if you've been there you've got these canyon walls that are thousands of feet too steep that was all carved out by retreating ice and then as that retreating ice melts you get waterfalls flowing over the cliffs and there you got cheap hydropower not too effective here in California because the ice is melted away and so you got tiny waterfalls going over those canyon walls in Yosemite but if you go up into Canada you see really big rivers flowing over these are canyon walls left over from the last ice age so for example Canada gets virtually all of its hydroelectric all of its electric power from waterfall in fact most of New England New York and Pennsylvania Massachusetts they get their electricity from water power that comes from Canada let me give you a blow-up here okay I'm a Canadian but one of things that you need there was a little fact about Canada Canada by itself has more lakes than the rest of the world combined if it wasn't for the last ice age Canada would be a barren desert Canada gets very little precipitation that's because there's these millions of lakes with rivers connecting these lakes and melting ice lifts or from the last ice age that's feeding those rivers and lakes and instead of Canada being in barren and desert it's a lush forest over the whole area until a lesser degree that's also true of Siberia and let me give you a little blow-up here of the province of Quebec if you look at that map you can see how much it's dominated by rivers and lakes and waterfalls now point number two not only do you need to be in an ice age and incidentally there's many more benefits from living in an ice age I describe circle more on the book but this is enough to give you I think some idea when you go home tonight thanking God for the fact that we live in an Ice Age cycle we wouldn't even have what we had tonight without that but number two in order for billions of us to be alive right now the Sun has to be middle-aged in fact it has to be virtually perfectly middle-aged and the principle is this all stars are like human beings that are unstable when they're young they're unstable when they're old they're only stable in their middle age and let me show you this Wow with this respect to our star of the Sun know of all the stars that exists stars that are exactly the mass of the Sun are the most stable of all the stars that are more massive or less massive are really problematic but even with our start of the Sun you've got to be careful what time you're living in the history for the Sun so this little graph here shows you the level of solar flaring activity with respect to the history of the Sun and also shows you the level of ultraviolet radiation and x-ray radiation coming out of the Sun and let me remind you that the scale on the left there is logarithmic what I mean by that is there's a factor of a million difference between the top of that curve and the bottom of that curve and that little dotted line shows you where we are right now so this indicates that we are at that one moment in the history the Sun we got the least amount of deadly flaring activity and the least amount of ultraviolet and x-ray radiation and that's what makes possible billions of us to be able to live here on planet Earth but it's more dramatic than what that graph indicates because what we were able to find starting about eight to ten years ago we're looking at neutrinos coming out of the Sun I won't tell you what neutrinos are they're just basically weird fundamental particles but because of those neutrino observations were able to deduce that the Sun entered an exceptionally stable luminosity phase in its burning history beginning 50,000 years ago and those same neutrino measurements tell us it's going to end in less than 50,000 years probably just 40,000 years what does that tell us there's a window smaller than a hundred thousand years wide in which it is possible for a large population of humans to live in Planet Earth it gives you some appreciation why God waited so long to create us human beings we were created any earlier we'd be in trouble we were created any later we have been in trouble this is the only window in which it is possible given the physics of the Sun so flaring minimum occurred when the Sun is 4.5 7 billion years old which is how old it is right now but the window of time in which we human beings can exist in a civilized state is less than a hundred thousand years long so you might want to take that into account your investment portfolio I wouldn't plan any further ahead than 40 thousand years ok but this raises a major problem because we astronomers know that right now the Sun is brighter than it's ever been in the history of life on planet Earth this is a graph showing you the physics of the brightness of the Sun now when the Sun is first born it's accumulating mass which makes a brighter and brighter than it begins to lose mass then it stops losing mass and stabilizes but what happens once it stabilizes is it's now fusing hydrogen into helium the Sun is a gigantic hydrogen bomb and that fusion process results in the Sun burning brighter and brighter as it gets older and older I think you see the problem one requirement for billions of us to live here is we have to be living in an ice age cycle but a second requirement the Sun has to be perfectly middle age that is perfectly little age look how bright the Sun is and remember I said earlier for 90% of Earth's history there's been no ice on the planet at all so now we got an enigma the Sun is brighter than it's ever been in the history of life on planet Earth this should be a period of time when our planet has no ice at all and yet it has ice has enough face to have an ice age cycle and so for about a 40 year period astronomers and geophysicists were working how do we resolve the problem of this enigma I have a very bright Sun and yet we got ice here and planet Earth and how rare that is in the history of Earth as we go back in time now just to give you an idea of the brevity of this ice age cycle let me blow up this graph were only looking at the last half billion years see the width of that little line there that's the period of time in which we have ice here on planet Earth during that time period so only a very narrow sliver of the history of the earth do we have this Ice Age cycle and operation in fact if we look at the hundred thousand year cycle the cycle is crucial for billions of us to be alive today that's only point zero zero zero one seven part of Earth's history so just a little tiny sliver