Dr. Hugh Ross ~ Why the Universe is the Way it is

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's the dr hugh ross conference weekend at grace church dr hugh ross is a world-class astrophysicist and christian apologist here to talk to us about how the universe points directly to god and how you and i can use science to share jesus and our circle of influence each service this weekend has a unique topic followed by a time for q a you've got a question for dr ross you can text your questions to 314-325-9328 you're in for an incredible weekend that's gonna build your faith here we go [Music] [Music] good morning grace church and welcome to those of you joining us online so great to have you here today yeah let's just stand together as we start off worshiping [Music] he's [Music] [Applause] [Music] praise [Music] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] is here to set the captives free [Music] is is [Music] [Music] oh [Music] who can stop the lord almighty who can stop the lord almighty who can stop the lord almighty who can stop the lord who can stop the lord [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so who is [Music] who is [Music] who is and the lovers yahweh the great i am is yahweh the lord of all he is yahweh rose i share unplease yahweh the righteous son is [Music] you are you are [Music] who is he that gives me [Music] peace [Music] [Applause] who is rising up in me with everything i need of god he is yahweh the great i am [Music] is [Music] is jesus the great i am [Applause] is creator god he is yahweh the great i am he's yahweh lord of all he is yahweh [Music] we thank you for your presence for being here with us this morning oh we love you lord we love you jesus name amen hey before you have a seat turn around if you will say hi to somebody give them a high five tell them how good they look those of you online with us this morning we're glad that you're here viewing with us this morning it's good to see you if you will go ahead and pull this out i'm just going to highlight real quick just a couple of things got really good service planned for you this morning i know you're gonna be really blessed hey if you happen to be new with us we're glad that you're here you're always welcome to come be a part of our services or classes lots of things happening around here you can see some of that on here there's a couple ways you can interact with us there's a connect card right here in front of you in your seats or up in the balcony as well or if you're viewing online or here you can text the word connect and it's an easy way for us to get some information for us to actually answer some of your questions or if you have a prayer request and you need prayer lots of things going on in the world right now that we're not meant to do it alone we need to encourage one another pray for one another our team looks over these in a real serious manner we're doing phone calls and connects and and praying for for you would love for you to take us up on that you could take the card on your way out and drop it at any of the offering receptacles you see at the exit we use those to put your tithes and offerings in and other ways that you can do that as well as you can see there on the screen again or you can text the word connect and it'll be an easy way to engage with us in that hey pull this out on the side where you got blank there to put some notes in from hugh's message here in a second two things here at the bottom last weekend we had louis cataldo come and we really had a a real pivotal weekend last weekend oh we clapped for that lewis came and it was an incredible weekend and we ended up having kind of a spontaneous meeting last sunday afternoon where over 200 of you came and we were in there for three hours talking about how do we engage in the civic arena in the public square how can we not just be a church that sits on the pews but how do we get involved in our community at in the civic arena and make an impact and we are putting a plan together those of you that came to that meeting or you weren't able to but you wanted to if you could text this number or pull out your phone and you can put the camera over that uh that code right there it'll pop up just a little form for you to fill out so that we can get your information and help build this team that we're building called civic engagement that where the lord is really beginning to give us some wisdom on how to do that we would love to be able to engage and continue the conversation with you and then right next to that as well as our prayer meetings guys again this is some of the most important gatherings that we have on a weekly basis is coming together to pray and to ask the lord to bless our families our kids our marriages our outreach into the city our neighborhoods etc take a look at that see if there's some ways you can move your schedule around to commit as many of uh to as many of our prayer meetings that you can amen let's pray father we thank you in the name of jesus lord for church lord for the freedom to assemble together to praise your name to listen to the bible to learn who you are who we are god i ask that as we just remember your faithfulness to us lord that as we give of our time our energy to serve to to give of our tithes our offerings that you would cause the name of jesus to go forth in our city and father it's in the name of jesus that we pray that the gospel would go forth in jesus name amen [Music] can we give hugh ross a big welcome here come on this morning it has been an incredible weekend you're at the 11. we've already done two different messages last night we had kathy your wife here with us this morning at the nine it has been incredible it really has i'm telling you i've been listening to you for 25 years or more when it was on cassette tapes and uh hang on what are those we don't know what those are all right yeah and they were two hour cassettes i mean those were the ones you had to really really be careful with but uh i'm telling you for 25 years this guy has expanded my understanding of god and has made him a whole lot bigger in my mind and my eyes and that's one of the incredible things that he brings every time he's with us uh but you know you saw this morning if you were in that service and that's going to be online his probably major gift is evangelism and man that just stirred me again to hear you talk about holy spirit opportunities and those kind of things so this is a a service where he's going to expand our view of you know the creator in a in a broader way and here's here's what i want you to understand because i know a lot of you that are older thinking i don't know that i can expand my mind anymore well i'm telling you why you need to the next generation is getting decimated in their faith by by everything they're watching everything they're exposed to their school their college and we as adults i mean we as even older adults have got to begin to wrap our heads around some of these facts that can we can begin to speak into this generation and at least be able to know where to resource them and how to resource them and so that's one of the values that uh hugh you know a weekend like this is is bringing us it's resourcing us and making us aware that there's this huge wealth and bank of information and knowledge that can help us equip this next generation because jesus said that's one of the things that's going to be the big sign of his coming the second coming is there's a great falling away happening and we see it with our youth we're seeing it right now we're seeing the deconstruction of faith that's happening at schools and uh you know even in bible study so we you know god has blessed us here this has just been when when i i told kathy i said when i first was able to get you to come to our church it was like i want you guys to love this man like i've loved him for the last 20 years and the wonderful thing is that you do and you have really embraced you know what he brings to us and so let's just pray even before we we get started today lord would you would you do what you loved to do would you open the eyes of our understanding and blow our minds with a revelation of who you are and the vastness of your love for us that you would do all of this that you would create all of this to have a relationship with us god just just touch us today with wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of jesus give you utterance today in jesus name amen amen just a little bit of direction for us because hugh comes with three different messages and then at the end of the service he gives us time to interact with him with questions it's one of his favorite times one of our favorite times as well so during the message you're going to see a number up here text in your questions as he's going through some of his material and then he'll call me out towards the end and we'll take the last 15 minutes or so of the service today to actually engage him in questions amen go ahead all right well thank you and uh you know it says in daniel 12 4 and the last days knowledge will explosively increase and it's a privilege to be alive in the 21st century we're seeing that time when knowledge is exploding i'm an astrophysicist and the knowledge base in astrophysics doubles every five years every five years we know twice as much about the universe as we knew and all of previous human history and that's just one discipline it's happening all over which is why i'm coming this weekend with four different messages i mean i arrived here yet last night and talked about cosmic reasons to believe in jesus christ as creator lord and savior the nine o'clock service i talked about evangelism