Hugh Ross Q & A Session Sat 26 04 14

do you didn't mention Jesus towards the end any of your talk but doesn't the theory of evolution with its death and destruction before atoms fall doesn't that destroy the gospel and undermine the gospel itself because if there's death and destruction before Adam then why did Christ come yeah I believe evolution is uh nonsense Walter nonsense so do i I mean if you look at our website you'll see that our position is that God performs millions of creation miracles and each one is an instantaneous event for example the origin of life we now realize happen in an instantaneous moment of time and actually happen without the benefit of any building blocks therefore it must be a supernatural event but concerning your specific question the most specific text is Romans 5:12 through 19 and what you see in Romans 5:12 is that when Adam sinned against God in the Garden of Eden death through sin was visited upon all men now notice here Paul is making two very careful qualifications because in the book of Romans he's talking about four different kinds of death he says this is a death you get through sin well of all the species of life that God created only humans sin the dogs don't sin the cows don't sin only human sins so he's saying this is humanity then to make sure you get the point he says death to all men that doesn't say death to all life it says death to all men and so Adams offense brought death to the human species and if you read all the way through to the nineteenth verse but you'll see is that the moment that Adam sinned he died instantly spiritually but he didn't die physically that came later God sent two angels to block access to the Tree of Life so it's interesting there is humanity at the potential to live forever in a spiritually dead State but God's intent was to use physical death as a tool to deliver us from the far worse consequence of spiritual death now nor in the bible does it tell us that there was no death of plants and animals before Adam sinned the Bible is silent on that issue well almost someone a Ford does address it which is seeing Psalm 104 as a message of God packing our planet where as much life as possible as diverse as possible and as long as the laws of physics will permit why so that God could treat us human beings at the very end and we would be the beneficiaries of all of Bayeux deposits provided by all the animal and plant life that preceded us and if you get this book navigating Genesis we actually total up the minimum quantity of bio deposit resources in the crust of the earth it's at least 76 quadrillion tons and here's a context in Psalm 104 verses 25 and following it's the property of all life to die off that happens just because of thermodynamics I mean look around you all of us are in a state of death because of thermodynamics look of my face you'll see that I'm thermodynamically decayed considerably and Romans 8 says the whole universe was subject to the law of decay everything decays and because of that it's a property of all life to die off that's verse 25 verse 26 and 27 god recreates and renews the face of the earth and it's a process of recreation and renewal that builds up all the bile deposits that allows us that coal oil natural gas steel zinc I mean all the metals that we mined to build our cities were concentrated my life that predated us so we thank God for the sulfate-reducing bacteria when we say grace at our dinner table well not every time but once in a while we do that but a good question and by the way it's addressed in more detail in this book there are some different type of question I know that your colleague Ken samples is a Calvinist I'd like to hear your take on the whole predestination vs. freewill thing okay you know reasons to believe is not Hugh Ross it's a team of scholars and you know what we all agree and sign a doctrinal statement that's basically consistent with the longer Creed's of the church I think the creedal statements are outstanding and so we insist that all of us sign that every year however we permit diversity and what we consider to be the non essentials like end times and like this whole issue of freewill and predestination nevertheless I decided to take the initiative to write a book on the topic and my motivation for writing the book was recognizing that in surveys we did in the Los Angeles area 15 percent of people who identify themselves as non-christians and said they couldn't consider becoming a Christian said so because of the apparent contradiction between human free will and divine predestination so for the benefit of those 15 percent I decided to write this book called beyond the cosmos it's not at the back book table but you can get it from reasons org or through Amazon but what I do in that book is first of all lay out the latest science that tells us this universe in which we live is not constrained by just length width and height there are in fact nine dimensions of space three big ones and six little ones and through the space-time theorems we know there has to be at least the equivalent of a second dimension of time and so what I do in the book is show you if you've got two dimensions of time and nine dimensions of space you can have human free will operating completely and divine predestination simultaneously without contradiction but also showing the book why it's impossible to reconcile predestination and freewill if you're trying to do it within the context of length width height and time and by the way in the Netherlands and Belgium they actually fought a war there was our minions fighting against Calvinists and they actually shed blood over this issue needless because there's eight passages in the Bible that state that God predetermines every word thought in action that any human being has ever expressed from before the creation of the universe and yet God holds us responsible for all of the decisions and actions and thoughts that we experience there are eight passages in the Bible as state both in the same verse so the Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible certainly did not see these as contradictions but you got our minions thinking that Calvinists are dead wrong and Calvinists who think they're Armenians are dead wrong and if I could speak for Ken samples of benefit he is not a hyper-calvinist he realizes that people take Calvin to a great extreme so he fully endorses the book that I wrote and the fact that we human beings are freewill beings and therefore were responsible before God to come to grips with his offer and to use our will to receive his offer a hyper-calvinist basically saying we don't have to do evangelism because god's already determined who's going to be