Responding To Attempted Rebuttal to Hugh Ross (Part 2)

I have been in...um...."discussion" with Andrew (aka Askegg) concerning evidence for the existence of God and the evidence of the Bible being true. Sure tempers have flare and disputes come in but I think it's useful because if your worldview can't stand up to scrutiny then you need another scrutiny. In one of my salvos I fired off a link to a lecture from Dr. Hugh Ross concerning how astrophysics points to the God of the Bible. As always my comments are in red. My original link can be found here.

Refuting Dr. Hugh Ross (part 2)

// July 17th, 2009 // 0 comments // Blog

I posted the other day about Dr. Hugh Ross’s lecture titles “Astrophysics Points to the God of the Bible” and promised I would refute his three rebuttals to his argument.

First, I must point out that Dr. Ross makes the following claim in his lecture:

“None of the rebuttals are scientific in nature. When you see your sceptical audience abandon a scientific refutation with a philosophical refutation, that means you’ve really won the debate.”

It seems to allude Dr. Ross that his entire argument has been philosophical in nature. Sure, during the lecture he has presented a great deal of hard proved scientific fact (which no one disputes), but to conjure a knob twiddling God to explain the cosmological constants is a philosophical point. In scientific terms it’s an hypothesis for which he has no data to support. In layman’s terms, it’s bullshit.

You have yet to come up with a better explanation for why those cosmological constants are set the way they are? Why? If you don't like attributing it to God then you need to propose a different theotu explaining this.

Reality is just the way it is. Science is our way of trying to understand it, and mathematical models are just that – models. They do not dictate how the universe works, they describe how it works. That’s why rational people leave these “laws” open to change, for it’s entirely possible that our current models of the universe are totally wrong. Since the “laws” of the universe just describe reality, then where does the impetuous for an author of these laws come from? If anything, we authored them.

I think that you are confusing "law" with "theory" A scientific law is based on models that not just describe realiity but predict reality! Things like the Gravitational Law and the Laws of Motion and Thermodynamics are really things I'd like to see you prove need changing. Now if you are referring to the Theory of Evolution, I agree with you. The theory will change when people wise up.

Dr. Ross would have you believe that God (more specifically the God of the Bible) authored these physical laws and set the cosmological constants to their current values. Again, in this lecture he simply asserts this without granted us the reasoning behind why all the other contender Gods are discounted.

No other religion, with the exceptions of Islam and Judaism say that the universe was created ex nihilo. They discount themselves.

Of course, this line of reasoning simply begs the question. If you are going to explain the attributes of the universe are due to a divine being, then why does this divine being have the attributes and qualities it does? Why does it have these values and not others? Why does God care about us, rather than not? Why is God all knowing? Why is he omnipotent? Why does God have a personal interest in the lives of his favourite animals (who were created in his image) and not the others? Why is God so vain that he requires constant worship?

When you look a the attributes of the universe, the creator must be omnipotent and omniscient in order to make it all work! And God care about all of his creation. Christians do not believe that God cares only about humans and not the other parts of creation. God demands worship not because of vanity but because He deserves it. No less. If you wrote a song or invented a car would you not deserve credit? God is responsible for our very existence, why would you not worship Him. To do otherwise is stupid.

Dr. Ross goes on to say:

“Stephen Hawking does not realise when he has abandoned science and become a philosopher.”

Really Hugh? Really? On what exactly are you basing that statement? It seems to me that whenever someone states a position equally probable but counter to your own you simply label it’s “philosophy not science” and claim victory. I see this as the height of hypocrisy since the final point of your argument toward God is philosophical. Perhaps Dr. Ross doesn’t actually know that philosophy is the highest form of mathematics?

You haven't suggested an position equally tenable. You failed to do so. I only agree with you on one thing. The best Ross can argue is that there is a God who created everything. To get the God of the Bible you need revelation to know more of His character - what He is about. This what the Bible says:

¹Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. ²This is what the ancients were commended for. ³By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.- Hebrews 11:1-3