The Eric Metaxas Show - #95 - Hugh Ross
Episode Date: April 13, 2026Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with Dr. Hugh Ross about the Ken Ham controversy, biblical inerrancy, the age of the earth, fine tuning, Noah’s flood, and why modern science keeps pointin...g to the handiwork of God. They also break down why so many Christians misunderstand Genesis, and why these debates should not be treated like attacks on the core truths of the faith. Subscribe for clips from The Eric Metaxas Show to hear politics and culture from a Christian perspective.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Eric Metaxa show.
And on this show, I get to talk to fascinating people.
For example, right now I get to talk to, I will say, my friend, Dr. Hugh Ross.
He's an astrophysicist and founder of reasons to believe, science, faith, think tank,
exploring the harmony between modern science and Christianity.
He has written many, many books.
It was his books in the world.
the early 90s that caught my attention and started me on the troubled path that I've been on
for all these decades now and that have led me to do things like write my book as atheism
dead, which we are now turning into TV series and which features interviews with Dr. Hugh
Ross. I get to talk to him today. Dr. Hugh Ross, welcome back.
Oh, thank you. I want to point people to Ari Socrates in the city.
conversation. It really was so wonderful. We were in Palm Beach together and we had a conversation
about many things. We'll touch on some of those here. But folks, if you want more of this or the more
upscale version of this, go to Socrates in the city.com or go to the Socrates's YouTube channel.
But very, very important conversation that I had with Dr. Hugh Ross, who's now my guest. But the reason I
wanted you on, Hugh, is because as a result of the airing of that episode, very recently,
we got some kickback from Dr. Ken Ham. I've interviewed Ken Ham on the program, and he believes
in the Young Earth theory, which you do not, and I at this point do not. And he was very troubled by our
conversation and basically said, you know, can you try, basically saying you can't really trust me.
Christians can't trust me because I would traffic with low life liberals like you, for example.
And of course, you're neither low life nor liberal theoretically or in any other way.
But it's kind of funny because I respect Ken Ham.
I love him as a brother.
And it, it bothered me that he would be so troubled that he would feel.
the need in a sense to, you know, to like question my faith or whatever I thought, my goodness,
I'm not questioning the bodily resurrection. I'm not questioning the virgin birth. I'm not
questioning the Trinity, the inerrancy of Scripture. This is something that I think we can have
a conversation about. And in fact, I did have a conversation about it with you. And you've
talked about this for many, many years. So I want to talk about that. You must have bumped into
this a lot where there are people in the Christian world who say, if you do not believe what I say
you must believe, you're not a Christian. Well, I publicly debated Ken Ham several times,
and his approach is to say it's a matter of biblical authority. And, you know, I hold to biblical
authority. I hold to Sol of Scripterra that the Bible is the only propositional revelation from
God that is completely inspired and inerrant. Our differences are ones of
interpretation. I think that's something that Ken really struggles with to see that the old earth,
young earth debate as a matter of biblical interpretation, it's not a matter of biblical authority.
And I've actually argued in my book, Rescue and Ericksey, that if you integrate all the Bible's
texts on creation, you can't defend a Young Earth interpretation. If you try, you've got
Bible passages contradicting one another. So my problem with Ken Ham is I don't think he realizes
by holding a Youngerth position, he's violating the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
How ironic.
Well, it's just, it's a funny thing because there are folks out there who, listen, we all
have different views on many different things. And some things are, uh, their hills worth dying on,
you know, the divinity of Jesus, uh, the Bible.
Lodely resurrection. There are things you say, look, you've got to believe in that. You've got to get that.
But there are other things where, you know, if you're honest, you say this is a little complicated.
Well, you're right. The age of the earth is not in a single one of the biblical creeds. Not a single
creed puts that issue in there. And, you know, I agree. We need to die on the right hills.
If it's in the creeds, we need to defend it. If it's not in the creeds, we need to generously dialogue
with one another on the issue.
Yeah, I mean, there are some people,
I think what's interesting,
and this gets to, you know,
in writing my book about the American Revolution,
when you're dealing with the concept of religious liberty,
many of the revolutionaries, the founders, George Washington,
they had specific views,
but they believed that part of their theology
was that you can't impose those views.
