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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Hugh Ross
Read between
March 8, 2019 - March 5, 2021
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.
Naturalism, which acknowledges no transcendent absolutes, has no necessary ground or foundation for logic, reason, or even mathematics. The very concept of truth comes from the spiritual domain.
Christianity upholds the values and ethics crucial to the scientific endeavor, including support for the laws of logic.37 That’s how Christian theology gave birth to the scientific revolution (see chapter 4).
The scientific method originated in Scripture and in the development of Reformation theology (see Appendix A, pp. 257–60).
Contrary to what the Newtonian model predicted, the speed of light was constant.3
However, many nontheistic scientists judged the avoidance of the implications of a single cosmic beginning sufficient reason to research each scenario.
Another RTB goal is for its model to help restore the partnership once enjoyed by scientific and biblical researchers as they considered some of life’s greatest questions. This effort attempts to integrate the achievements of science, philosophy, and theology.
Similarly, Christian theology is not the same as the words of Scripture. Like science, theology involves human interpretation, which may be inaccurate. So conflicts between science and theology don’t necessarily falsify or damage RTB’s creation
model. Rather, such discord provides opportunities for exposing incomplete understanding and faulty interpretations and for discovering a deeper, more complete knowledge of creation’s story and history.
offer all people a way to live forever in his presence in a new creation, apart from sin and death and every consequence of rebellion against him;
“Why would a good and all-powerful God create a universe that yields so much human suffering?”
God and his people will live there together face-to-face, by choice, without the effects of decay, pain, suffering, evil, and darkness (physical and spiritual). Yet individuals will still be fully capable of personal, purposeful loving action and interaction.
Colossians 1:16–17, “For by him [Christ] all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . and in him all things hold together.”
The ideal design for a particular purpose must not be confused with ultimate perfection. This current realm is optimal in that it perfectly suits God’s plans—the triumph of life over death, good over evil, love over apathy, light over darkness, and freedom over bondage.9
The universe has been continuously expanding from the beginning of space and time (Job 9:8; Ps. 104:2; Isa. 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jer. 10:12; 51:15; Zech. 12:1).
10. At its end, the universe will roll up like a scroll and vanish in a burst of extreme heat (Isa. 34:4; 2 Peter 3:7, 10; Rev. 6:14).
The whole of Scripture confirms that only humans, among all life created on Earth, can (and do) sin. Therefore, this “death through sin” applies to humans alone, not to plants and animals.
God’s transcendence means he exists in complete independence from matter and energy, the laws and constants of physics, and the space-time dimensions of the cosmos. His freedom to operate and create knows no boundaries.
But Venus continued to remain visible to the naked eye throughout the entire day.
The most distantly imaged galaxies present in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field reveal the state of the universe 13 billion years ago, an epoch when the cosmos was less than a billion years old.
The proof that time was created has enormous philosophical implications. Within the universe, time is the dimension in which cause-and-effect relationships occur. Effects follow their causes.
the effect of general relativity is augmented by a “scalar field” that stretched the universe at many times the velocity of light during a brief period when the universe was younger than a quadrillionth of a quadrillionth of a second.)
Today, many independent lines of measurement now validate, with better than 1 percent precision, that the universe began 13.73 billion years ago.7
Scientific progress in cosmology also refutes Kantian philosophy and a fundamental doctrine of world religions based on nonbiblical content. Such beliefs claim that space and time are absolute and eternal and that a god or gods created within them.
For life to be possible, the cosmic dark energy density that governs the degree to which the cosmic space surface stretches must be fine-tuned to at least one part in 10120
For advanced life to be possible on any planet, it must be accompanied by a just-right suite of gas giants. These planets act as gravitational shields. Their large masses either absorb or deflect asteroids and comets that would otherwise collide with the life-support planet.
No known natural mechanism exists on Earth, past or present, for generating this homochirality.23 While some individual mineral crystals produce limited right- or left-handed enrichment (at best, about 10 percent), any natural ensemble of mineral crystals contains roughly the same number of crystals favoring production of left-handed configurations as it does those favoring right.24
fixed dates for Abraham and Peleg indicate that Adam lived approximately 50,000 years ago.
Scientists didn’t begin to present serious models for an infinite number of physically distinct universes beyond our own until after Freeman Dyson claimed that “the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming”15 and Stephen Hawking announced that “it would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”16
If everywhere scientists can measure design they do detect design—and if the degree of detected design consistently increases with their measuring capabilities—it seems irrational to discount all this design evidence by appealing to that which never can be detected or measured.
The evidence shouts humans were meant to be here. So why would anyone bet otherwise? The only reason appears to be an unshakable commitment to an a priori assumption that no universe can possibly be attributed to a transcendent Designer.
The mainstream perception that teaching any aspect of creation in public education is forbidden by the Constitution rests on four court decisions: Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), McLean v. Arkansas (1981), Aguillard v. Treen (1983), and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). In all four cases, “creation teaching” collided with the First Amendment’s establishment clause—but for reasons different than most people think.
years ago and that the universe had a beginning in finite time. During the last forty years, several mathematical theorems based on general relativity confirmed that space and time had a beginning— coincident with the beginning of the universe.38 During the past twenty-five years, astronomical measurements have established the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic doctrines of a single beginning universe.39 (This evidence contradicts the Hindu/Buddhist/New Age doctrine of a universe cycling through an infinite or near infinite succession of beginnings and endings.)
“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
Evidence of that spirituality, according to the Bible, is that God has “set eternity in the hearts of men” (Eccles. 3:11). The
