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.

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.

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.

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?

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?