And it's a tricky thing. It's a paradox, even almost a conundrum, because you say, well, I believe this, but I have to be, I have to hold it a little bit lightly because I do believe it and take it seriously, but I don't have the freedom to impose it on someone else. And so there's just a bit of a paradox there, because you can believe something strongly. You believe strongly in certain things that follow from the research that you've done and from your,
interpretation of the scriptures, which of course you take so seriously, but you don't want to excommunicate
someone who may take a different view. We may disagree with Ken Ham, but you don't want to
excommunicate him. Well, Paul wrote in his letters, it's good that there's differences among you.
If we all believe the same thing, we wouldn't be learning anything. So it's important that we dialogue
about differences. Hold fast to that, which is really a creedal. But,
tolerate and engage in dialogues. I make it a point, for example, that the scholars in our community,
that they don't all hold the same views. If we do, we're not going to make any progress
and our biblical knowledge or scientific knowledge. And that's what's unique about Christianity.
It actually tolerates dialogues on different issues. And it's tolerant. I mean, religious freedom,
as you mentioned, is a core feature of the Christian faith. It's an amazing thing. It is a kind of a
paradox and there's some people that don't get that. They think, well, no, no, if it's true, then I want to
impose it. But no, if your view of the scripture is honest, you realize it cannot be imposed. It can be
proposed, but you cannot force people to accept the truth. And so, again, there are limits to everything.
I mean, I believe murder is wrong and yes. We do want to force people to abide by that.
So it takes a little sophistication and a little nuance to process this thing.
I do agree.
I mean, we have an organization in India.
And what I notice, it's the Indian states that have a Christian majority that tolerate
religious freedom.
Those that do not, you either have to be a Muslim or you have to be a Hindu.
So isn't it interesting that Christianity is the only religion that tolerates the freedom
a religious expression.
I mean, if you got the truth, you're not afraid.
Well, that's right.
And also you understand that it's something that it has to come freely.
If it is coerced, there is no faith.
To have real faith is to come to it freely, not to be coerced.
Well, anyway, I was sorry that Ken Ham felt the need to use the strong language that he did.
Again, he's a very dear brother, and he has done.
done so much good.
But he takes a very narrow view on this.
And if you dissent from it, I guess, you know, he's more than troubled by that.
But you and I had such a wonderful conversation.
I want to steer people toward that conversation.
Folks, go to Socrates and the city.com and or you can just go to our YouTube page.
But it's really and truly a valuable, wonderful conversation.
We had it in Palm Beach.
It was just a few weeks ago.
It was such a delight.
I said, we're going to do more of these.
So we are going to do more Socrates and city conversations with you, Hugh.
But what we talked about that night, we talked about so much, the fine-tuned universe.
We talked about UFOs.
Now, there's something might as well go there.
I am really fascinated with how it has become part of the zeitgeist over the last, I don't know,
you know, since the 60s, that life just pops up all over the place in the universe and we all know it,
except it's not true.
But so many people just take that for granted, even though the science points dramatically away from it.
Yeah, I mean, everywhere we look in the universe beyond planet Earth, we see conditions that are very hostile for advanced life.
I mean, we've yet to find a star that's sufficiently like the sun to be a candidate to have a planet
orbiting it, and which advanced life can exist, we've yet to find another galaxy. We've got to find
another galaxy cluster. We now know that all eight planets in our solar system must be
exquisitely fine-tuned to make advanced life possible on Earth. When our family celebrates
Thanksgiving, we thank God for Neptune. We thank God for Uranus and Saturn and Mercury,
because they all have to be fine-tuned in order for us to have a Thanksgiving dinner. That's even true
the common and asteroid belts, and we see it nowhere else in our Milky Way galaxy.
It really does look like God designed the whole universe so that we can enjoy life here on planet
Earth.
I wrote about it, of course, to some extent in my book is atheism dead, but I learned much
of this from reading your books.
And when we come back, I want to talk more about it.
It is breathtaking stuff, folks.
It is breathtaking.
When you begin to see the level of design in this universe, it's a lot of design.
It really stops your heart, how outrageous it is and beautiful it is.
We'll be right back talking to Dr. Hugh Ross.
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Welcome back talking to Dr. Hugh Ross.
He's with Reasons to Believe.
You can go to reasons.org.
I recommend you do, reasons.org.
A tremendous wealth of information and resources there.
But Hugh, I, just as you were talking just a moment ago about our,
solar system. Now, most of the stuff that you say, I know most people don't know this, and I
don't know it. I barely know. I've just picked up on some of this. But the idea that our
solar system is fine-tuned, is designed, most people would never know that. I mean,
I discovered, for example, that, you know, the gassy giants, Saturn and Jupiter,
If they didn't exist, and they're so far away, but if they didn't exist, we wouldn't exist.