and how god wants every follower of jesus christ to be actively involved in bringing other people of faith in christ not because he needs us he's got better assets than us but he wants to use this ministry of bringing your faith to other people as a way to transform you into the image of christ and also to experience the intimacy of the holy spirit working out miracles in your life as you share your faith and the message today is going to be why the universe is the way it is all the different reasons why god created the universe the way he did he's got multiple reasons but fundamentally i'm going to be sharing with you that his biggest reason for creating the universe the way he did is to permanently eradicate all evil and suffering you know there's that hymn that says uh you know i'm this this life is not ours i'm just passing through this universe is a gateway to a completely different creation that's where god wants to take us and then uh tomorrow evening i'll be speaking about ufos and extraterrestrial intelligent life based on the fact that our government is releasing all these secret reports nothing real serious but we're gonna have to swap out your mic pack again dave if you want to help out real quick i'll sit here and continue my talk on physics here why why hugh is doing this and my you know i have to have a dictionary for like every other sentence you know to make sure no but this morning i want to just weather talking just to talk for a little bit his wife joined us for the first time you've been here four five six times and kathy came on this trip the nine a.m this morning was off the chart incredible i want to encourage you if you weren't here you have to get online and watch it because then she came out and she she joined you in the in the talk afterwards and we were just engaging in conversation about really even those that are on the the that level of intelligence that are just really smart but then how the lord all the stories that they had of the lord meeting this specific you know group of people like hugh where actually intelligence led him to the scriptures instead of away from the scriptures it was off the chart good one more thing as well that i want to introduce or not introduce but announce and we didn't we really didn't know this was going to happen it kind of happened a little kind of spontaneously but tomorrow night we're actually having another service uh in the atrium chapel about ufos and aliens because you know hugh is an astrophysicist he's studying the universe and there's all of these things even right now about that and tomorrow night at seven we'll talk more about that here in a moment in in the q and a time but lock that in tomorrow night at seven o'clock in the atrium chapel we're gonna have a whole session where he's gonna be talking about ufos and aliens okay now you can go back to the universe thank you very good well just to get started you know my sons were young they said dad do you believe in aliens and i said yeah i certainly do and i pulled out my wallet and showed him my alien resident card so uh and they went around the name and says our dad is an alien our dad is an alien i'm now an official u.s citizen so i don't have that alien resident card anymore so but yeah the message is going to be on why the universe is the way it is if you're not already a subscriber to our youtube channel reasons to believe as a 24 7 youtube channel we're putting new videos up every day encourage you to subscribe excuse me and all of our scientists and theologians we have facebook and twitter pages it's for ministry purposes only and it's a place for you to ask your questions i know we're going to have q a but you don't ask get to ask your question today we're available to take your questions and we have a book table out there and if you fill out the card that we gave you we're going to give you a free copy of her book always be ready i talked about that on the nine o'clock service and if you're too shy to go the book table you can go to this qr code and you'll get a free chapter of the book but hey if you want the entire book then hard copy go to our book table and you'll be able to get that and also we created a special micro site just for you people it's reasons.org grace church and you'll find some specially designed resources that we've prepared for all of you and if you use the code grace2021 that gets you a 30 discount on all of our products books dvds audio everything well this is the passage i use for the nine o'clock service out of first peter 3 15. it's kind of the hallmark verse for reasons to believe ministry always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have but do this with gentleness and respect and the core of reasons to believe is preparing good reasons for you that you can share with people to encourage them to develop a relationship with jesus christ but we also want you involved in sharing your faith because that's the way you develop gentleness and respect i didn't have that when i first started sharing my faith but as you engage people you begin to learn okay i'm rubbing them the wrong way i'm being obnoxious that i share with people the nine o'clock service when i would see that things weren't going well i would ask the non-christian can you please share with me where i've been obnoxious with you and they were very eager to tell me but this is the way we developed that gentleness and respect and as we do god will send more people to you the better the reasons you develop the more gentleness and respect you can build in your life the more god's going to use you and bring people to you that he is prepared to advance to hear and respond to those good reasons and the nine o'clock message i gave several examples of how that has happened within my life in the life of others i'm going to share one example in the context of this message why the universe is the way it is and i was sitting at an airport and the plane was delayed and they were calling people and they were booting them off the plane and then they called my name i said oh this is not good news uh but instead the lady at the counter said uh we noticed you're traveling alone is it okay if we trade out your seat this is fine you can give me any seat you want because there was a family that needed to sit together so she handed me a ticket i looked at it and it was first class it says wow don't fly first class this is going to be interesting i wonder what it's like so i sat down on my first class seat and this other gentleman sat down beside me and he immediately introduced himself and said i'm from germany i'm a quantum physicist i'm an atheist and a skeptic who are you now you may not know this but that's not uncommon with german academics uh they're very out there now and so i said well i'm not german i'm canadian i'm now an american i'm not a quantum physicist i'm an astrophysicist i'm not an atheist and a skeptic i'm a christian who believes the bible is the inspired word of god he looked at me and said you know this is going to be a very interesting flight do you mind if i ask you some questions and i said yeah fire away so what i'm going to share with you are the questions that he asked and the answers i gave to his questions it was a two hour flight this is not going to be two hour message i'm going to condense it down into less than 30 minutes but the first question he asked and i get this all the time from atheist scientists if god created the universe surely all he needs is one star one planet yeah you need the moon but everything else is superfluous you're an astronomer this universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies and each galaxy is hundreds of billions of stars it all seems like such a waste you have to tell me why is the universe so incredibly massive if indeed god only needs one star and one planet to achieve his purpose and my response was well the universe's mass determines what the periodic table looks like it determines the makeup of elements and the greater the cosmic mass density the more hydrogen the universe begins with nothing but hydrogen in terms of the periodic table and the greater the mass of the universe the more that hydrogen is fused into helium during the first four minutes after the cosmic creation event you know in big bang cosmology the universe starts off nearly infinitely hot but it's expanding as it expands it cools down and there's a 20 second window where the temperature is such that fusion can take place nuclear fusion can take place but if you're to make the universe just slightly less massive than what it is so little hydrogen will be fused into helium that the future stars will not be able to use nuclear fusion to make any of the elements other than hydrogen and helium and in that case the periodic table looks like this now with a periodic table like that it would be really easy to pass your chemistry classes right but it's a universe but no carbon no oxygen and no nitrogen and no possibility for life and so this quantum physicist said well what happens if you make the universe a little bit more massive it says make it a little bit more massive then you're going to get a lot more hydrogen fused into helium and in that case the future stars will very quickly burn up and convert all that hydrogen and helium into elements that are heavier than magnesium or apartment manganese and in which case the periodic table looks like this you've got iron you get all the elements heavier than iron but nothing else and once again you've got a universe with no carbon no oxygen and no nitrogen and no possibility for life the universe's mass must be exactly what it is to get this periodic table and make possible not