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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Hugh Ross
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May 11 - May 26, 2014
The universe, life, and humanity were either designed with purpose and meaning, or they were not. The entire cosmos either explains itself, or it does not. Creation either happened, or it’s a figment of someone’s imagination.
To adhere to objective principles, scientists must present their positions in the form of models that can be tested. In science, the term “model” refers to the schematic description of a system (or set of phenomena) that accounts for its observed and inferred features. A model is much more than a mere idea, inference, method, hypothesis, or rudimentary theory. It’s a scenario that offers reasonable explanations for the entire origin and history of a particular system in nature, as well as for its relationship to other phenomena.
The Bible, unlike any other holy book I’ve encountered, provides at least two dozen creation accounts (see chapter 5, p. 61), and a careful integration of these descriptions yields a well-defined outline for the origin and history of the universe, Earth, and life.
After more than two centuries of vigorous debate on the topic of creation/ evolution, proponents of various positions have developed surprisingly few serious tests of their own (or other) models. Nor have they produced many model-based predictions of future scientific discoveries.
With naturalism, the answers to the big questions of life become insignificant. Where did we humans come from? Random physical phenomena. Where are we going? Most likely to extinction. Such answers rarely captivate a student’s curiosity or ignite the general public’s imagination. Nor do they satisfy the soul’s hunger for meaning, purpose, or hope.
The Supreme Court affirmed that if creationism is valid as science, its right to a place in the public school science curriculum is assured, no matter what its connection to religion.
A decade later I found out why the Bible so perfectly and consistently followed the scientific method. A study of the rest of the creation accounts and of the history of the Reformation revealed that Scripture was the source of this process.
When European Reformation scientists began to apply the biblical interpretation method to the record of nature, their efforts gave birth to the scientific method (see Appendix A, pp. 257–58). That process also initiated the scientific revolution.
Only the Bible gives an abundance of specific, testable detail about the cosmic beginning and ending—data that proves accurate—written prior to the second century AD. The following details (with the exception of 9 and 10) have already been confirmed by twentieth-century cosmologists:
Thousands of years prior to any scientific speculation or research into big bang cosmology, the Bible predicted all of the fundamental attributes of a big bang universe.
In Genesis 1, the word translated “day,” yôm, could have any of four different definitions: (1) a portion of the daylight hours, (2) the entire daylight segment of a twenty-four-hour day, (3) a twenty-four-hour day, and (4) a long but finite time period.13
Light from the Sun takes 8.3 minutes.
Stated another way, the probability from a nontheistic perspective of finding a body anywhere in the observable universe with the necessary conditions to support advanced life is at least 10850 times more remote than the possibility that a blindfolded person could pick out a single marked electron randomly shuffled into a tightly packed pile of electrons that fills the entire universe, on the first try.
As the universe expands at progressively faster rates under the influence of dark energy, researchers will see increasingly less of cosmic history. Humanity lives at the only moment in cosmic history when the first stars, galaxies, and even cosmic background radiation can be observed.
Scientific discoveries about the origin and history of the universe point to the existence of a transcendent causal Agent. So does the Bible.
For over fifty years, astronomers have scoured the Milky Way Galaxy in search of a star that qualifies as the Sun’s twin. Given the Milky Way’s life-friendly features and two hundred billion stars, the astronomical community expected to find many exact analogs. However, by October 2007, in spite of diligent searches spanning several decades, astronomers had found only two possibilities: 18 Scorpii and HD 98618.3 Table 8.1 lists their observed properties:
If Earth’s Sun shone brighter by just 0.4 percent (as it will when it’s only 0.2 percent older), advanced life would become extinct.
the second law of thermodynamics, which says that all systems in the universe proceed toward increasing disorder and decreasing complexity.
Life cannot tolerate even a 1 percent change in luminosity.15
However, only five or six new phyla have appeared during the past 540 million years, and about fifteen phyla have disappeared—taking the idea of evolution in the opposite direction of what naturalistic models predict.
The main reason people are weaker and slower than similar-sized animals is that 35 percent of the human body’s blood flow serves the brain.
Earthquake activity today is high enough to sustain adequate levels of various surface nutrients but low enough to allow for a global, high-tech civilization.
The Declaration of Independence itself makes four direct references to the biblical God.8
In the four most important creation-evolution court battles of the past fifty years, the creation side lost every time. Why? Because its defendants could not prove that young-earth creationism had scientific legitimacy.
These court judgments against young-earth creationism are not the audacious judicial moves many make them out to be. The courts have been consistent. Since the founding of the United States, and in light of the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause, American education always has discriminated against religious ideas and doctrines that lack factual support.
Falsifications of a model resulting from failed predictions can be classified into three categories: refining, corrosive, and catastrophic.
“In China we are not allowed to criticize our government leaders, but we are free to criticize Darwin. In your country you are free to criticize your government leaders, but you are not permitted to criticize Darwin.”10
Biological evolution (as opposed to Darwinian evolution) is a theory in every sense of the definition in that there exists overwhelming physical evidence that life progressively became more diverse and complex over the past 3.8 billion years and shares common DNA templates, metabolic reaction paths, and common designs in morphology. This is the definition most scientists refer to when they declare biological evolution an established fact.