saved there's nothing we have to do that's an abuse of the Calvinist position it's abuse of predestination by the way we also have a short DVD of the called beyond the cosmos so if you don't want to read the book you can get the DVD I got a young Christian in regards the evolution I think I heard through your app you see that your research can show that there was no primordial soup yes to begin the evolution process yes well this is something I'm hoping Christians will take advantage of is that we now the scientific evidence that the origin of life happened on planet Earth in a geologic instant without the benefit of any prebiotic soup or pre molecules and the reason why we know that's the case is that you have every organism every plant and animal every bacterium has certain isotope identities for example all organisms prefer carbon-12 over carbon 13 they preferred nitrogen 14 over nitrogen 15 and sulfur 32 over sulfur 34 so we look at those isotopes to see if the ancient carbonaceous material in the crust of the earth was prebiotic or post biotic we find the post biotic there is no prebiotic nor on the earth do we see the signal of prebiotic molecules and it was a romanian physicist who explained why he says if you have oxygen it stops the prebiotic chemistry I mean that famous experiment where they put chemicals inside the flask and put a spark through it they made sure there wasn't the tiniest amount of oxygen in the Flass they knew that would stop the whole process and this Romanian physicist said if you got oxygen it eliminates the possibility of these prebiotics but if you don't have oxygen there's no ozone and without the ozone there's nothing to stop ultraviolet radiation streaming in from the Sun at the time of the origin of life that ultraviolet radiation was thousands of times more intense than it is today but even today's level of intensity if it wasn't blocked out by ozone would stop prebiotic chemistry so what's what's called the oxygen ultraviolet paradox if he got oxygen it can't happen if you don't have oxygen it can't happen either way you lose and by the way that applies to the entire solar system so that's explains why people are speculating that life came from another planetary system but there was an Australian original plate researcher that calculated how frequently earth gets a rock from another planetary system once every 10 of the 16 years which is a million times older than the age of the universe so it takes an extraterrestrial alien to bring life to Planet Earth but it's not an alien from another planet it's a being from beyond space time matter and energy have brought life here to Planet Earth if you want to dig into a more detail we've actually written a book buzz Ron and I on origins of life and by the way that book got peer reviewed by an atheist origin of life researcher in the journal origins of life and the biosphere now I'll tell you what he said about the book he said of all the books I've seen in the origin of life this is the most scientifically comprehensive the most up-to-date and the most accurate and the most fair D balanced I like everything about the book accepted Jesus Christ part can you just address like pre Adam and Eve humanoid fossil record I think how do you see that well ok God is responsible for every life-form that exists on the surface of the earth past and present and the message you get in Psalm 104 is every life-form that God has ever created serves a purpose and equipping human beings to launch and sustain civilization and take the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to all the people groups of the world that includes the bipedal primates have preceded us so for example I made the point that Africa where you got 12 different species of bipedal primates that precede human beings the extinction rate when humans arrived in Africa of large bodied bird mammal species was only four and a half percent and therefore people they were able to launch civilization contrasted with Australia the extinction rate in Australia was 94 percent and with that high an extinction rate the Aborigines were not able to launch themselves out of the Stone Age it took Europeans coming with the animals that they had killed off to could all happen I mean the sheep here in Australia are not indigenous they were brought from Europe and Asia and so in that sense even Neanderthal and Homo erectus in stralla pithy scenes serve a role in preparing the way for human beings and human civilization they also provide a powerful proof against Darwinian evolution thanks to conservation biology we now have experiments that show us that of a mammal has an adult body size greater than 7 kilo from than 3 kilograms it goes extinct before it can evolve and of course all of bipedal primates are bigger than those 3 kilograms and we see in these creatures we've got DNA Neanderthals for example we got DNA from 20 different species they were here for a hundred thousand year period before human beings show up during that hundred thousand years we can't measure any change in the DNA it doesn't evolve and likewise the earliest Neanderthals looked the same as the latest we don't see any evolution and even more dramatically Homo erectus which was here from 2 million years ago to 200,000 years ago the DNA is too corrupted to be analyzed when we look at the skeletons they're the same 2 million years ago as they were 200,000 years ago primates don't evolve they're here for a period of time they go extinct and the replace against Psalm 104 it's a property of all life to go extinct that God recreates and renews the face of the earth and the bigger the animal and the more advanced the animal the faster it goes extinct what we see with the bipedal primates the average extinction time is one to two hundred thousand years by the way that's also going to apply to us we need to fulfill the Great Commission quickly because if we don't we'll be extinct hi he a big fan I just had a quick question about you mentioned how the moon however mars-sized planet hit the earth and created the moon so on and so forth so you say that also that scientific like the actual probability of that happening is very slim so I just want to know where does God fit in that picture hey very good fact I just wrote an article on our website a couple of months ago on the moon forming event and this is something that my peers have been researching now for over 30 years and the core of the story is that you really can't get a big moon orbiting a small planet close to its star unless you've got a really exotic collision event and it's such that when God formed the solar system we had two planets sharing the orbit of the earth so and that can actually happen