only life but advanced life you know sitting there in the audience you need 22 different elements in the periodic table just to be a lie your heart will stop beating if you don't have those 22 elements and you have to be there in just the right amount and he said well is there any other reason why the universe has to be that massive i said yeah there's actually several reasons but i share with them one more make the universe slightly less massive and then the universe will expand so slowly that you're not going to get galaxies forming at all and so make the universe slightly less massive the universe will expand so rapidly that gravity will not be able to take any of the dispersed gas and make stars or galaxies out of it and if you make the universe slightly more massive the universe will expand so slowly that very quickly you find nothing but black holes and neutron stars and in that case you've got a universe that's missing the stars and the planets and the moons that are necessary to make life possible the universe must be exactly the right mass to have it expanded exactly the right rate so that you get stars and planets and if the cosmic mass density were just the tiniest fraction greater or smaller then life would not be possible at any time anywhere in the entirety of the universe the universe would be sterile for all time in all places and then the quantum physicist looked at me and said okay i think i got that one but tell me this why all these billions of years couldn't god have just made it really young i mean why do you need all this time why does the universe have to be so old and i said well when i read the bible it tells us that god revealed himself through two books the book of nature and the book of scripture and the book of scripture has 66 books and god wanted us to be able to read all 66 books he also wanted us to be able to read the entirety of the book of nature but here's the problem if we were created any later or earlier we would not be able to see a hundred percent of the past history of the universe i said you know i'm an astrophysicist all of my data comes from the past because it takes light time to travel from the distant stars and galaxies to our telescope and if god had put us here say five billion years earlier than when he did light from the cosmic creation event went on a time to travel on the space surface of the universe and reach her telescopes if we were here five billion years ago we'd only be seeing two-thirds of the history of the universe we would be completely ignorant of the cosmic creation event and i shared with a quantum physicist it's our ability to directly witness the universe coming into existence that gives us the most persuasive scientific evidence there must be a creator god beyond space and time that created our universe a matter energy space and time i talked about that last night it got recorded if you missed it now you're going to pick up the recording of that and he says well uh what would happen if we were actually here later i says well you're probably aware that when we look at the farthest reaches of the universe it's moving away from us at barely under the velocity of light and because of dark energy the universe expands faster and faster as every year goes by which means that we were here even the tiniest bit later the universe would be expanding at the greatest distances at more than the velocity of light which means we would not see the cosmic creation event we're here at the only time in cosmic history when it's possible for astronomers to look through their telescopes and see 100 percent of the history of the universe now sometimes when i say this people say surely you've got to be exaggerating we can't actually see god creating universe i said you're right we can't actually get down to time equals zero but here's how close we can get i can show you images that show you the state of the universe when it was 100 billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old that's so close we can get to the cosmic beginning that's so close we can get to the cosmic creation event and it's that capacity that literally gives us the most compelling scientific evidence there has to be a crater god behind the universe only at about 14 billion years after the cosmic creation event can we humans observe all of cosmic history and directly witness the cosmic creation event god wanted us to read the entirety of the book of nature he said well are there any other reasons why the universe has to be that old i said well actually there's several but let me just share with you one number one if we want to have intelligent life on a planet it's got to be a planet that has a huge amount of uranium and thorium because without that uranium thorium there won't be the heat energy flowing from the interior of the earth to produce the magnetic field that protects us from cosmic and solar radiation and there won't be the heat to produce the plate tectonics that's necessary to transform our planet from being a water world as you see in genesis 1 2 water covered the whole surface of the earth but thanks to plate tectonics creation day three we get the continents but it said uranium and thorium is made inside supernova stars and when the universe is young you got lots of supernovae exploding and these distribute uranium and thorium into interstellar space but they're radioactive and they decay and so as these supernova explosions begin to be less frequent the uranium and thorium begin to decay and so what you get is a curve like this where thanks to lots of supernovae exploding the uranium and thorium abundance builds up but when there's not so many supernova these radiometric isotopes begin to decay and what it shows you is uranium and thorium abundance reaches a maximum when the universe is a little bit more than 9 billion years old i said well guess when the earth formed the earth formed when the universe was slightly more than 9 billion years old our planet earth formed at that moment when uranium and thorium hit a maximum abundance then his comment is well why didn't god put us here four and a half billion years ago i says well we have a problem with stars stars are like human beings they're unstable when they're young they're unstable when they're old they're maximally stable in their middle age now you're laughing for we human beings we have a rather long period of stability stars are the opposite they're extremely unstable except for a very tiny window when they're perfectly middle-aged and we're now orbiting our sun when it's at that level so for example we have our star throwing out deadly solar flares but the flaring activity follows this curve and by the way the y-axis of that curve is logarithmic when the sun was young the flaring activity was a hundred thousand times greater than it is today and then it dropped to about ten thousand times greater and that's okay if you're a bacterium it explains why for the first three billion years of life history in planet earth all we have are microbes anything more advanced than that would be killed off by these deadly solar flares and the x-ray of ultraviolet radiation that's associated with that and then we humans are the most sensitive to that flaring activity and as i said to the quantum physicists it's no accident that we show up about a hundred thousand years ago give or take 50 000 years but that's exactly the moment when the solar flaring activity hits the minimum level the minimum level when we can exist he said well how wide is this window in which we have safety from these deadly flares i says is about 100 000 years wide so yeah we really are different uh than the stars we're stable for six or seven decades uh which is you know 90 of our lifespan for stars is just a tiny fraction of a percent of the lifetime of the star where it has that stability and you can add it up four and a half billion years plus 9.2 billion equals what 13.7 or 13.8 that's the age of the universe so that's another reason why he says okay now tell me why is this universe so dark he was aware of dark energy and dark matter and i said yeah you're right the universe is incredibly dark in fact i shared with them the very latest is what's the latest data in cosmic darkness i said this is it dark energy makes up 70 percent of the universe exotic dark matter the manner that doesn't strongly interact uh with photons that makes up 23 and a half percent ordinary dark matter makes up four and a half percent and he says what doesn't leave much left does it it says yeah everything we see through the telescopes the stars and the galaxies the nebulae that's 0.27 percent of the entirety of the universe and he says well again that seems like a big waste why all that dark stuff couldn't god have dispensed with all that dark stuff those are those very good reasons why the universe is that dark it needs to be that dark just to have stable spiral galaxies which are a crucial feature for life but more than that dark energy must be fine-tuned to get the universe to expand at the just right rate to get the uh and i said the degree of fine tuning is one part and 10 to the 122nd power change dark energy by one part and 10 to the 122nd power you eliminate the possibility of life in the universe matter of fact to share with them it actually ranks as the most spectacular evidence that we can measure for fine-tuning design and as i shared last night the fine tuning that we see in dark energy alone is 10 to the 96 times greater than the very best example of human engineering design achievement he says well i've got another one for you i says why would god want so much decay that's not the word he used the word to use was this why so much