in which it is all possible no we've been able to resolve the Enigma of why our planet has ice when the brightness of the Sun would dictate we should have no ice at all what I'm going to share with you is that there's been five simultaneous unprecedented tectonic events that transformed our planet from being warm with no ice at all into having an ice age cycle all five must happen at the same time if you take one of the five away our planet is ice-free all five had to combine so let me share tectonic event number one that's what happened to the continent of Antarctica if you go back a few million years Antarctica was attached to Australia you may have heard of the Great Australian Bight is that kind of curve at the south of Australia that's where Antarctica split off and got separated from Antarctica but then it got attached to South America and then only about ten million years ago to break off from South America and then it began to move away from South America and landed square on top of the South Pole and so it moved away from South America got to the South Pole and it stopped but what's unique about the continent of Antarctica there's open ocean all the way around notice there's a huge swath of ocean completely circumnavigating Antarctica what that allowed was for very powerful ocean currents to circulate around Antarctica it also generated powerful winds if you're a fan of sailing boat novels of the 19th century era 18th century era you may be aware of what they call the Roaring Forties this is between 40 and 50 degrees south latitude where the winds blow 40 miles an hour all the time and and then there's this powerful current in the ocean that's connected with that the combination those winds and that powerful current worked to cool Antarctica and since it's situated the South Pole that was a second cooling effect now you're probably aware there's thousands of feet of ice covering virtually all of Antarctica that ice is recent it's only been there for the last three million years and so this tectonic event allowed all that ice to form now ice as the property that a reflects sunlight more efficiently then continental dirt or open ocean water and so all that ice packed over Antarctica works to cool the planet in the way it reflects sunlight but there's a second cooling in fact that circulation of that powerful current around Antarctica also causes a current of water to move up from Antarctica through the South Atlantic and into the North Atlantic and so thanks to the tectonics of what happened to Antarctica the entire Atlantic Ocean is cooled way below where it was before Antarctica got an ice pack over it all okay as tectonic event number one number two has what happened here in North America mainly what happened to Greenland if you go back again a few million years Greenland was situated off of Newfoundland and then it began to move north where today the northernmost landmass on her planet is the northern tip of Greenland it literally moved north by eleven hundred miles and was moving in a fairly rapid velocity but then it's stopped when it landed right on top of what's called a hot plume a hot plume is where he got hot magma coming up in the interior of the earth and penetrating close to the surface of the earth and what that hot plume of magma did is it took Greenland which had an average elevation of only a few hundred feet and turned it in to an island where the average elevation was now eight to ten thousand feet so the raising up of the Greenland landmass in terms of his elevation and his location where it's so close to the North Pole caused a heavy pack of ice to form over almost all of its area and again ice reflects sunlight better than any other reflective surface here in planet Earth and that worked to cool North America and the rest of our planet okay event number three is what happened to Pangaea how many of you heard of Pangaea okay almost all of you great one of the features of planet Earth is it goes to what's called a supercontinent cycle where you've got a single continent that breaks up into multiple continents and then it comes back together to form a supercontinent and breaks up again the entire cycle takes about a half billion years so every 1/2 million years you get a supercontinent Pangea was a supercontinent a quarter of a billion years ago it has split up but only in this particular supercontinent cycle do we see these broken up continental land masses and congregating together around the North Pole so as we look at the northern hemisphere where we notices almost all of the continental landmass is above the equator there's not much below the equator as you look at these continents you see that they oriented themselves in such a way as to virtually enclose the Arctic Ocean now before that enclosure happened the Arctic Ocean was open liquid water there was no polar ice cap but as thanks to this enclosure that a polar ice cap began to form now our a polar ice cap is not very thick it's not like Antarctica the polar ice cap is only about six feet thick however is floating on water and reflects sunlight so again this is another factor that works to cool the planet day number four is what happened in North and South America so if you go back ten million years notice that there is a huge open ocean between North America and South America what that allowed was warm Pacific Ocean water at the equator to flow unempioyed into the Atlantic and what that did is a blunted the cooling effect of that cold Antarctic water so yes there's Antarctic water flowing up through the Atlantic but then it comes into contact with his warm Pacific Ocean water coming through that gap between North America and South America but as you can see here beginning about five million years ago the gap began to close and it became completely closed three million years ago where now there's a land barrier that prevents this equatorial warm Pacific ocean water from going and in Atlantic and therefore the cooling effect from this Antarctic current was much enhanced thank to the formation of the Isthmus of Panama now the last one I'm going to talk about is the most dramatic tectonic event of all totally unprecedented in the history of the earth it's what happened to the Indian subcontinent so if you go back about 20 million years ago we had eight continents today we have just seven because the Indian subcontinent has now joined with the Asian continent but again if you go back a few tens of millions of years the Indian subcontinent was attached to the island of