Hugh Ross's scientific evidences for God

Faith & Science Conversation
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I see. So basically what Ross did was to omit some numbers and possibly make up others in order to make it look like the opportunity window we had was way shorter than it actually is and thus make his arguments look stronger? Well, we don’t even now if 100 trillion years for now the universe will even still have the conditions to form life, so it is hard to apply any anthropic principle logic here.

Yeah, I also found that claim interesting and it seems reasonable at first, but then again, it probably has something wrong with it given Hugh Ross’s track record. The same thing can be said about the argument from our location within the galaxy.

I will read carefully all the links you posted (especially Krauss’s paper) so I can be better informed. Many thanks!

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Thanks for clarifying.

I know well the video by Inspiring Philosophy you refer to.
I agree with many of the claims in it although I would like to formulate things more accurately.

So I suggest you read my article in arxiv.org

and then we can continue the conversation with more common ground.

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Going on.

Claim: we’d be completely ignorant about the cosmic creation event if we were on the scene 5 billion years ago because the light wouldn’t have had time to reach us

I’m going to try to guess what he is referring to in more detail here. Presumably the ‘cosmic creation event’ is referring to being able to see the Cosmic Microwave Background which is constantly getting harder to measure as time goes on (not by much but say in 2 trillion years it’d be quite a bit tougher!). At first glance it would actually be easier to measure this in the past as it would be a larger signal compared to today. But since it was very unclear what he was referring, I had to pull out the book that this talk goes with and I found a section that is kind of relevant to this.

If you have the book it is in Chapter 3: Why such an old universe in the section titled “Just-Right Age for Observing.”

Claim in book: “the light of nearby objects would have blinded observers from seeing the more distant objects. Only in a universe where stars and galaxies are sufficiently spread apart can an observer potentially see everything.”

Okay there are no actual sources for this and there is no way he could know what someone could see in the universe 5 billion years ago. Not to mention, could one measure the CMB? Absolutely yes! We would measure a blackbody spectra on top of any other electromagnetic radiation and we can subtract out the background from stars. I’m gonna go with this is nonsense for this one.

Claim #2 in book: “these lights were much brighter in the past than they are today. The intensity of light emitted by the cosmos is strongly tied to the rate of star formation. This rate reached a peak when the universe was about 5 to 6 billion years old. It took additional billions of years beyond that peak for the lights of the universe to dim sufficiently so as not to impair astronomers’ viewing capacity”

Again, no sources. I’ll give one that can possibly support him although he’s wrong in the peak star formation rate (I posted a little on this above):

Sobral summarized the results: “The production of stars in the Universe as a whole has been continuously declining over the last 11 billion years; it is 30 times lower today than at its likely peak 11 billion years ago. If this trend continues, no more than 5 % more stars will exist in the Universe. We are clearly living in a Universe dominated by old stars. All of the action in the Universe occurred billions of years ago!”

In other words, if Sorbal is correct, given that there are approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, we will be producing another ~500,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars still.

But anyways, as for Hugh’s claim, it is completely speculative and no backed up by any evidence. However, in the presentation it is cited as a matter of fact.

Claim #3 in book: if humans were alive on earth during Earth’s infancy, they couldn’t have seen through our translucent atmosphere

Again no sources. Forget this. And this is a complete strawman type of comparison. Hugh is arguing that nowhere in the universe could we see the cosmic creation event and one of his reasons is that the Earth’s atmosphere was hard to see through so its unlikely any humans alive would have been interested in making telescopes to measure electromagnetic radiation from space. I’ll do a few more claims but this type of shenanigans is ALL OVER HIS MATERIAL.

Claim #4 in book: “Theoretically, the earlier in cosmic history humans arrived, compared to 13.73 billion years, the smaller fraction of cosmic history they could have observed”

There it is! The claim I’ve been looking for. Ah rats, again no sources yet in his presentation he states as a matter of fact about 5 billion years ago we’d only be able to see about 2/3rds of the universe.

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One final post for me starting at 22:38

The slide reads: 99.73% of all the universe’s stuff is dark energy and dark matter

Stop right there. This might not be a big deal to anyone else, but this is wrong.

72.1% is Dark Energy
23.3% is Dark Matter
4.35% is from other matter that doesn’t shine like stars but is still regular matter
0.27% is from stars

Hugh clumps the regular matter that doesn’t shine for some reason in the category of ‘Dark Energy and Dark Matter.’ NOBODY would ever do this. No cosmology publication does this. Dark Matter specifically refers to not just stuff that doesn’t give off light. It would be completely wrong to call my wallet made of dark matter because it doesn’t give off light. But that is what he’s done here. I can’t fathom how anyone could or would ever do that, but I digress. Next!