cosmic entropy but i used the word decay because there was a couple of people behind us that were listening into our conversation so i wanted to make sure that they were along with us as well but why is the universe experienced at such a high level of entropy why is the universe decaying so much and this is where i had the opportunity to share with them that god designed the laws of physics for the eradication of evil and for willing humans to receive redemption and more than that god's desire in creating us human beings is that we would experience strong love strong loving relationships with one another and with him and the angels in particular and that god could have made us more robotic where we had a weak will but if he gave us a weak will we would also have weak love god wanted strong love that was his whole reason for creating was to magnify the expression of his love which means that god took a risk that some of us would use our free will for rebellious intent for evil intent god knowing this in advance and incidentally you can do a study of this in the old new testament titus 1 2 2 timothy 1 9 god began his works of redemption before he created space and time before god created the universe before god created anything he began his works of redemption which implies that everything god creates is for the purpose of redemption and i've been i wrote a book in probable plan i got one coming out in a few months called design to the core and i'm basically challenging my scientist peers who are not christians and saying if you will do your scientific research from a biblical redemptive perspective it'll make you a better scientist because from my position everything that our god creates every event in the history of the universe earth and earth's life every component plays a role in making possible a redemption of billions of human beings and i share with non-christian scientists you may not believe like i do but just do this as an experiment do your research from a biblical redemptive perspective and see if it doesn't make you a more successful scientist but god designed the laws of physics he designed the universe as a whole for the eradication of evil and for humans to have their free will magnified because it is true that our free will is being constrained to some degree by the physics of the universe but god designed the physics of the universe first to eradicate evil and then to bring willing human beings into a realm where evil will never exist again as it says in romans 8 21-22 the entire universe the whole creation has been groaning under its bondage to decay everything we can see decays as it says in ecclesiastes 1 and 10-12 their solomon is telling us no matter where you look you see decay and the decay never stops it's ubiquitous if you don't believe that take a look at one another we're all undergoing decay the cars we drive under go decay our houses undergo decay you say well why all is decay well it's optimal for the formation of stars and planets and life needs stars and planets our star of the sun is an extremely high entropy example just pouring out radiation with an extreme degree of decay but that's important without that physical life would not be possible it's also crucial we'd be living in a universe with a very high level decay because without that plants cannot produce food and we animals would not be able to eat those plants and digest the plant food and use that to do energy so we need to be living in a universe with a very high level decay just for us to be able to survive but it's also optimized for the restraint of evil it's optimal as well for preparing humans for their future roles in the new creation you know in my book why the universe the way it is i say life here on earth is kind of like going to the university and taking a semester course you take that semester course and you go through the challenges of that semester course to get prepared for a future career and by the way i've been both in the role excuse me of a student and a professor and i can tell you my job as a professor is to make my students suffer okay that's my job and what's amazing is students pay me to suffer at my hand but why are they willing to suffer at my hand they know that the suffering is going to prepare them for a future career and they know it's only one semester so they put up with that the other thing i've noticed too the best students in my class are the ones that come to me and say uh dr ross can you please subject us to more suffering they don't put it in those words but what they're asking for are more challenging assignments because they want to be better prepared through the course for a future career well likewise god is taking us through the equivalent of a challenging college level course preparing us for a career not in this universe but in the new creation to come paul says this that god is preparing us to teach the angels to rule with him over everything that god creates a new creation and yes the advantage we have over the angels is this the angels watch the grace of god we humans experience the grace of god because we experience the grace of god we're being equipped and trained for careers that the angels cannot fulfill and that's why a time will come when we'll be teaching and judging the angels because we have been prepared and trained like they have not and as peter explains in his letter first peter he says god actually takes the followers of jesus christ through more intense training and so as james says don't be surprised at the trials you're going through it's all preparation to prepare you for incredibly rewarding careers in the new creation what we notice about the rate of decay it's not so high as a discouraged productive work and i can tell you this everything you do the achievements you perform they're undergoing decay as well and so i know the books that are right that's all going to be decayed they're not going to last forever and you know i'm not too excited about yard work because i do yard work i realize within two weeks thermodynamics is going to make me do it all over again that's just the way it works but it's not so high that i refuse to do it i mean the decay was such that it happened within a few minutes i wouldn't do anything at all but the decay rate is not so low as to let human sin go unrestrained and you see this right in the third chapter of genesis the moment that adam and eve choose to rebel against god and begin to experience evil personally god says because of your choice from now on you're going to be experiencing more work you're going to have to work harder you're going to experience more pain as you see in the book of ecclesiastes you're also going to waste more time and the way we're biologically designed in this universe is that none of us enjoys extra work extra pain and wasted time and what is it that causes us to experience all this extra work and wasted time and pain it's the laws of physics and the space-time dimensions of the universe i remember having talks with my sons when they're growing up and saying i want to explain to you why i take you through the disciplinary treatment that i do and my as a dad my job is to discipline you but if i don't discipline you the laws of physics will and so i explained to them how the laws of physics are set up in such a way that the more we sin the more pain we experience the more work we have to do and the more time we waste because thanks to gravity electromagnetism and thermodynamics the more sin we do the more damage we cause to our environment and the more we have to work to undo that damage so with my sons i use the examples of the rooms saying hey when you begin to abuse your room notice how much pain you have to experience how much time you waste how much work you have to do to tidy it up but one thing i've also learned in raising our sons as how skilled they are at transferring the consequences to me and their mother and so we who are in authority have to be disciplined to say we're not going to clean up your room you've got to clean up your room and actually it's the way our prison system is designed that those that perpetrate the crimes are the ones that experience more pain more work and more wasted time well i won't go into all the things that happened with that quantum physicist over the course of two and a half hours he asked me eight questions and i gave him answers kind of like what you heard only a little more detail at the end of her flight he said i gotta ask you another question why do you have such well-prepared answers to the questions i've asked i said well it's because the questions you ask are the chapter titles in the book i wrote and he said there's no way i believe that while i was at the end of the speaking trip and when i go on a speaking trip i fill up my briefcase with books and dvds and i hand them out to people that i meet in airports or on the street or whatever i was in i only had two things left in my briefcase but one of the things i had in my briefcase was this book why the universe is the way it is and i said look at the table of contents he looked at the table of contents and said you're right those are my eight questions more than that they're my eight questions in the order that i asked them he was just blown away to see that in my book and he said there's more stuff in the book and he says i got to read this i said well you can have my last copy so he took that with him then he looked at me and said well you know my english is good but do you have anything in german the only thing i had left in my briefcase was a dvd called journey toward creation but it was in 11 languages one of which was german so i gave him the copy of a