Blog - Friday, July 17, 2009 17:06 - 0 Comments

Refuting Dr. Ross (part 3) – Useless Stars

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?

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!