if you got a plan at sixty degrees back or forward its stable so you can actually have two planets sharing the same orbit if they're exactly 60 degrees back or forward however it's only stable if it's a three body situation where you got a star and two planets in our solar system you got Jupiter and Saturn Uranus and Neptune they destabilize the orbit of the smaller the two planets which causes smaller the two planets to very slowly creep towards the Earth and collide with the earth at a low velocity into a very deep ocean evaporated the water which caused 99% of our atmosphere to be dissipated into interplanetary space and we lost ninety-nine point nine ninety nine point six percent of our water which enables us to have advanced life here now in the last year lunar formation theorists have been recognizing that it's more complicated than what they thought and so they come up with a new set of models which either require enormous fine-tuning of the mixing of the interior layers of the quieter and the earth in order to get the chemicals that are crucial to sustain plate tectonics set up a strong in any field and give us all the metal resources we need to launch advanced civilization the end result is one of them published a paper in the british journal Nature a few months back when he said all this complication and all this incredible fine-tuning design is leading to philosophical disquiet amongst our myths in other words and then our attempt to find a way to get less design but instead they found there was even more design and what's that philosophical disquiet though looks like we're gonna have to invoke a supernatural being to explain why the moon is exactly the way it is and the earth is exactly the way it is and the philosophical disquiet is growing even in the past few weeks just just back again on evolution the the mechanism by which evolution is supposed to have happened is by mutation and natural selection right but isn't it true that mutations are only downhill there are no beneficial mutations how do you answer that question well there's a ratio I mean most mutations are neutral where they'd either do no harm nor no good but that doesn't help that don't win Ian's model because it doesn't do anything but if you look at the ratio of what are called harmful mutations to beneficial mutations at best it's ten thousand to one at the other extreme it's ten million to one so you're going to get 10,000 minimum harmful mutations for a beneficial mutation now what that implies is in order for a species to have any significant evolutionary change it has to have an enormous population at very short generation time and you know a very small body size bottom line is the only species of life I've had any hope of Darwinian advance would be bacteria all of their species are off the table and this is what's motivated some evolution of biologists to do what are called long term evolution experiments and they're three of these experiments are right about my book mmmm more than a theory and the most famous one is one done at Michigan State University where they took twelve populations of E coli bacteria an e coli bacteria feed on sucrose that's their food supply but the scientists knew that inside the e coli bacterium his machinery that would allow it to also feed on citrate however it lacks the pore structures to let the citrate through but they also determined ahead of time that all you need is three mutations in the pore structure for citrate to get through and so what they did in the experiment as they supersaturated the e---coli battery was citrate and put in a starvation level of sucrose and so they were basically doing everything could externally to force the evolutionary change and I say that because that would never happen in the world of nature this is a laboratory experiment but it's a good experiment because it shows the limitations of evolution and what they're really trying to do is to see if these populations would all evolve to feeding on citrate of the 12 populations only one did and only after 44,000 generations so that's how long it took now those forty four thousand generations translate into a million years of human evolution and all you got was three mutations now the real gold experiment however was to see if they could get evolution to repeat and so they're expecting all 12 populations to develop this capability to this day the experiment is still ongoing now they're up to over 65,000 generations they still have only one population that's speeding on the citrate and then what was elegant about this experiment every five hundred generations they took a sample from each of the twelve populations and put it into cold storage which means after the forty four thousands generation they were able to go back to 43 thousand five hundred and see if they could get that to come up with a citrate feeding and that would work whether they went back more than a few thousand generations they could not get it to repeat and so they published their paper basically saying Stephen Jay Gould got it right that if you rewind the evolutionary clock you never get the same outcome it will not repeat but was catastrophic to the Darwinian model we see thousands of examples in biology today and biology past in the fossil record where you got repeated outcomes all over the realm of biology we have repeated design outcomes and with this experiment proved is that Darwinian mechanism won't now let me put a theological point on this remember I said earlier for six days God creates on the seventh day he doesn't create the advantage of these long term evolution experiments theologically we know God's not intervening we're only going to get the natural process now for the Darwinian model to be sustained you've got to build a demonstrate in the seventh day you can explain what happens in the six days and this experiment proves you can't and by the way that happened with the other two experiments as well all we're seeing is the micro evolution that takes place on day seven not the macro evolution that is declared in the six days of creation so that's an example of how scientists are actually putting to the test Darwin's claims and simultaneously confirming what the Bible's thought for thousands of years and Franklin told me many more experiments like that will be run soon here and can you I've heard lots of new things tonight very interesting to listen to not sure I'm going to research some of this myself as to what I believe about it but if the planet crashed into the earth dissipates in ninety seven percent or so of the water that was on the earth how did God then flood the earth in Noah only question okay good question and in this book you'll see five