journey toward creation we have the book out there why the universe is the way it is uh you wait a few days you can get a free chapter of that book at reasons.org ross but in closing the heavens really do proclaim the righteousness of god and all the peoples have seen the glory of god and i think the one problem we're facing one thing i got to share with this physicist too is that you know you're a quantum physicist i'm an astrophysicist we both have phds we both were at universities studying for eight or nine years to get our doctoral degrees but doesn't it strike you that strange that we're more ignorant about some parts of science than people lived 4 thousand years ago i was basically making a comment we live at a time when two-thirds of the world's population has never seen the milky way if you live in shanghai or hong kong and look up at the night sky the heavens declare zero you can't see a single star when abraham looked at the night sky he could see fifteen thousand stars he saw the milky way in all of its glory nowhere on earth today can we see the milky way like abraham saw it and so don't get too proud yes we know a lot about science today but we've also lost a lot of science that was common knowledge everybody exists thank you very much and we're gonna have a time for q a thank you uh again we're gonna have a time of questions we're got a couple of floor mics right here and if you have a question you'd ask like to ask live you can just come and stand in line we just ask that you just ask one at a time if you have several just make sure there's nobody behind you and if you do you got to go back and we'll do it again we're going to do this to about 12 15 our normal ending time for the service uh hugh as we jump in you know this question comes up frequently you know when we read the creation account in genesis it seems that you know there was these days of creation and yet you're talking all these numbers that are a whole lot longer than what seems to be implied in genesis as far as the creation uh can you break that down a little bit for us and tell us how you come to that understanding well that's interesting because uh you know i came to the christian faith not through meeting other christians but through reading through a gideon bible i was raised and educated in canada where christians are hard to find and when i first met someone it was eight years after i became a christian that i finally met someone was here in the united states that took a young universe perspective and when he asked me about a young universe i thought he was talking about the universe being quadrillions of years old so i was actually identifying myself as a young universe creationist because i believe it was only billions of years old and that's because there is a debate in the 20th century between two groups of astronomers the young universe astronomers have thought it was only billions of years old and then the old universe astronomers thought it was quadrillions of years old so today i now identify myself as a middle-aged creationist i believe it's only billions it's not quadrillions but i don't think it's thousands either and the reason why is based on my experience with genesis when i was 17 years of age where i picked up this gideon bible and gone through genesis and saw right away the word that's used for day must have three distinct literal definitions because three are used on the first page creation day one it uses the word day to contrast days and nights so it's day for the daylight hours creation day four it's contrasting seasons days and years and that's day for 24 hours and then genesis 2 4 uses the word day to refer to the entirety of creation history so that's day as a significant passage of time later on i found through a hebrew lexicon there's a fourth definition namely part of the daylight hours and this is typical of the hebrew biblical hebrew it has a much smaller vocabulary than english so almost every hebrew noun has multiple literal definitions but the context kind of tells you and how i discerned that is realizing that the first six creation days are accompanied by an evening morning phrase and i wasn't certain what the evening morning words in in the original hebrew meant but i recognize at a bare minimum the evening morning phrase is telling us each creation day has a definite start time and a definite end time i anticipated finding an evening and morning for the seventh day but it's not there there's no evening and morning for the seventh day and then i read on in the bible and discovered that uh there uh you've got two passages psalm 95 and hebrews 4 that tell us we're still in god's seventh day that we're to live our lives in such a way that we can enter into god's seventh day so the seventh day is not finished and the seventh day is not finished then these creation days have to be much longer than 24-hour periods and also it was a breakthrough experience for me you know part of my story is that i was committed to studying astrophysics from the age of seven forward in fact i was bringing home four or five books on astronomy and physics from the library every week and that caused my parents to think i was being obsessive i don't know why but they thought i was being obsessive and they said okay we need to help you broaden his perspective and they wound up buying our family a big thick book on evolutionary biology i was the only one in the family that read the book but i went to my parents and said mom dad the numbers don't add up this happened when i was 10 and a half years of age and i said there's all this speciation before humanity and hardly any afterwards can you tell me why i said no go ask your science teachers they said no you better talk to those professors you know i got no answer until i picked up that gideon bible for six days god creates on the seventh day he stops creating the reason we don't see new phyla new orders no new classes of life in the human era this is when god has ceased creating the reason we see so much of it before the human era is because that's when god is creating and also explain to me why so many astronomers believe in god because all their data comes from the six days and why so few biologists believe in god because most of them do the research in the human era and they say we see no evidence for the supernatural handiwork of god well for good reason they're looking on the wrong day looking at the day when god is resting from his work of creation and just to be clear on this it's just like the sabbath you know we celebrate a sabbath which means we work six days on the seventh day we cease from a work but we don't cease everything we cease from our normal work to focus on the most important issues of life likewise god created for six days on the seventh day he focused on his more important work the work of redemption during the seventh day is when god is going to bring billions of people and redeem them from their sin and evil and prepare them to enter the new creation and an eighth day is coming when god will create again there will be a new creation he's going to be creating we don't know what in the new creation but what he's told us is those of you who choose to be redeemed i'm going to make you magistrate so i'm going to make you administrators over everything i create in a new creation and it's going to be a fulfilling career [Applause] hi ross god bless you for all your work is i've been following you it's really cool stuff um one of the times you were here before you mentioned how you um recently got a lot of the disciplines the scientific disciplines all together experts in different fields um to help explain some of these you know all these these really hard questions and when you when you put the whole picture together then it starts to make sense with mathematic statistics the whole nine yards uh how has the scientific community reacted to i don't know why i took them so long but how they reacted to you know other disciplines all coming together and those answers how what what has been the response i guess yeah great question and i started my talk off with a reference to uh daniel 12 4. how we're living at a time at least with respect to the book of nature where knowledge is literally exploding and it's exploding at such a rapid rate it's forced the community of professional to hyper-specialize so for example when i was full-time doing research at caltech i only focus on a short wavelength radio astronomy and that's all the scientific literature i read that's all i had the time to read matter of fact it was so extreme that our entire astronomy department would take over a restaurant every tuesday and uh the people at the restaurant would seat us at these different tables we had a table for the ultraviolet astronomers we had a table for the x-ray astronomers a table for the infrared astronomers we had two tables for the radio astronomy people one they're doing short wavelength work one long wavelength work if you sat at the wrong table you couldn't follow the conversation that's how specialized scientific research has become and what i realized that in order to use science as an evangelistic tool we had to integrate the scientific disciplines so i left my job at caltech and people said hugh you abandoned science no i didn't i'm just as involved in science as i was when i was full-time at caltech but now i got the freedom to read broadly in the scientific literature and integrate the different disciplines of science just like i like to read broadly in the book of scripture and integrate the 66 books of the bible when you integrate you see things you don't see if all you look at is one chapter of the bible or one book of the