Madagascar then it broke off and it began to speed at a high velocity towards Asia now this is the fastest tectonic movement in the entire history of the earth let me demonstrate this for you okay a normal really fast tectonic plate movement is about two centimeters per year what we're seeing with the Indian subcontinent is 22 centimeters per year so allow it a model for you the two centimeters per year it'd be like I was doing this and now we're going to show you how the Indian subcontinent moved okay that fast okay consequently when the Indian subcontinent it literally tore up the ocean floor between India and Asia and crumpled it up and those are the Himalayas the Himalayas are crumpled up ocean floor that resulted from the collision of India with Asia now the collision is still ongoing now it's only five centimeters per year but that five centimeters per year ranks as a second fastest tectonic movement in the history of the earth and so the Himalayas are still rising the Tibetan Plateau is still rising so Sir Edmund Hillary did not climb the tallest mountain the world Mount Everest is now a foot and a half taller than when he climbed to the top of it in the 1950s and if you're interested the second fastest tectonic uplift on planet Earth today are the San Gabriel Mountains they're going up 9 millimeters per year I mean we live close to the foothills and I tell my sons were owners of future mountain property ok but what this did as India crashed into Asia the Himalayas formed that Tibetan Plateau began to expand and push up the average elevation of the plateaux today is 17,000 feet above sea level even though it's close to the equator it's high enough up that ice will form and accumulate there okay here's a quiz for all of you where on earth do we find the largest store of ice in this warm interglacial this is an easy one okay shouldn't be hard Antarctica he's correct that's by far the biggest store of ice and planet Earth today what's the second biggest store of ice on planet Earth today I heard Greenland okay that's right that's number two what's number three okay when they usually get asked that question people say it's got to be the Arctic ice cap the Arctic ice cap is number four number three is a store of ice or the Himalayas and a Tibetan Plateau but because it's so close to the equator it reflects sunlight four times as efficiently as the Sun being reflected off of Antarctica it's because of the angle of the sunlight and so this actually has the biggest cooling effect on a planet of any of these five tectonic events and because it's still crashing into India earned Asia at five centimeters per year every ice age and the ice age cycle gets more severe than the previous one so the most severe ice age in the entire ice age cycle is the one that just preceded us why because India are pardon me that Tibetan Plateau is still going up so every Ice Age you get a bigger pack of snow covering Tibet and the Himalayas now again take away any one of these five you don't get any ice you need all five and even with all five given I'll bright the Sun is it's barely cold enough to get ice on planet Earth and that explains why we have an ice age cycle it's barely cold enough to get ice which means you're going to get a cycling of that ice why because of the subtle changes that are taking place in the orbit of the earth about the Sun now a lot of you students here have taken some classes and what's happening with the planets you've probably been taught about Newton's laws of motion where all planets go around their stars with elliptical orbits but one thing I want to share with you is a tiny variation in the ellipticity of that orbit about the Sun sometimes it's a little more elliptical sometimes a little less elliptical when it gets a little more elliptical it has the effect of warming the climate of the earth when it's less elliptical things get cooled off the other thing that happens is that the tilt of the earth relative to the plane of the solar system that changes about by about two degrees right now the tilt of our orbit is about 23 and 1/2 degrees and it's heading towards 24 degrees and then it gets down to about 22 to two degrees the greater the tilt the warmer the climate on earth becomes and so the variation in the tilt of our orbit has a forty one thousand year cycle so until a hundred thousand years ago the ice age cycle was a forty one thousand year periodicity but now it's such that the shape of the Earth's orbit is the dominant effect on the climate of the earth that explains why we have a roughly one hundred thousand year cycle and this is what it actually looks like in terms of a temperature this is the global mean temperature of the earth throughout the last four hundred thousand years and actually I showed you two cycles the forty one thousand year cycle the tilt of Earth's orbit the hundred thousand years cycle of the shape of its orbit there's actually five more cycles that are involved seven cycles and because there's seven cycles it does chaos with the temperature of the earth so as you see here during the last four ice ages yes we can see a rough hundred thousand year period but notice throughout there that temperature global mean temperature is going up and down quite wildly now I'm going to show you a blow-up of the last ice age where we get that picture of the temperature change and you can see that the temperature global mean temperature is jumping up and down by 24 degrees Fahrenheit over timescales of just a few centuries that's all because there's seven different cycles affecting the climate of the earth and it's all because earth is very delicately balanced between no ice and lots of ice so we have this ice age cycle now if you read Genesis 2 it tells us that God created human beings during the last ice age say how do you get that it names for rivers that come together in the Garden of Eden it tells you geographically where those rivers flow from two of them still flow today the Tigris and Euphrates the Gihon and the Pichon have stopped flowing why because there's no melting ice to feed the ghee on the Pichon anymore during the last ice age there was lots of ice feeding those rivers incidentally the Tigers knew Freddy's flow today because of ice left or from the last ice age there's a band of ice at 17,000 feet in the Caucasus Mountains that are feeding the Tigris and the Euphrates but yeah just go back on the last ice age you got all four rivers flowing and a text tells us they come together in one place in the Garden of Eden now I could