Claim: if the dark stuff were changed by just one part in 10^122 no life would be possible

In the book, there’s actually a citation for this claim! It’s a miracle! The citation is: ‘Lawrence M., Krauss, Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass (New York: Basic, 2000), 103-5; Krauss, “End of the Age Problem,” 461, 465. I don’t have the book, but here is Krauss’ paper on End of the Age Problem:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/305846/pdf

You can find the reference to the 120 orders of magnitude on the first page and in the conclusion. It is an interesting question but understanding where this comes from is very important before arguing for what the unsolved question truly is. A youtube helps demonstrate the origin of this extreme apparent fine tuning:

But, from my perspective, the best ‘fine-tuning’ is based upon a lack of knowledge. Others here may disagree, but until we have a comprehensive theory of quantum gravity, I’m not going to be raving about how this is knock-out evidence for God. From my perspective… it is a very dangerous thing for a Christian to say 'the best evidence for divine design is in the darkness of the universe simply because we may find out that there is really no fine-tuning at all!

Claim: the designer is therefore 10 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion… etc. times smarter and better funded

This is a nonsensical claim. Let’s compare humans today to humans oh two hundred years ago. We are able to measure something as small as 10^-24 meters today (very small with the LIGO detector and gravitational waves). The smallest thing anyone could measure 200 years ago would be let’s say a micrometer (or about the width of a human hair). Does that mean that humans today are a billion billion times smarter? No, not by any means which makes this a ridiculous argument only put in perhaps to cause oohs and aahs from Christian audiences.

Claim: the planet earth resides in the darkest life habitable location within this dark universe

Well I think if pressed, Hugh might agree that he believes the earth is the only habitable location in the entire universe so by default, we win! But there’s absolutely no way whatsoever to possibly know this at all! And then he claims if we were anywhere else we couldn’t really know anything. Yeah… An actual cool study is describe in this short youtube video of where we are cosmically.

Let me go on…

Now at 36:30 The abundance of Uranium and Thorium reaches a peak at 9.2 billion years after creation

There is a graph he shows where the graph of abundance of uranium and thorium increases and peaks when the MWG is formed. In the book (Figure 3.1)… THERE IS NO CITATION. Are you kidding me? This is HUGE and there is no citation. Well no worries, I’ve got several of his books that also mention Thorium. He uses the exact same graph in his book “More than a Theory” (fig 7.5). Again no citation.

Okay fair enough, maybe it is just so obvious that it doesn’t even need a citation! He does write in more than a theory:

“based on measurements of the cosmic expansion rate, astronomers have determined that the cosmic abundance of these elements (uranium and thorium) peaked when the universe was two-thirds its present age, some 4.57 billion years ago.”

Okay. Well I can’t find any sources anywhere. I’m sure astronomers have done just that but nobody bothered to write it down ever.

Final claim: The solar flare activity being at a minimum presently

Alright, lets go for one more round. This one also appears in the Why the Universe is book as Figure 3.2! Hey, there’s a citation here right after the phrase “the sun’s flaring subsided to a minimum level when the Sun reached about 4.5 to 4.6 billion years of age.” Holy cow! There are seven citations just for this one claim! And yeah, I’m going to list all seven.

  1. Evidence in metoerites for an active early sun (1987)–yeah this looks promising to support the idea that the sun’s solar flare activity was higher at first
  2. Irradiation records in meteorites (1988)
  3. A slightly more massive young sun as an explanation for warm temperatures on early mars (1995)
  4. Solar wind composition and implications about the history of the solar system (1973)
  5. Long time variations in solar wind properties: possible causes versus observations (1991)
  6. Long-term changes in composition of solar particles implanted in extraterrestrial materials (1991)–the abstract notes: There is good evidence for a long-term decrease in the solar-wind flux.
  7. Observation estimates for the mass-loss rates of alpha-centauri and proxima centauri using Hubble Space Telescope Ly-alpha spectra (2001)

Well, what did I learn. I learned that yeah our sun most likely had greater solar flaring in the past. But what of this amazing dip in the curve at EXACTLY when human beings are here? I don’t know. I can’t verify this one beyond looking at flaring activity being higher in the past than today. My problem is just that nothing close to this curve has ever been published but yet it is touted out as amazing evidence of the providential window of God.

Concluding thoughts
I’m done with this presentation. Watch at your own risk!

4 Likes
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I’m a bit rusty when it comes to science, can you explain what the article is arguing using layman’s terminology?

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I must say it is even worse than I thought it would be, I was expecting something like “very sloppy but the overall idea is ok”, haha. Thanks for your patience going through all that! And yeah, don’t bother watching the rest of the talk, that segment is the “best” (or less terrible) part of the talk, it really hits rock bottom in the rest.

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Creationists have the excuse of not having enough knowledge in biology to know what they are talking about, but Ross should in theory have enough study and education in physics to know what he is doing wrong.

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It is gonna take a little bit of time since it is 18 pages long and I’m not used to the subject, but I’m enjoying it so far!

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With pleasure. Nonetheless I would prefer to do it in another thread to avoid confusion with Hugh Ross’s claims.

We could do it in this thread, where quantum physics is also discussed, or you can open a new specific thread.

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New thread please

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