chapters on Noah's Flood so we go into it in detail and by the way there's some amazing new archaeological finds around the Persian Gulf that confirm what the Bible is taught I mean this stuff has just discovered a year ago by German archaeologists so a little plugged up to get the book and get the latest insight on Noah's Flood but a lot of people read the Bible in the 21st century and think is teaching that the flood is global what in fact is teaching is that the flood is worldwide now because we're global citizens we think worldwide and globe are one in the same they're not so one of the things I do in this book is actually take you through every passage in the Bible where it makes a claim of worldwide and would you see every single time it's less than the globe and likewise that's the case for the flood of a Genesis so for example it'll say that all the kings and queens of the whole world came to Solomon to hear of his great wisdom but if you read two verses further on it says they came from as far away as southern Arabia and Ethiopia that was the whole world about Solomon and as a nation or what Paul says in the New Testament to the Romans your faith has been heard throughout the whole world he meant the Roman world not necessarily the Aborigines living here in Australia likewise when it says of the flood 2nd Peter to the world of the ungodly was flooded and second Peter 3 cosmos --tote the world at the time the event took place don't you notice in both cases Peter is attaching an adjective to the word cosmos that immediately tells you it's not the whole globe if he meant the whole globe there'd be no adjective so wherever the ungodly dwelt there was a flood and so the real question as to how extensive was the flood how extensive was humanity because would you see in Genesis 7 and 8 is that all of humanity was wiped out and all the soulish animals that were associated with humanity so in our model there is no emperor penguins on board the ark humans had no contact with the emperor penguins no need to kill him and no need to put him on the ark and this fits what you see in the Levitical law that when you sin in front of a cockroach that does not change the behavior of a cockroach they're not soulish so they can't be impacted by our sinful behavior unless of course you step on them but the higher animals are impacted by our sin so you may have heard of the mean dogs and Rome mean dogs are owned by mean people and it's not that the dog is sinful or immoral the dog is simply trying to bring pleasure to his vicious owner and so vicious dogs are always owned by vicious people and that's why it tells us analytical law if a cow has a habit of goring other creatures the owner is to be spoken to and told to redress the behavior if the behavior continues the cow is to be killed and the owner along with the cow making it clear the owners responsible for that cow's behavior so that's what the flood is all about in genesis 7 & 8 however God kills off all of humanity and all of the animals impacted by the sin of humanity except for Noah his family and their animals there was the ones that are saved and how extensive was the flood what we see is that God commands Adam and Eve multiply and fill the earth but they didn't do it they refused to spread out over the face of the earth God brings a flood wipes out humanity and he repeats the command to Noah multiply and fill the earth but if you read Genesis 9 the language is stronger than it is to Adam and Eve he's basically insisting that they multiply and fill the earth once again we see in Genesis 11 they don't do it they stay in one place and therefore God has to step in and forcibly scatter humanity into all the continents of the earth now that's documented in Genesis 10 where it talks about the nations that God sets up and spreads and scatters notice that's after the flood not before the flood and now we have DNA evidence that tells us that humanity indeed was in one locale and then there was a very brief period of extremely aggressive migration and then the migration stopped and we actually can use a DNA evidence to trace the migration routes the date of the roots and the speed with which humans migrated along those routes the two primary routes are the Schorr of Asia and the west shore of North and South America and it all happened within a few hundred years so the Bible declared at first in Genesis 10 we now DNA evidence to prove that what's in Genesis 10 indeed is accurate probably not necessary now because in part of my question was related to your views on the noahic flood but could you give me your explanation of the fossil record and its existence for instance the Cambrian explosion as an example now what you see in the fossil record and I'm gonna include with a fossil record not just the bones but also the isotope evidence of life here on planet Earth is that for the first three billion years it's only unicellular life forms and colonies of unicellular life forms and Australia is where we got some of the most dramatic evidence for those events but 543 million years ago to go from bacterial life to virtually every kind of conceivable animal body plant it happens all at once particularly in the Chinese sight compared with a Canadian sight we see that even the most advanced animal phyla are there at the very beginning of the Cambrian explosion and this is something we see in the history of life is that it's punctuated by these mass extinction events followed by mass speciation events just like you see in Psalm 104 but as we investigate the mass speciation events we notice that we always get optimized ecological relationships immediately but Darwinian paradigm would predict that there would be a substantial passage of time from an extinction event to optimized Ecology's but the optimized ecology show up immediately whether the time delay every single time now as to why God would use that approach well it's because the physics of the solar system is changing you know and I engaged my biology peers what I notice is they try to explain the fossil record as if there's no change going on in the Sun the earth the moon or the planets and the truth is there's rather dramatic change going on the Sun today is 15 percent brighter than at the time of the origin of life the earth is rotating five times more the radiation environment is changed by a factor of six the radiation environment the Sun has changed by a factor of a million so you take that all into account what you recognize is in order to keep the earth packed with as much life as possible as diverse and as long as possible it's crucial you have different life at different times why because for example you got the Sun getting brighter and brighter