bible and likewise you see things when you integrate say evolutionary biology with astrophysics just to give you a quick example you know a lot of evolutionary biologists are telling you life evolved from a bacterium by strictly natural process through mutations natural selection and gene exchange we don't need a god to explain all this but i was mentioning the q a yesterday that you know we need to integrate evolutionary biology with astrophysics uh the problem of evolutionary biologists because they're so specialized so narrowly focused they're not aware that the sun is 23 percent brighter today than it was when light first arose on planet earth and yeah they're mystified by all these mass extinction events followed by mass speciation events but that's exactly what you need to compensate for the brightening of the sun and this is actually stated in the bible thousands of years before evolutionary biologists and paleontologists saw these mass extinction events and mass speciation events you saw in psalm 104 verses 29 and verse 30 it's the property of all life to die off but god recreates and renews the face of the earth and so god knowing the future physics of the sun removes most of life from planet earth and replaces it wholesale with very different species of life but these new species of life are now more efficient at pulling greenhouse gases from the atmosphere so as the sun gets brighter our atmosphere becomes less and less efficient and its capacity to trap the heat of the sun keeping the temperature in the surface of the earth optimal for life throughout the entire past 3.8 billion years and as i share with evolutionary biologists only a mind that knows the future physics of the sun would know what life to remove and what new life to replace that with and has been doing so continuously throughout the 3.8 billion years and not only has to be a mind but it has to be the mind of the god of the bible we see described in the pages of scripture hi um i seem to recall learning a while ago that time or like the measurable passage of time is dependent on on mass and the strength of gravity at that particular location or whatever and as an example if there are two people with synchronized watches one of them on the surface of the earth another one could jump up to a really high tower and then later on if you were to compare the watches they'd be out of sync and so essentially if my question is if time is there if time varies based on where you are and what gravity is then what does it really mean when we say the universe is 15 billion years old okay good question and you are right that there will be a difference in the clocks if you're at high elevation that you're a loyal nation because you're experiencing different gravity uh but the difference is going to be like uh a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a train i mean it's very tiny uh unless you've got extremely accurate atomic clocks you're not going to be able to notice a difference now where you will see the difference is if you've got a black hole compared to the earth because now you've got really intense gravity and there the effect is a little bit bigger but for the vast majority of the universe the gravitational time dilation is so trivial we ignore it now what is not able to be ignored however is the velocity time dilation this is special relativity not general relativity special relativity says the faster that you move the slower your clocks will go and so for example we're looking at a distant galaxy because of the expansion of the universe it's moving at such a high velocity relative to the velocity of light clocks in that distant galaxy will run more slowly than clocks here on earth and we can actually observe that because supernova are exploding in galaxies all over the universe a supernova that explodes in our galaxy will go through its explosion cycle in about seven months but when we observe supernova in distant galaxies it can take 8 9 10 11 months depending how fast that galaxy is moving away from us but in terms of how this affects the young earth old earth debate it really doesn't because when young earth creationists appeal to either gravitational time dilation or velocity time dilation it actually makes the universe older that doesn't make the universe younger but again unless you're looking very far away uh it's not going to be measurable and unless you've got extreme gravity it's not going to be measurable either although i don't know how many of you ever saw that movie interstellar where it actually has an actor going into the center of a black hole where time goes so slowly it actually stops by the way that's not physically possible that you could survive going into a black hole but i'll tell you what was real about that movie the equations that were in the background they're all accurate so you can believe all the equations just don't believe the script none of the stuff in the script was real but the equations were all accurate mainly because they had kip thorne as a consultant for the movie dr ross half my questions here are about ufos and aliens number one i don't i want you to you know take a stab at why but then hit us up on tomorrow night at seven o'clock in the chapel how you're going to be addressing this well uh i had no intentions of ever becoming an expert in ufos it all happened when i was 16 years of age i was the director of observations for the astronomical society in vancouver british columbia i thought it'd be a great idea to have a booth at the pacific national exhibition and so we had a booth there uh but they put us right next to the flying saucer club so uh people would go to their booth they would come to our booth and say hey what do you think about this and all the questions came to me because i was the one who was most familiar with what's going on in the night sky and i'd be asking him questions like well uh were you inside when you saw this cluster of ufos on the horizon was there a pane of glass between you and he said yeah i was inside i said was our chandelier behind you yeah why do you ask well with a pane of glass is going to actually appear as a cluster of lights on a distant horizon and i found that i could answer about 99 of what people reported to me as ufos what i'm going to talk about tomorrow night is the one percent that doesn't fall into that category and what is the cause of it and is it actually possible that there could be intelligent beings like us on another planet and if it's possible is it possible for them to travel here or to put it more personally you know if our sin gets out of control and we really mess up planet earth can we do as stephen hawking suggests that we do abandon this planet get in a bunch of spaceships and go to another planetary system and colonize that system and live there is that a possibility those are the kind of questions we're going to address tomorrow night and just so you know on that we are streaming that on our youtube page tomorrow night at 7 be in person at the chapel or it'll be uh online on youtube go ahead mike yeah thank you dr ross for being here it's kind of a follow-up question to the first gentleman that asked about relativity of time and time dilation i i understand what you're saying about now the universe largely being in stasis you don't have those large gradients of gravity except in localized areas like black holes i wonder about the rate of time flow at the beginning where the singularity has this infinite mass and infinitesimally small dimensions what does that do the distortion of time flow and do the does the scientific community compensate or unwind that has to be the most extreme uh distortion of time flow from the early seconds or minutes or months as we measure seconds minutes and months now in this sort of stasis you know billions of years later so i had a very similar question to his but could you comment on does it inform the scientific community's observations of the creation story this this severe time dilation or distortion at the beginning now you're making a good point that uh you know with big bang cosmology uh you've got the universe beginning nearly infinitely dense and infinitely hot and with an infinite density you will get gravitational time dilation but the universe is created by god with an expansion rate that is so extreme that that period of measurable time dilation is extremely brief you say how brief well it's over within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trains of a second so rudy doesn't affect your calendar it doesn't affect the age of the universe uh the correction factor uh is like 40 places a decimal down and so rarely do scientists even acknowledge the correction because of how tiny it is but they are aware that yes you do get gravitational time dilation when the universe is extremely young but it exits that extremely young stage very quickly we're going to go ahead and we're going to continue to do this for a little bit longer but we got grace kids going on if you have kids and grace kids we're going to do a a soft quiet dismissal if you need to go ahead and step out this is our normal ending time feel free to go ahead and do that if you have kids i'm not going to give you the option please go do that and relieve our grace kids ministry so they can continue with their day we're going to continue on in here for a little bit longer so i just we just asked for any conversations go ahead and take them out you want to hit up the bookstore all the resources are out there don't miss out on that and take the card to receive a free book with that as well go ahead hi hugh um i have a question from a friend uh who is also a ross uh it's a flood-related