We need them.
God put them there, like, to run interference with all the comets and asteroids or whatever.
That would be hitting the Earth a thousand times more than they are right now.
But I wasn't taught that in school.
Most people don't know that.
Most people would think, like, well, you know, who cares what the other planets are?
We've got this planet and everything's great.
But you're saying that even on the level of our solar system,
There's tremendous fine tuning.
Talk a little bit more about that.
Right.
Well, I just put up a post on my Facebook page this morning, making the point that we now
have discovered 8,000 planets outside of our solar system.
And we were first discovering them.
My peers were saying, we're going to find lots of planets just like the planets in
our solar system.
Not a single one of those 8,174 or anything like any of the eight planets in our solar system.
And that's what led to the discovery.
There's something special about each of those eight planets
that makes advanced life possible on Earth.
I mean, for example, you would expect that the farther away a planet is from its star,
the greater its atmospheric gases will be.
Because the farther away it is, the less heat it receives from its star.
You'd also expect that the more mass of the planet is,
the heavier atmosphere it will accrete.
Well, that works for Mercury.
It works for Venus.
It works for Mars.
It does not work for the Earth.
Earth should have an atmosphere 200 times thicker than what it has.
It should have an ocean that's thousands of miles deep.
Instead, we got a thin layer of water and a very thin atmosphere.
And also what describes us as a density of the Earth.
It's the densest planet in the soul.
solar system. The farther you are away from the star, the less dense it should be. And so we're
actually denser than Mercury. What's going on here? And we realize... Listen, that's my question.
What's going on here? Why are we denser than Mercury or Venus or Mars? Well, it's because the
solar system began with five rocky planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and a planet called
Thea. And Thea was orbiting very close to the Earth. So close,
that the two planets collided with one another.
And when they collided, that made number one the Earth bigger than it was,
and the collision dissipated the thick atmosphere and the thick layer of water.
And if we had retained that thick atmosphere,
no life would be possible on the Earth.
That thin layer is what made advanced life possible on the Earth.
Okay, so this happened roughly four billion years ago?
4.5 billion years ago, about 50 to 90 million years after the Earth formed.
Okay. So this is, boy, this is, I mean, I write about this in my book as atheism dead,
but even remembering this, that alone is crazy. The idea that there was this planet, I guess,
that collides with Earth so perfectly, so perfectly. There's no way really to, it's like two
bullets meeting in midair because it's not like a glancing, uh, collision. It's, it's,
it's such a perfect collision that it forces most of Earth's atmosphere at the time to blast off
into outer space, never to come back. And then the moon is created out of it. It's hard to believe
that that just happened randomly. And then if it didn't happen exactly as it happened,
we would not have the earth that we have right now. I mean, this is, again, this is not really
taught in schools. It's even more amazing because.
The collision caused the moon to form, and because of the collision, both the moon and the earth started off with a lot of internal heat.
And because of the collision, they had big iron cores, liquid iron cores.
And because of how close they were together at that time, about five times closer than they are today, the tidal forces that they exerted in one another circulated the liquid iron in the cores of the moon and the cores of the,
Earth, causing their magnetic fields to be strong, and because of a close they were together,
the two magnetospheres coupled together.
Okay, hang on, folks.
If this sounds complicated, it is.
We'll be right back.
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open an account. Crypto created 80,000 new millionaires last year. Welcome back. We're talking to Dr. Hugh
Ross, he's with reasons to believe and go to reasons.org. Okay, Hugh, you were just saying some stuff that,
I don't know if I've heard this before. This is so amazing. And what we're saying, folks,
this is science. This is not just, hey, we've got a theory. Like, we know now what happened. So
about 4.5 billion years ago. So it's right after the Earth formed. This is like right in the beginning,
there's this crazy collision, this planet called Thea collides perfectly with Earth, dissipating our atmosphere.
So before that, the atmosphere was so thick it would be like trying to breathe sand.
Not going to happen.
The moon is formed.
And then you said, because of this collision, because of the nature of the collision, the dramatic nature, it superheated both the Earth and the Moon.
and that had something to do, you said, with the iron cores of each of these two bodies.
Well, the collision gave both bodies a big iron core. And because of the heat, it was liquid iron core.
Because of how close they were together, the tidal forces that they exerted in one another circulated that liquid iron.
When you circulate liquid iron, you get a magnetic field. It's the same principle as an electric motor.
and because of a close
the two bodies were together,
that magnetosphere around both bodies
coupled.