now in order to keep life optimal and super abundant on the surface of the earth it's crucial that that life had just the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere downward as the Sun gets progressively brighter and brighter and so what the crater does is he steps in and removes life that is not as efficient as pulling out greenhouse gases with life forms that are that explains for example like vascular plants show up so late the vascular plants hastened the erosion of silicate continental land masses by a factor two to four times and what that does is dramatically pull more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere so the Sun gets brighter the temperature the surface of the earth remains ideal for life and my peers in astronomy have actually calculated how frequently you would need a mass extinction event followed immediately by a mass speciation event in order to keep things ideal on the surface of the earth the answer is once every 25 to 27 million years what does the fossil record tell us about once every 27 million years so the to actually fit but again only a mine knows what life to take away and what new life to replace it a mindless process would very quickly get at a sink and a planet becomes pearly sterile so it's one of the more dramatic evidences that you need an intelligent supernatural agency to ensure you got the right life on the planet at the right time throughout the entire history of life incidentally that's going to be the subject of my next book um there's a lot of debate about global warming and its repercussions global warming and its repercussions what are your views on them okay global warming at the back there you'll see the book hidden treasures in the book of Job and when I point out there is in Genesis 1 it ends with a single sentence where God puts Adam and Eve and through them all of humanity in charge of the planet to manage its resources for the benefit of all life it's just one sentence the reason why Moses could get away with a single sentence is in the book of Job which predates the content of Moses books by about five or six hundred years Joel had already explained how to take care of the planet for the benefit of all life job 37 38 and 39 is God's creation care manual but the main theme of that manual is that when we humans face a crisis and manage the planet for the benefit of all life God already has designed the earth and it's life so we face that kind of a crisis he's provided a solution that's optimally ethical and the same time optimally economic now what's making the global warming issue so controversial is you got one group of politicians saying we need to make draconian economic sacrifices in order to make sure the planet doesn't get too warm and you've got another set of politicians saying wait a minute that those draconian economic sacrifices are gonna cause great suffering and we need to do what's economically beneficial and so they begin to say maybe this global warming isn't what people claim it is it's politically charged but what if we can provide solutions that are often ly ethical at the same time boost the economy and so what I described number one in terms of global warming I can tell you there's no doubt that the planet is and has warned many times in the past our planet goes through warming and cooling cycles the real debate amongst us scientists how much of this warming is the fault of human civilization and how much of it is the fault of natural cycles that our planet goes through and unfortunately the answer is not very unambiguous the human input is somewhere between 20 and 80 percent of the total so we got really big error bars on who's at fault here but there's no doubt that global warming is happening and there's no doubt that if it continues it's going to put a real crimp on human civilization and by the way an ice age is inevitable no matter what we do but there are things we can do to put off the inevitable and when I described in hidden treasures in the book of Job our three solutions that are actually in this 4,000 year old book that allow us to do something that will cool the planet at the same time dramatically boost the economy of the world now have you got a solution like that every politicians going to vote for it because everybody wins but I use that as a general case that for every ecological problem we face there are those win-win solutions why cuz God designed the planet so that we humans would not be stuck with a choice between ethics and economics so one is to do with whales one is to do with ostriches then one has to do with reversing the rainfall patterns that we have abused over the last several hundred years but to send the book of the back there yes who's next um dr. Ross I wonder if you would explain your understanding of the seven days of creation yeah the Hebrew word used for day and Genesis one is the word Yom notice to this debate over how long these creation days are is basically an english-language debate when I speak in other countries where they speak different languages this isn't a big deal it is in English and the reason why is that you're taking Hebrew which has only 3,000 words if you don't count the names of cities and people and translating into a language that's got 4 million words and so for example in English we have over a dozen words for a long period of time and Biblical Hebrew you only have one as the word Yong has translated day and because the Hebrew vocabulary is so tiny virtually every Hebrew noun has multiple literal definitions so the word that you see for earth and Genesis one five different literal definitions the word heaven three different literal definitions which explains why Paul says in Corinthians I was taken up to the third heaven so you would know which heaven he was speaking about the word yom translated day for different literal definitions it can mean part of the daylight hours like from noon to 3:00 p.m. they can mean all of the daylight hours it can mean a 24-hour rotation period or a long but finite period of time and once again Yoma is the only biblical hebrew word that can mean a long period of time now the position we adopted reasons to believe as a Genesis one is declaring that God created in six consecutive long periods of time and therefore there is no contradiction between the book of nature and the book of Scripture and some of the reasons we take that position you heard me tonight there's no evening and morning for the seventh day and three passages tell us we're still in the seventh day which means the seventh day is a long period of time a second obvious passage to go to his creation day six where we're told that God created both the human male and the human