question he asks if god did not flood the entire earth then why did he make noah spend 100 years building an ark when they just could have migrated out of the flood zone okay very good question and by the way i love your t-shirt so yeah when you read genesis you got god having noah spending a hundred years building the ark and you're making a good point uh you know if god wanted to eradicate all those evil people he could have just told noah hey just move away from him then i'll wipe them out and you can come back but what you see in scripture is that whenever god deals with a societal reprobation and let me define that term that's kind of like the city of sodom where it tells us in the text every man young and old including the young boys came to lot store to rape his two guests basically you're talking about a city or nation where every individual has decayed to utter evil reformation and when that happens god performed surgery i mean he basically eradicated the sodomites to prevent their moral disease from affecting the rest of the human population and so you know i mean you've got god saying to abraham if there are 10 i will not destroy it but then abraham realized the entire city is reprobate except for the ones you already promised to pull out so but what you notice in scripture is god will never perform that kind of surgery until he first sends a prophet to that wicked generation so every example in scripture i mean lot for example was sent to the city of sodom and it tells us in hebrews he preached to those people how throughout his time he was in sodom and so god gave noah a pulpit he had him building this huge boat and people would gather around in her curiosity and it gave noah a chance to preach and again if you go to the new testament it uses that exact terminology that god used noah as a preacher to that wicked generation yes he could have had a move away but god had a higher goal he wanted to give so that that generation would have no excuse god sent them a prophet he preached them for a hundred years and in spite of that preaching none of them chose to repent and so it's a message to all of us the surgery was necessary just like a surgeon comes to you and says you've got stage four cancer if i don't remove the tumor you're gonna die and likewise you've got paul saying in romans chapter one that the evil can reach a point in an individual where they become an evangelist for evil they're not content to do evil they're only content when they can spread that evil to as many other people as possible which is why today societal reprobation can't happen the reason why jesus told his disciples when you receive the holy spirit you will become the salt of the earth you'll be a preservative preventing societal reformation i say that because another question i frequently get why is the god of the old testament so vindictive and the god of the new testament so loving god didn't change humans changed it's through the holy spirit coming upon the disciples and all the christians that are alive today that prevents societal reprobation from happening nevertheless there are a few isolated individuals who are reprobate but you notice is when people reach that reprobate condition god takes them out early in their life he still prefers providing surgery but it's like a surgeon saying i'm going to remove one cell so now he's removing individuals he's no longer removing whole societies because that kind of reprobation can't happen anymore dr ross i i'm here more as an encouragement to you than to ask a question um i'm one of those people that when you talk a lot of things go like this over my head right um we don't we don't know what you mean right so we can't we can't relax yeah so i'm very humbled to be in your presence sir um but my my heart is that you even though i don't understand a lot of the scientific verbiage and things that you're using you elevate my faith in god and my understanding of how big and awesome and beautiful he is and so i want to thank you for coming and having just the ability to do that with us you are fearfully and wonderfully made dr ross to be a man that i know you shared midnight o'clock of of having an autism spectrum and i here at grace have ministry that i work with young people young kids with different uh challenges and many of them are on the autistic spectrum and they're very bright and they're very um incredible young people but they get misunderstood a lot so i want to thank you for just being vulnerable with us and for allowing us to get to know you through your wife and you and you telling your story and i just want you to know you continue to elevate us even though some things may go over here they're getting in here in a different way so god is using you mightily here and i want to thank you around the world for what you're doing thank you so much thank you rachel let's go ahead right over here since you shared that you work with autistic children there's actually a design argument here that a paper got published saying you know about 1 out of 100 1 of 150 are on the spectrum and in terms of being able to advance civilization and technology the optimal number of people we need on the spectrum is between one and a hundred and one and a hundred and fifty which means this is another piece of evidence god's behind all of this it's also true for example that we need a certain number of people that are adhd they can do things that neurotypical people can't do and uh also what we see there is a number we have that are adhd it's exactly what we need to maximally benefit human civilization same thing goes for dyslexia so that's kind of a little addendum to the message i gave at nine o'clock uh that god made us clay jars we're not like the angels we have issues we have deficiencies we're clay jars there's cracks in our jars but god is committed to use every one of those cracks to maximally benefit uh humanity and to maxilla benefit the angels well that's a hard question to follow but uh i'll try uh what do you say to people who try to use the bible to say that the earth is flat and they try to explain that the earth is flat because in genesis they talk about a firmament and the waters above and below and i just want to know what can i say to these people and also second question uh if there is intelligent life in the universe would they also have to have had a jesus figure to live on their planet die for their sins and be born again yeah i'll answer your second question first hebrews 9 and 10 tell us that the creator of the universe jesus christ came to earth one place one time to save all that would seem to imply the only place in the universe where we got intelligent life like ourselves that are in need of redemption is planet earth but that does not eliminate the possibility that it could be another planet with dolphins on it or grass on it or even people like us that don't need redemption although i would be skeptical of the last conclusion because of the fact that it tells us that god created the universe for the purpose of redemption he began his works of redemption before he created anything so i'd be skeptical of that last piece of speculation and i can tell you as an astronomer everywhere we look in the universe we see hostile conditions and uh therefore it really does look like we're it but here's what's amusing a few years ago i debated victor stinger a particle physicist and an atheist at the caltech in front of an audience of 700 atheists it was the international skeptic society conference he actually used the hostility of the universe to advance life as an argument against god he basically was saying if god really loves humanity he wouldn't cage us into just one planet he would give us the capacity to colonize the entire universe the fact that everywhere is hostile except earth tells me god doesn't really love us if he does exist my response to him was the following you know i've been a parent to two sons and they were really little we actually uh caged them in we put up barriers so they could only wander around in one room we did that because if we knew we let them escape out of that region that they would do injury to themselves they would fall down the stairs and so we purposely put up these little gates that prevented them uh from entering the rooms they wanted to enter into i says god's treating us the same way he realizes we're immature and that we're in danger of doing harm to ourselves so on purpose he constrains us to just this you know one solar system yeah we can go to the moon uh i'm going to share tomorrow night why it's not in the cards for us to go to mars so we're not going to be able to colonize mars none of the other solar we've found millions or hundreds of thousands of other solar systems none of them look like ours most of them have plans i can make a stronger state closer we've now found nearly 5 000 planets outside of our solar system and none of those planets are anything like the planets in our solar system they're all different and we now realize thanks to that research every one of the eight planets in our solar system is designed to make possible advanced life here in planet earth we need all eight of them to be the way they are but where we see the compelling evidence for external hostility we can't even find a star that's sufficiently like the sun that it could be a candidate to have a planet orbiting it in which advanced life is possible we've been searching for 65 years to find a star sufficiently like the sun we found lots of stars that are twins of one another but no twin of the sun the next book i'm bringing out talks about the miracle of the design of the sun and why we're not going to find another star