show you a satellite image it shows you where the two dry riverbeds of the Gihon and P Shan are and we can trace where they all come together they come together in a location on a planet that today is 300 feet below sea level basically in the southeastern part of the Persian Gulf but during the last ice age it was not below sea level the sea level has risen 330 feet since the last ice age so the Garden of Eden was dryland during the last ice age today it's under 300 feet of a water but that tells us that God created Adam and Eve during the last ice age I could also take you to the flood chapters in Genesis also tells us that Noah was alive during the last night Oh it's brand-new and you'll see this in the book and probable planet as we now have archaeological evidence the humans journey in the last ice age were really doing everything they could to launch advanced civilization but what's stymied them weathers radical temperature variation we now have evidence that humans living thirty forty thousand years ago were growing grains they're roasting the grains grinding the grains and the flour and using the flour for bakery products that's not new it's been around literally for almost forty thousand years and maybe even earlier however because of this extreme climate instability their farms were tiny two or three acres at the most and what farmers had to do was plant 12 different crops and Counting the fact that these temperature variations would destroy eight of those crops but they would feed their family on the three or four crops have made it same thing with animal husbandry they couldn't count on which animals are gonna survive and which ones wouldn't survive so it was all mixed farming and very small farms now that prevented the human population for getting very large during the last ice age 99% of the population was involved in trying to come up with enough food you wanna know what the percentages today in the United States of America only 1% of our population is engaged in trying to produce food the other 99% of us are playing video games or doing engineering or science or law or medicine one reason why we see such rapid technological advance 99% of us don't have to worry about where food comes from but that was not possible during the last ice age because of what was happening to the extreme temperature variations and incidentally it was the same radical temperature variations during the warm interglacials until this warm interglacial this is the only warm interglacial for all seven cycles driving this temperature variation came into sync and gave us this only for the last 9,000 years that we had extreme climate stability where the global mean temperature has not varied by more than two degrees Fahrenheit that's what has enabled us to plant these enormous farms and grow this huge surplus of food and set most of our population free to do things like engineering and science and medicine law and all the other professions that we have and it's because of that extreme climate stability that that is possible no I've spoken about this on university campuses and a common response I get from the unbelieving scientists we just think this is a sheer coincidence and so we'll wait a minute we're here at the only time in the sun's history where we got the solar stability that would make our existence possible at this population level five simultaneous unprecedented tectonic events moreover it's the only time in the history of the earth where we've had no nearby supernovae Russians supernova Russians are common in our Milky Way galaxy that's actually a critical requirement for advanced life to exist in a galaxy but over the last 10,000 years the closest supernova has been 5,000 light years away far enough away it has no impact on her agriculture it has no impact on her human health but during the last ice age there were five of those events so explains why there were health issues and also why humans not only because of the temperature instability because of the supernova RUP shins were not able to grow the food that we can grow today and I could go on and again when I'm in front of a technical audience I say hey I gave you three you want I can give you a hundred more and you come up with those extra hundred they realize this is not a coincidence everything is fitting in this has got to be designed for the purpose and particularly when you realize all this design makes possible the redemption of human beings one way I define a miracle where you see fine-tuning design that would never happen if there was no intentional involvement and were that purposeful fine-tuning design makes possible the redemption of human beings so the fact that we can see a spiritual benefit and not just a physical benefit and again my peers are not Christians although looking at as a physical benefit but as a Christian I look at the spiritual benefit as well not only is allowing billions of us to enjoy high-technology civilization and also allows billions of us to be able to hear the gospel and respond to that Gospel message let me close with a verse from revelation 7:9 before me was a great multitude that no one could count for every nation tribe people and language you know when Jesus left Earth he said I will return when you who are my followers take the message of salvation to all the people groups of the world and this text tells us it's not going to be a small number what is uncountable me well the Greeks at that time had a number system that went up to 1 billion so it's telling us there will be billions of humans they'll be standing before God in the new creation praising him for what he has done through making possible us having an eternal loving relationship with the one that created everything want to read more you can get this book and probable planet we have a lot of other books out there a principle we have at reasons to believe every book we publish is designed to be a book that you can give away where someone reading that could come to faith in Christ simply through reading the book we've seen thousands of people come to faith in Christ simply through reading our books so again I'll encourage you to read it but think of someone you can give the book away to I'm going to take questions I'll take questions on any subject that has to do with faith science the Bible other philosophies other religions I only have one rule when I do a Q&A time you've got two questions I'm going to ask you to take two separate turns and no fair giving me a six part question okay but that let's throw