Responding To Attempted Rebuttal to Hugh Ross (Part 3)

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. Ross (part 3) – Useless Stars

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

Dr. Hugh Ross cites Stephen Hawking’s book “A brief history of time” as the source for the first refutation of his argument from design:

It’s incorrect to refer to Stephen Hawking as an atheist. He’s not. He’s a deist. He concedes that you need a God to get the beauty, and the elegance, and the mathematics. But he insists that it’s not the God of the Bible. Why? Because he says “the God of the Bible was a God that does not waste miracles and therefore God would not create one hundred billion trillion useless stars. He would simply make one star, one planet, the moon, oh yeah you need the four gas giants, you need some asteroids and comets, ah but the rest of it’s useless.” he claims.

Dr. Ross’s “refutation” (I kid you not) is that:

“… Stephen Hawking himself proves (in his own research) that it takes that many stars to make one planet possible given the laws of physics in the universe. You can’t have an Earth unless the universe has a mass equivalent of one hundred billion trillion stars. If the mass of the universe were different by one part in quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion. So those stars are not useless. They are all critical, an necessary in order to make possible the existence of one planet on which life could exist.”

Naturally, Dr. Ross completely ignores his knob twiddling God for his refutation to stand. He assumes the cosmological constants cannot be changed, not even by an omniscient, omnipotent being who can create the splendour of the universe ex nihilo, and breath life into a pile of dust, and fashion a women from a rib. Why is Dr. Ross’s God limited in this way?

In no way does Ross say that God could not choose different constants! God chose the constants we have so that the universe would be as we find it! That is Ross' argument. Try another straw-man argument.

Surely it would be trivial for his deity to twiddle up new values which supported a universe consisting of one planet, and one star. Hell, we could even have the star spin round the planet just as the Biblical authors assumed – a position which was vehemently defended by the church for centuries.

It’s interesting to note that only after centuries under the crushing weight of evidence and scientific advancement did the Catholic Church finally and officially concede that Galileo was right – on the 31 October 1992, some 350 years after he died.

So it seems Stephen Hawking’s assertion that “God does not waste miracles” still stands, unless Dr. Ross cares to admit that the universe must have been this way to achieve some higher, ultimately unknowable, purpose. I sure would like him to provide evidence for that!

Andrew, no where does the Bible teach a earth-centric universe. No where! Yes the catholic church in Galileo's time taught that and persecuted scientist who opposed it. So what? That is not what the Bible says. The church acted contrary to God. No surprise there - they were people just like you and me. It's exactly the Christian theistic argument that God created the universe to achieve a purpose(s). It's not unknowable. It is being revealed to us. The Bible does give insight.

¹⁸I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that^i]">[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. - Romans 8:18-25

You need better arguments, Andrew!