female but if you go to Genesis 2 God creates Adam first and he's created outside the Garden of Eden he watches the trees in the garden grow then God puts him in the garden and he's told that 10 the aren't long enough Bible Ephraim to realize has got to be more to life than gardening and then God has a name all the soulish animals so he brought all these animals to Adam and says give each an appropriate name for how I've designed this creature to serve and please you and having done all that God looks down on Adam and notices he's lonely it takes time to become lonely then God puts him to sleep perform surgery on him he sees his new creature when he sees Eve what do we see recorded in the original Hebrew coming of his mouth ha ha ha it's a word used more than 20 times in the Old Testament most commonly translated at long last therefore the sixth day like the seventh day is a significant passage of time and the grammatical structure would tell you all the days would be there for long periods of time and by the way the events previous to the creation day one are indeterminate there's nothing in the Hebrew that would put a limit on how much time goes on between the creation of the universe and the beginning of creation day one I just want to ask about the the speed of light and the the origins of the universe from the singularity through to now I think isn't it understood to be about 17 billion years or something the universe thing around about that old and I think I remember reading about 20 years ago something about a theory that the speed of light could change but it sounds from what you've been saying that that's that's not biblical so could you just comment on right yeah the age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years and it's right here in Australia that a gentleman named a Trevor Norman came up with the idea that maybe the universe is only thousands of years old and the way he speculated was what are the velocity of light for Adam were a million times faster than it is today then the light from distant stars in galaxies which is a huge problem for the young earth paradigm could get here quickly rather than slowly well we have measurements in astronomy that tell us the velocity of light is the same at distant galaxies as it is here in the earth and it's the same to like 13 places a decimal so it's very precisely determined I mean there's certain spectral lines that's split and the degree of splitting tells you the velocity of light and we see the same degree of splitting everywhere we look in the universe but I found that no matter where I speak all audiences know the equation e equals MC squared okay C is the velocity of light and E is energy so if indeed Trevor Norman is right and the velocity of light was a million times faster for atom than it is for us today so a light could get here that much faster that would make the heat output of the Sun a trillion times hotter if his a trillion times hotter atom would have been incinerated along with the rest of planet Earth and clearly that didn't happen and bottom line is part of what we astronomers call the entropic principle that the velocity of light has a fine-tuned the law to make life possible change it even in a very slightest at any time in the history of the universe it rules out the possible existence of life so the fact that you're sitting there proves there's never been a change in the velocity of light and it's comports well at the Bible which says in Jeremiah 33 25 the laws that govern the heavens and the earth don't change the velocity of light is one of those laws and constants it doesn't change you've got a people that haven't had a question yet I remember learning in science I remember learning in science about carbon dating and how reliable it was do you have any comment on its reliability yes and you'll see a lot more in my book a matter of days there's a whole chapter there are radiometric dating you actually see an article on our website that goes into in some depth and in physics and astronomy we have a whole range of radiometric tools and the thing we're needing to communicate to laypeople is every radiometric tool as is range where it works at a much larger range where it doesn't and the rule of thumb is you have to be within a factor of six of the half-life carbon-14 half of it decays over 5715 years so you can multiply that by six and divide by six that's its range of applicability so for example if you want a date a book that was published ten years ago carbon-14 dating is useless it's too young and you're trying to date something that is fifty thousand years old that again is too old but it's wonderful for dating Bible manuscripts that date to be 2,000 years old so for example we've been able to hack your ly establish the dates of some manuscripts to plus or minus nine months precision it's because you're close to the half-life the other limitation of carbon-14 had dates along something's been dead so it's useless for dating a rock but it's ideal for dating say a papyrus scroll because of papyrus at one time was living tissue so basically determining how long that papyrus has been in a dead state so that's where carbon-14 works and it can be calibrated back in Tights because some people have speculated maybe the decay rate changed well you can look in deep ice cores in Antarctica for example and in the annual layers you'll see carbon-14 and so you can actually measure the rate of decree decay for the past eight hundred thousand years of looking at the dome see ice core and we do by the way see very tiny variations in carbon-14 half-lives why because nitrogen decays nitrogen 15 decays into carbon 14 through the agency of cosmic rays while the cosmic ray path is not constant cosmic rays come from supernova eruptions so every time you've got a supernova eruption in the galaxy it disturbs the carbon-14 decay rate but only by a tiny amount usually by about 1% that's all we see so typically that doesn't make a lot of difference in the calculation of the date and their dating the earth you're gonna want to use things like uranium dating and thorium dating so for example uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.4 billion years so it's ideal for dating the birth of the earth because the Earth's date is 4.5 7 billion so you're right on almost bang on the half-life and likewise thorium with a decay rate of 14 billion years is also a useful tool what's been the reaction to your solutions in the in your book for go out to global warming what global warming you said yeah well the book has only been out for a year and a half but we've gotten a very good reception particularly from secular scientists because they've been under a lot of