it open to whatever questions you might have ok so let's do it this way if you have a question why don't you come forward and line up and that way you'll be on the microphone and everyone can hear your question we won't have to repeat it does that sound like a winner to everyone and while you're thinking about your amazing question - right I've been communicating with my students this week and some of them have already turned in some questions there were some athletes who wanted to be here tonight they gave me some questions and I was talking to dr. Ross about one earlier and and it seems to recur in the classroom as well as for dr. Ross and the question goes something like this because there is so much fine-tuning not only to the universe not only to the planet I mean I I hope I mean was this just amazing tonight to see the fine-tuning of just the tectonic plates and the ice age cycle all at the same time of the Sun being where it is all that coming together and so the question that students often ask and it's a great one with all of this fine-tuning evidence in the universe in earth in biology and molecular biology and cell biology why why are there still so many who hold to a naturalistic worldview that is a view of the of reality that does not leave room for God and I think that'd be a great one to start with well it's actually a question that an agnostic astronomer got started answering he wrote a paper was published in the scientific literature and said isn't an interesting or the past 30 years the anthropic principle has become the prebiotic principle and when he's making the point was 30 years ago my peers were talking about the amazing design that makes possible the existence of humans or they're functionally equivalent in the universe but because of the theological implications of that conclusion what's happened with my unbelieving peers is that they basically looked at the enthroned suppo and said what fine-tuning do we need to get the prebiotic building blocks for life so no longer are we talking about the fine-tuning for humans we're talking about the fine-tuning for things like amino acids and the sugars and the nucleotides you know the simple building blocks of life and that's one way to put God at a greater distance and so here is this agnostic astronomer saying we need to go away from the prebiotic anthropic principle to the real anthropic principle what explains why I became began my talk by saying there's one level of fine-tuning design you need just to get a simple bacterium the level of design you need to get microbes lasting on a planet for a billion years or more it's literally 10 to the 300 times greater that's 300 zeros after the 1 now if you want the fine tuning design that makes possible plants and animals again you gotta go another factor of 10 to the 300 it just jumps exponentially and is even a greater jump when you go from animals and plants to human beings but the greatest jump of all is when you go from human beings to a realm where billions of us can be redeemed into a relationship for Jesus Christ that was really the motivation from my writing and problem planet saying have I can actually persuade my peers and astronomy and physics and the other disciplines of science that the most efficient way to advance scientific research is to interpret the realm of nature from a redemptive perspective and we're already putting this to the tests of reasons to bleed indeed the most efficient way to advance the scientific enterprise is to interpret the universe the earth and all of its life from the perspective of a creator that wants to redeem billions of human beings when I speak on a university campus I challenged my Peters and say I'm making this claim why don't you put it to the test I mean you got your way of doing scientific research this is another way which model develops the most efficient and dramatic scientific advances and we're actually getting people to listen to that however to finish the answer the question keep in mind Romans 1 verses 18 to 32 will always stand which basically says God has made himself clearly evident and his attributes to what he's revealed in nature but people who are in rebellion to the authority of God over their life will engage in self impose ignorant they know that the record of nature speaks of God but they closed their minds to it and so often when we have to deal with is not the intellectual barriers but the heart barriers and keep in mind the Bible's told us that we'll never be a majority that become followers of Jesus Christ but also tells us it's not going to be a small minority I believe it's going to be the neighborhood of say thirty to forty percent so there's a lot of people out there that we still need to bring to faith in Jesus Christ but I'm arguing this is a new tool or we can perhaps help make that happen great thank you other questions we'll run to you yes um one of the I guess with young earth creation is this theological question is that they argued that after the fall death entered into creation and prior to that no death how does that jive with a million years a billion years a very good question and what young earth creationists do is they quote part of Romans 5:12 where they try to claim it says death entered the world through Adams offence but if you actually read the entire verse it says death through sin because of Adam's offence was visited upon all people but you notice there by the wording is that it says it's a death you get through sin well that means it's human beings only humans amongst all life on planet Earth are spiritual but the capability of experiencing sin my dog doesn't sin but my sons do sin and I sin and then he says death to all people it doesn't say death to all life and so what Paul was saying in the book of Romans is that when Adam and Eve sinned in their rebellion against God's Authority that's when death for the first time was visited upon human beings the Bible says nothing about when death came upon the life that preceded human beings in fact their passages speaking about God's creation previous to Adam and Eve that basically make the point that God created predators and he blesses the Predators with providing them with prey and from a biological perspective the suffering and the death of the herbivores skyrockets when you take away the carnivores the carnivores are actually a blessing for the herbivores it's because of the way God designed the carnivores except for human beings all carnivores are designed in such a way that they cannot kill