like it so we better take good care of this planet it's the only one that god has given us we need to take care of it at least long enough that we can fulfill the great commission and be ushered into a new creation so forget about sending a spaceship to a distant planet god's going to send us beyond the universe to an entirely new realm and he's not going to need a spaceship one last thought um can you explain how the earth has so much water considering that i'm gonna have you actually come back to that i want to have you come back to that i got more questions we got about five minutes to go but afterwards he'll stick up around here for a little bit let's go right over here there's a good answer to your question uh hi here uh i have my question written down right here um how does the time line up when dinosaurs roam the earth related to the creation of man okay a good biblical text to go to is psalm 104 where it tells us that god created life to be maximally abundant and maximally diverse throughout the whole history and so depending on the earth's conditions god will create life to achieve maximum abundance and maximum diversity you can't have dinosaurs today at least not the big ones because without water support you can't have a land animal that big just based on the law of gravity the biggest land animal you can have without water support is an elephant anything bigger than an elephant that creature is going to experience significant injury just because of the law of gravity there's a reason why elephants move the way they do they move the way they do to avoid injury uh but if you've got shallow seas then you can have bigger creatures for example whales weigh 200 tons they're 100 feet long and it's because they can be that big because of water buoyancy the error of the dinosaurs is that time when the continents of the earth were basically covered with shallow seas say how shallow anywhere from 10 to 50 feet deep and that water gave them enough buoyancy that you could actually have a dinosaur that was 100 feet long that weighed up to 80 tons so it was possible back then not possible now and the era of the dinosaurs was between about 245 million years ago and 66 million years ago that was a time when we had these shallow seas that actually permitted those kinds of creatures to exist on the earth but it demonstrates the biblical principle you see in psalm 104 god always packs the earth regardless of its status but the maximum life and the maximum diversity and the dinosaurs are evidence for that okay we got time for two more questions but you got to be brief because i got to keep you on schedule okay okay two questions right here one two okay uh my name is rick my last name is green and i'm small so that settles that but the fella before me said what i was going to say about other intelligent beings on other planets if that were true of course then jesus would have had to go and die on their planets for them like he did here so as you pointed out in hebrews the author kind of puts all of that to rest when he says jesus died once for all right he only died once and he died for us on earth he's not a space traveler he doesn't have to be because he's created everything out there but he chose us to die for us perfect very good thank you last one right here hi dr ross first of all i love all your stuff i've read a lot about you but anyway so recently uh my wife and i went to the creation museum and there was one thing that i saw there that i i didn't have an answer for and i couldn't get over so they depict um like the dinosaurs and early animals as before the fall of man being completely reliant on plants and fruits um as sources of food and then after the fall of man was bec was when they became carnivores just because due to like death and destruction before the fall of ma'am was it possible so anyway i just wanted to hear your your thoughts on that or if you could comment on that at all well it's a good point that you raise uh because atheists have picked up on this and said you know what's really strange you've got these bible-believing christians endorsing extreme evolution because what they're basically saying is you have herbivores and they all rapidly evolve into carnivores they have the same problem with their flood model because they believe the flood covered the entire globe and not just the world of humanity you have the problem of getting millions of species of life from the few thousand that were on board on the ark and so atheists have published books saying these christians believe in evolution at a rate that's ten thousand times greater than what any atheist on the planet ever believed and yet when we read the bible there's passages i can cite that say no god is the author of life it's not natural process and also i think that these young earth creationists are making a mistake and thinking that what happened at the fall was that the laws of physics were changed jeremiah 33 25 god says i'm a god that never changes i'm immutable if you want proof look at the laws that govern the heavens and the earth as they never change i never change what happened at the fall is humanity change and you see this in genesis 3 17 where god says you know cursed is the ground because of you it's not cursed because you change the laws of physics it's cursed because the people managing the ground are now sinners and in their sin their agricultural practices lead to the land being less productive than it otherwise would be and we see that to this very day it's our agricultural abuses that make our agricultural land less productive than what god intended so we change not the universe not the physics not the animals and also i think there's a third issue young earth creationists say if we believe that animals were engaging in carnivorous activity then that means that we're worshiping an evil god so they look at carnivorous activity as something that is evil rather than something that is good and i think that's because so many of us live in cities that we don't recognize the benefits of carnivorous activity but if you look at the biology field experiments probably the most famous example is when they introduce rabbits into australia and the carnivores were there were not equipped to hunt the rabbits the rabbits multiplied out of control they exhausted their food supply and there was catastrophic disease and death amongst the rabbits and so the death rate the suffering of the animals actually goes up when you eliminate the carnivores and what's amazing when you look at life not just now but throughout the entire fossil record the predator-prey relationships are optimized for the benefit of both the predators and the prey notice that god designs the predators with a capacity only to hunt the sick and the dying and the injured and by taking out the sick individuals they actually preserve the health of the rest of the herbivores there's actually an interesting thing you can watch on youtube it shows these grizzly bears in alaska going down to all these walruses that are along the beach and what these bears do is they go to each walrus at a time and give it a hug and what they're doing is they're trying to determine which walrus is so sick that it can't respond to the hug and when they find that walrus they kill the walrus it was interesting you watch the other walruses they all tolerate being hugged by the grizzlies they know that the grizzlies are only going to go after the really sick ones so because after all an adult walrus can easily dispose of a grizzly but what's interesting the grit the walruses actually tolerate this they don't move they just sit there and let the grizzlies do their thing and uh when the grizzly kills the sick walrus they just sit there it's like they seem to know that this is actually to their benefit if they let that sick walrus stay there they're all going to die but letting the grizzlies come through means they get to preserve themselves and their young that's just one example that many you can show but it was job who said in the 12th chapter look to the birds of the sky they'll teach you look to the beasts of the field they'll instruct you they'll instruct you significant spiritual lessons about how wonderfully god has designed everything not just for physical benefit but our spiritual benefit and i think one reason why we see strange beliefs appearing in the christian community and why we see a rise in atheism and agnosticism were cut off from those animals if you have adequate exposure to those animals then more people believe in god and the christian community is healthier that's one reason why i'm an outdoor enthusiast and i try to encourage people go to places where the animals haven't been abused by humans you're going to see things that'll transform your life and transform your life spiritually guys let's give dr ross a big hand for being with us this weekend again tomorrow night in the atrium chapel at seven o'clock we'll be doing one more session there to be live stream god be with us we love you lord in jesus name amen amen god bless you thank you such thought-provoking ideas and information absolutely incredible dr ross what did you think leave a comment below or write in to us also feel free to re-watch and share this message on facebook youtube or even our website gracestl.org have an awesome week [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Grace Church St. Louis

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Rating: 4.970149 out of 5

Keywords: gracestl, grace, saint, louis, rontucker, stl, church, Jesus, grace church, grace church stl

Id: lgTnUBti5ZU

Length: 103min 45sec (6225 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021