pressure to deny global warming and it's like okay we can take the economic issue out of it then this is something that people can rationally look at without bias so yeah we've gotten a very good reaction and it's actually leading to some interesting discussions too because if you look at the ice core data you basically see a hundred thousand year cycle of warming and cooling and there looks like this the temperature will spike up from an ice age hit a peak that's about three degrees centigrade warmer than where we are right now but when it hits that peak you get a rapid drop in temperature and you get an ice age and it's such a the ice age typically lasts ninety thousand years and you get a ten thousand year warm interglacial but if we look at all the previous ice ages the warm interglacial has looked like this we're living in the only warm interglacial where the temperatures spiked up leveled off for nine thousand years at three degrees below the maximum level and has stayed there and because of that we've been able to launch and sustain global high technology civilization it's the ideal temperature but in the past million years back in the past four million years we've never seen what we call this warm spring where it stops just short of the maximum and stays there for an extended period of time and my colleagues are trying to figure out why we don't know the answer but it's this is the only time in the history of the earth that we can see that there's been what we call this long steady springtime condition for the earth but one thing is it's exactly what you need to explain civilization dr. oz I think that question to was have any of your solutions being accepted in the scientific community so pushing into the solutions oh well the solutions we recommend in the book are for example that'd be a really good idea to shrink the Sahara Desert to 1/10 of what what it is now during the days of the Roman Empire and the Sahara Desert was the only 10% of its size and we know how it got that big and we know how to reverse it and if we were to do that there would be a big food supply in Africa that Africa currently doesn't have it would provide an economic source of income for those nations and it would soak up huge quantities of greenhouse gases so as an example of a win-win-win and how of my colleagues who are not Christians and looked at that it's a no-brainer let's do it although they think my idea might be a little bit radical because I basically said if we're gonna motivate the sub-saharan African peoples to work with us to replant the Sahara Desert we're gonna have to give them all the petroleum they want free of charge and rather they would have them pay for that petroleum rather than get it free of charge but my whole point is even if you've got to give it to him free of charge it's worth doing and if we don't get him some free fuel they're gonna keep stripping the land of grasses in order death cooking fuel we need to provide them with a cooking fuel resource that's going to be cheaper and more convenient than what they're already using because that's what's causing this arid desert get bigger and frankly I think the shrinking of the Gobi Desert might come first that's four times bigger than it was 2,000 years ago and the reason why I think that might come first is at the Gobi Desert a few years ago invaded the suburbs of Beijing and so it's gotten the attention of the Communist Party leaders there that this is a serious problem and they may have more motivation to do something about it we'll see just on the fossils I've read lately that there's been some soft tissue found within fossil remnants can you explain your view of that yes you know there's been some debate that soft tissue can't be preserved for long periods of time what preserves soft tissue for long periods of time is if the creature is buried where you cut off all contact of bacteria and oxygen if you got oxygen and bacteria that will decay but if you don't have oxygen bacteria even though it's soft tissue even though you've got blood vessels there it will be perfectly preserved and you see this for example and a lot of fossils that are as much as 1 to 300 million years old but it only happens where you got a complete sealing off of oxygen and bacteria and how often does that happen less than 1/10 of a percent of the fossil finds we have have that degree of protection from exposure to oxygen and ten bacteria now some modern-day examples of that are caves where you get say a wolf that falls into the cave and lands on the floor and certain caves have a very low rate of oxygen and bacteria and what you notice as you get a perfect mummification of that creature the tissue doesn't decay so you know even in real time we can observe that phenomena taking place but in the case of dinosaur soft tissue it's an immediate cutting off of all oxygen and bacteria as to the end possibly one mole huge fan one more question just regarding how like I was brought up to believe like six thousand ten thousand year old and I was very confused by it so when you can when you can cross I really visualized it and I understand it but obviously they they got that six to ten thousand years from the genealogies in you don't want me and how does that ok the genealogies yeah that too is covered in the navigating Genesis book but if you really want to get the detailed scoop on it the Hebrews scholar Walt Kaiser has done probably the most extensive biblical research on the genealogies and that was actually involved with him and a couple of TV programs on this and what he and others Bible scholars point out is that every genealogy in the Bible has missing names no genealogy is exhaustive and for example you notice in Genesis 5 and 11 there is no totaling up of the years and you know in Hebrew the word hobb that's translated father can also mean grandfather great-grandfather great-great grandfather white was been the word son can mean grandson great-great grandson etc so again the Hebrew vocabulary has a small size and so a single word covers all these possibilities why do you have it in the Bible well what wall Kaiser and others would point out is every genealogy has got a redemptive message in it so for example some genealogies will choose to highlight the women as opposed to the men making the point that redemption is not just for men it's for women too and other genealogies will highlight the Gentiles as opposed to the Jews making the point again the gospel is for both Jews and Gentiles and also in particularly the Old Testament genial oh geez they like regular patterns saying you actually see this and one of the New Testament genealogies where it records the genealogy from Jesus back to Adam and it