healthy adult prey they have to feed themselves on the weak the sick and the dying and the disease and by doing that they actually increase the health of the herbivore population and they lengthen the lifespan of the herbivores in the population he actually get a greater number of the herbivores and you would if you take away the carnivores no younger creationist said well couldn't God have done it so none of that would be possible I said yes but now you're no longer gonna have gravity and thermodynamics and electromagnetism and those three laws of physics are crucial for eliminating evil and suffering once and for all I won't go into details there's a book back there why the universe is the way it is which tells you why we need physics to be exactly the way it is for the Creator the universe to rapidly and efficiently eliminate evil and suffering while at the same time enhancing our capacity for free will and love so yeah tonight you want to thank God for gravity and micro magnetism being exactly the way they are thank you good question others yes oh yeah one okay well I'd then I'll run back to your Oh what is the relationship you know the global warming problem that we they talk about today right and how does that fit to what you were talking about well I've written two books on the global warming issue improbable planet deals with it and also our book hidden treasures in the book of Job and if I can go back to this slide here there we go one of the problems with the global warming debate is if people think extreme climate stability has been the long-term history of the earth they see those are right they don't realize it's an extreme exception only in the last 9,000 years that we've had extreme climate stability however the temperature has been optimal for us having as many people as we do and because of these cycles in the orbit of the earth we know it must come to an end there's no way we can sustain that extreme climate stability that improbable planet I give you the documentation where at the most fourteen or fifteen hundred more years now if we humans aren't careful with the way we manage the planet it could happen as little as a hundred years for it be over so in that sense we do have a role we can extend the period of climate stability but we can't sustain it for very long and if your theology is premillennial you need to subtract a thousand years for the 1,400 or 1,500 okay but also end the book by making a point that's more than enough time for those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ to complete the redemptive work that God has assigned to us and the promises and we do that the universal of fulfill this purpose and God has promised to take us to a new creation and the description of the new creation I see in Scripture makes you want to go there as quickly as possible and so for those of you are followers of Jesus Christ let's make it happen fast let's not wait too long I mean the sooner we get it done and then we don't to worry so much about global warming but what makes this global warming thing controversial there's no doubt global warming is happening if you look at the previous ice ages they've always happened that right now we're three degrees centigrade below the maximum temperature of the last several ice ages and that's the history with these climate cycles we are going to get warmer even if we human beings do everything we can to stop it however well we also notice every time the global mean temperature jumps up by three degrees centigrade over where it is right now a rapid drop into an ice age and there's actually some insight on why that happens and we actually see some signs that may be happening sooner than we think so global warming can bring upon severe global cooling that's happened in every previous Ice Age now what makes this a controversy we know that we humans are at least 20% responsible for the global warming we may be as much as 80% responsible well that's a big error bar 50% plus or minus 30% which explains why the politicians get so involved in this and Rudy makes it political as you go one group of research scientists saying the only way to resolve the global warming crisis were facing is through extreme economic deprivation we have to stop driving automobiles we got to stop depending on electricity and air conditioning and they're encouraging the wealthy nations of the world to make drastic cuts and their carbon footprint on the presumption everybody else is going to follow suit but what does the Bible tell us we human beings are fundamentally selfish trying to encourage seven and a half billion people to make extreme economic sacrifices I don't think it's going to go anywhere however if you read the book of Job chapters 37 38 and 39 it's the creation care manual in the Bible and there's a promise there that God has designed our planet in such a way then we face these kinds of problems in managing the planet for the while life Godin advances provided solutions that are often ly ethical and simultaneously optimally economic so if you get hidden treasures in the book of Job we show you from job three ways that we could stabilize the climate for a much longer period of time that would boost the economy of the entire world now with that you take all the politics over everybody's gonna vote for something is going to put more money in their pocket and hey it actually works to stabilize the climate that's another bonus so I think all in the book of Job so I think also one of the big conclusions is we better get to evangelizing right I mean because we don't know when this cycle is going to go south on us well it could go south of we humans start panicking right and so yeah I'm all the more motivated I mean when I write about an improbable planet already evangelical Christians have the numbers the finances and the technology to complete the Great Commission in five years or less all we lack is a motivation I'm here tonight to give you the motivation did you get ro okay at what point in the Bible as well as Earth's history would there be enough resources and and so on so forth to be able to support certain tyrannical lizards known as dinosaurs okay there is an era in the past history the earth where we had these giant land animals wandering around the reason why that was possible at that time is that so much of the continental landmass was basically characterized by shallow seas by shallow seas we mean seas that are like five to thirty feet deep which means that you now have water to give sufficient buoyancy that