puts it in three sets of fourteen generations well if you compare it with the genealogies and chronicles it's clear that they're giving you that what they consider to be the fourteen key people in each segment and what you see in Genesis five and 11 is that each genealogy has ten names and so it's kind of giving you the ten key figures for the theological point that's being made in those early chapters of Genesis and so you know I remember talking to my sons about the genealogies and said what could be more boring than all these lists of begats has a wait a minute this is in the Bible for a reason it's not just a list of names let's actually look at what it says around the genealogy to see the theology is being communicated there in the genealogy but for example we see in Luke 3:11 names for the Genesis five genealogy so that by itself establishes that there are names that are left out and as I said if you compare the different genealogy each one leaves out different names but really what you got going on in Genesis 5 for example it mentions those individuals that are in the patriarchal line that lead to Jesus and these are the individuals that live a long time except for Enoch who did not die God took him while he was still alive even so he lived more than 300 years but notice what it says in Genesis 6 where it talks about the wickedness of the pre-flood people's and which is see in Genesis 4 where it talks about Cain being a murderer and how his ancestor murdered seven people and so the point there is these are the exceptions that lived to be eight or nine hundred years of age the vast majority people were being killed by their fellow man in fact you'll see in the navigating Genesis book we actually they for you what the murder rate was in the days before the flood it was over 95 percent 95 percent of all people that were born were ending their life by being killed by their fellow man in fact we argue that the average lifespan in the human species today has longer than the average lifespan and the days before the flood yes you got Methuselah living to be 960 seven years he's the exception the norm is people being killed in their 20s and 30s because of the wickedness of their fellow man and if God hadn't intervened with a flood humanity would have gone extinct humanity was on the verge of extinction in the days before the flood and so the flood in that context is an act of mercy by the Creator to see the human species from self extinction the last question the night before our Sydney friend over here hear this something I've wondered about I know of on your podcast you guys have touched on it that whole universe from nothing the quantum bubble I mean you know they're saying that quantum theory can say that something can come from nothing I mean that to me sounds ridiculous but maybe you can sort of elaborate what they're not that ridiculous when the a CDS physicist astronomers talking about something coming from nothing I mean I gave a sermon in our church on everything you want to know about nothing and basically talked about how in physics we have nine different definitions of nothing and every one of those definitions is something and so when Lawrence Krauss talks about the universe coming from nothing you need to ask him what kind of nothing are you talking about so for example he makes a big deal that you can get matter out of nothing well it's not really matter out of nothing it's matter being created out of the space-time quantum fluctuations and so for example we have experiments and particle physics labs that tell us that the quantum space-time fluctuations in the space fabric of the universe can actually produce virtual particles and lawrence krauss says well that's how the universe came about well the space-time theorems tell us that the beginning of the universe is the beginning of space and time if you've got no space in time you got no quantum space-time fluctuations and so in that sense his creation out of nothing is a creation out of something and the other fatal flaw and his suggestion that is just like virtual particles okay you can get virtual particles being produced out of quote nothing that is space-time quantum fluctuations with one proviso it must return to the quantum space-time phone before any experimenter can quote keep the virtual particle as we call it virtual particles you can't keep the particles they go back into this quantum space-time phone so quickly you can't capture the particle now if you're trying to use virtual particle production as an analogy for how the universe came about we can calculate through quantum mechanics the snap-back time how quickly the universe would have to return to the quantum space-time fluctuations it would have to return and less than 10 to the minus 120 seconds so no matter what kind of creation model you have I think we would all agree the universe is older than 10 to the minus 120 seconds therefore that's not how the universe came about now at Lawrence Krauss his book he appeals the three other kinds of nothing to try to make the universe but all of them are just like the virtual particle example and if you want to see a critique of his book I've got a 16 page review of his book up on our website I forget the title if I think it's everything well there's nothing really nothing or something like that maybe put Lawrence Krauss his name in it'll pop right up on her search engine or what did everybody get all of that I mean just repeat it back for me straight away that'd be great I mean my head's exploding and that's been my last 24 hours so some sympathy for me but seriously I think genuinely all through the night there there's been some real nuggets that all of us that any different level can take away no doubt about it the the whole point to not getting at all is the books and these books great books are all available at the back there's videos as well that's a great way to be able to just resource yourself and really encourage you in that regard also Greg down the back there can if the book sells out there's only a couple of each book he can put you in contact with the right supplier or we can order it for you if you're in the earth Ridge area so that'd be that'd be great I know dr. Ross is available for one-on-one questions at the front here so you can come forward at the end otherwise I think we should just put our hands together now for dr. Ross

Channel: Catalyst Church

Views: 40,604

Rating: 4.8314176 out of 5

Keywords: Hugh, Ross, apologetics, space, astronomy, Astrophysics (Field Of Study), Jesus, God, creation, genesis, evolution, Hugh Ross (Person)

Id: Fc9KqMXChqA

Length: 64min 45sec (3885 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 27 2014