you can have a land animal that weighs 50 to a hundred tons today it's simply not possible for animals of that size to exist in the continental land masses there isn't the water to give them the buoyancy notice that the biggest mammal on the planet today biggest animal is the blue whale the reason why it can weigh in at 200 tonnes it spends its entire time in the ocean where the ocean water gives us sufficient buoyancy to resist gravity how many of you saw those Jurassic parka seriously they've done four movies every one of them shows a t-rex rampaging at 40 to 50 miles per hour hopefully your friendly physicists in your neighborhood has told you that that's impossible there's no way a creature of that size and that I could run at that velocity without killing itself within a few months in fact you can notice that with human beings but taller you are the higher the probability that you're gonna injure yourself with a fall why because gravity is gonna do more damage to you when you fall I mean we have a gallon our staff that she's like God four foot nine you know and but she's an Americana I said I envy you you're gonna be able to marathon run all of your life because you're just the right height to be able to do that your joints aren't gonna wear out my joints are wearing out I'm too tall so t-rex there's a disadvantage to being that big and that tall but if you got enough water to give you buoyancy you can make it as long as you don't move very fast and so yeah there was a period between two hundred and forty nine million years ago and 66 million years ago when we had these shallow seas and incidentally because of those shallow seas we have rich agricultural Plains today so for example all of the American prairie was a shallow sea during the dinosaur years and that's one reason why we've got six feet of topsoil there we have time for a couple more questions okay yes do you then you know so then the days of creation are are not literal and from what you're saying and but they are time periods are those time periods of equal duration or were some longer so I'm sure or what how do we how do we interpret that by reading that their days okay keep in mind the old testament was hebrew has been translated in english biblical hebrew has a vocabulary size if you don't count the names of people in cities of only three thousand words english it's over four million explains why we have forty plus different translations of the Bible in English you need lots of translations because of the challenge are going from a small vocabulary to a large vocabulary so for example I'm very comfortable signing a doctrinal statement I believe that God created in six literal days why because the Hebrew word translated as day the Hebrew word Yong has four distinct literal definitions it can mean part of the daylight hours all the daylight hours a 24-hour period or a finite epoch of time and what's interesting on the first page of the Bible he uses three of those four definitions creation day one the Texas contrasting days and nights that's young referring to the daylight hours creation day for atra speaks about seasons days and years as day referring to 24 hours and Genesis 2:4 it uses the word day to referral all of creation history that's the word day using a long period of time so here's a challenge when you read Genesis 1 which of those four definitions apply and you know I ran into that the first time I picked up the Bible and I notice at age 17 is using three different definitions with a word because in the King James it uses the word day in Genesis 2:4 that's as pretty the correct translation but the other thing I notice there is no evening of mourning for the seventh day only the first six days have an evening of mourning the seventh day doesn't and that's the day when God rests and remember I told you earlier in my talk that my parents were worried I was being obsessive about physics and astronomy when I was about 10 and they bought me this thick book and evolutionary biology the idea trying to broaden my science education I was the only one in the family that read it but I remember coming to my parents and saying mom dad the numbers don't add up they got all the speciation before human beings and you got almost nothing after human beings that enigma bothered me until I picked up the Bible at age 17 and I said no evening of mourning for the seventh day that means we're still in the seventh day it's a day when God stops creating new forms of life that explains why we have all this speciation before humanity and almost nothing after humanity for six creation periods God creates on the seventh one he stops now as I continue to read through the Bible I found three texts Psalm 95 John 5 and Hebrews 4 that all say were still in God's seventh day so the seventh day is not yet finished the other thing I noticed at age 17 God creates both the human male and the human female on the sixth day but in Genesis 2 we have a passage of time between God trading Adam and God creating Eve God creates Adam outside the garden Adam is around long enough to see the trees in the Garden of Eden grow he tends the garden long enough to realize his God to be more to life than gardening for me that wouldn't take very long but once he does that he says I want you to relate to all these soulish animals see how I've designed them to relate to you and serve and please you and give them appropriate names having done that what does the text say Adam was alone he was lonely God put him to sleep perform surgery on him he recovers from the surgery he sees his new creature and what do you see coming out of Adam's mouth when he sees Eve the Hebrew word is hopin to use 20 other times in the Old Testament consistently translated at long last so I'd argue the six-day according to Genesis 1 and 2 must be much longer than 24 hours which would imply they all are now do they have to be equal time periods no but they must be sequential we're talking six sequential periods of time and if you actually compare it with a scientific record the first day is the longest the second day is the next long as the days get shorter as you go from day one to day six and evidently if the Great Commission is will feel quickly the seventh day will be the shortest of all so I think mr. Gould has the last question and a reminder to my students be sure to bring me your note card with your name and for a little extra lovey blessing to keep me from coming at 2:00 a.m. and frightening you in the middle of the night if you want to add a question that's great but please be sure to bring me a record of your attendance tonight and mr. Gould has last night oh he would go good but the other half of my question was just what is the number one response that natural give as an excuse to deny this evidence okay good question let me complete the answer to your question it's not in the book that you got there that's most which books do you have okay the one you want is called a matter of days it's not here but the other one you need to get is navigating Genesis and it is here it will answer the question you have okay and your question was what's the number one reason that naturalist give for denying the Christian message probably the number one reason is the problem of evil in fact in my debates with atheist scientists what I notice is that's the only positive evidence they have against God all the other arguments I have our negative ones where they basically say you Christians don't do a good job arguing your case and granted we could do a lot better the only evidence they have on their side is the problem of evil and how it works is this if there's an all-powerful all-loving God it would be a God that in his great love with not subject any of his creatures to evil and suffering therefore that God does not exist so some of them are willing to accept the D istic God a God that creates a universe and then takes a 14 billion year nap and doesn't care what's going on that's quite popular with a lot of my peers who are not Christians so it's the problem of evil which explains why I wrote two books addressing the problem of evil notice that the problem of evil is an issue for every religion the Buddhists try to tackle it the Hindus try to tackle it the Muslims try to tackle it a problem is in each case for those religions the evil that we humans are experiencing to be some degree as gratuitous only from a biblical Christian perspective is there an answer to the problem of evil it's not / - 'it us because that evil serves a higher purpose in fact i argue and why the universe is the way it is that god and his great power could have kept satan of the garden of eden away from planet earth for all eternity instead he invited him to come in why would God invite the most powerful creature he ever created the author sin and evil that come in and tempt Adam and Eve here's the reason it gives him the opportunity to be tested by the most extreme test possible in the context of evil and he can pass that extreme test nothing they're after will ever threaten you to go down an evil a pathway it's the same principle that we who have PhDs live under we get subjected to the most difficult tests in their discipline and if we pass they give us a piece of parchment that guarantees that never again will we have to be tested for a competency and are disciplined because they see the disappointments we've already put you through that test well God puts us each through that test as well notice in the book of Revelation the only humans that enter the new creation are those that have been subjected to the most difficult tests and have passed the most difficult tests but here's what I find wonderful God says if you try to pass this test on your own I guarantee you will fail if you come to me for help I guarantee you will pass my professors did not guarantee I would pass by PhD but the crater of the universe is offering you a guarantee I guarantee you'll pass that test if you let me help you not pass that test that's what's so wonderful about the Christian faith but what you'll see in why the universe is the way it is is why God designed the universe first and foremost to be a template a place where evil and suffering could be experienced by God's Premal creatures but also conquered and eliminated with the least amount of pain and suffering and the least amount of time it's an optimal conquest of evil and suffering only possible because we live in four large dimensions of space accompanied by six tiny dimensions of space and the four fundamental forces of physics fine-tune exactly the way they are so hope you will go home tonight and you'll be praising God for the strong and weak nuclear force being designed exactly the way they are so that you can quickly enter the new creation great question [Applause] thank you again dr. Ross and and thanks to all of you for coming out you are among a minority of Christians who are really responding to what the Bible says you're supposed to do you are supposed to be theologians and you were supposed to be scientists so that you can always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within you and hopefully you have a little more preparation tonight hopefully people will see hope in you and they will ask you what's the reason for the joy what's the reason for the hope that you have with everything that's going on right now and hopefully you have been a little more equipped to answer them with sound reason so let me close this in prayer let's thank dr. Ross one more time for coming awesome fantastic lord thank you for this evening thank you for the ministry of reasons to believe thank you for the work that's going on here at trinity to prepare the next generation to carry this good news of Jesus Christ the Lord I pray a special blessing on every one who came out tonight that they would go away strengthened in their faith that they would go away realizing you are indeed an infinite yet also personal God who has communicated your reality to all of us not only through Scripture but through the book of nature and Lord go with each of us as we go may we remember the faces we have seen here fondly pray for one another continue to hold each other up to you in prayer and may each of us take the call seriously to share the good news the light of Jesus in this dark world that needs him so desperately Lord were grateful to you we thank you for this time tonight and we pray in Jesus name Amen god bless you thank you for coming [Applause]

Channel: Trinity Classical Academy

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Keywords: trinity classical academy, rhetoric school, top private christian school, Santa Clarita, Los Angeles, The Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home, dr. hugh ross Ph.D, Private Christian K - 12, Christian School Santa Clarita, Classical Christian School, Private School Los Angeles, Private High School, Private Christian Elementary School, Private Christian Grammar School

Id: jNPSZwxEFME

Length: 81min 5sec (4865 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2017