And if it wasn't for that
coupled strong magnetosphere,
the particle radiation
of the early sun would have
sputtered away 100%
of Earth's water and 100%
of Earth atmosphere, and there never
would have been life on planet Earth.
And the people
discovered this, basically
looked at this and said,
this is an extraordinary habitability requirement.
Well, I would argue it's the most spectacular
habitability requirement ever discovered.
The fact that you have to have this coupled strong magnetosphere
at just the right time when the sun is pouring out all this particle radiation
and the moon retained its magnetic field
until that particle radiation subsided sufficiently
that it was no longer a problem.
the moment that it was no longer a problem,
the moon lost its magnetic field.
So I had a magnetic field for only the first half billion years,
but that's exactly when we needed the moon to have
that strong magnetic field,
and it'd be close enough that it could couple with Earth's magnetic field.
If you want life somewhere else in the universe,
it's got to be exactly with that scenario.
A perfectly designed collision between two bodies.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know it's so crazy.
and also I think we should underscore,
it's fairly recent that we have come to understand this.
I mean, 50 years ago, people did not know what you're talking about.
Am I right?
This wasn't published until 2020 and 2021, that recent.
So six years ago, people didn't know about this.
I mean, again, this underscores, you know, this big thesis
that every day science points more to,
to God, to fine-tuning on a level that it's breathtaking.
I mean, what you're describing here, in some ways, it's tough to follow.
But if you can follow it, it is breathtaking.
It's absolutely breathtaking.
Because if it didn't happen exactly the way you're describing it with all these details,
forget it.
There's no, I mean, what amazes me sometimes, too, is people take it for granted.
They walk outside and they breathe and they look up with the sky.
And the idea of having an atmosphere where you can just walk outside and breathe and everything
works, it really is beyond, beyond belief. You were saying earlier that there are thousands of planets
which people would say, oh, probably they could support life. You're saying no. And again,
I learned this from reading your books. The level of fine-tuning, it's just, it almost hurts
your head when you think of all the parameters that are necessary for life and how in the
universe it just doesn't exist. So this idea that, you know, if I travel the universe, oh, there's probably
life out there. No, that's not true. But we've been taught this so much that it's just hard to
unlearn it. While we're finding rocky planets outside of our solar system, but they're all orbiting
very close to their star, much closer than Mercury orbits the sun. Unique to our solar system
is we've got big, massive rocky planets orbiting far away from the sun. And that's crucial if you
want to have life existing. So yeah, we're finding all these planets, but we're not. We're finding all these planets,
none of them are candidates for life.
Our solar system really does stand alone.
As I mentioned earlier, even our star stands alone.
We've yet to find another star out of the millions and millions that we observe
that would be a candidate to have a planet orbiting it, which events life exists.
We're also having to be living on this planet at the best time in the sun's history.
If we were here any later or any earlier,
the flurring activity from the sun would be a problem
for advanced life. We are here at the optimal time.
We'll be right back, folks, talking to Dr. Hugh Ross. You can find him at Reasons.org,
and you can watch our conversation at Socrates in the city. I recommend it.
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Welcome back talking to Dr. Hugh Ross.
You can see our conversation at Socrates in the City or on YouTube,
Soxington City YouTube channel, highly recommended folks.
Well, Hugh, I just want to go back to this idea of the fine-tuning.
I think most people, we have really been catechized falsely, at least in our lifetimes,
that, well, the universe is kind of random, and we just sort of ended up here, and life just pops up randomly,
which is, it's so ridiculous, it's so wrong.
But I can't help but be astonished at how many people believe it.
We've really been force-fed these ridiculous lies so much so that anybody on the street pretty much believes, yeah, I guess just life just pops up around the universe.
It just popped up here.
That's just what happens.
And we know that that is as dramatically untrue as anything could possibly be.
Well, especially in the 21st century.
I mean, look at the amazing biochemical machinery we have today for our research.
If the origin of life was a naturalistic event,
biochemists should have produced it in the lab a long time ago.
Yet they struggle even to try to make a chain of amino acids.
That's 40 amino acids long,
let alone making ones that are tens of thousands of amino acids long.
They can't even solve the homocorality problem.
How do you line up all the amino acids
where they're all left-handed in their configuration
where all the sugars are right-handed?
and you know I I attend these Origin of Life research conferences
what I notice is every conference I attend is more depressing
than the one that happened previously
because they realize the evidence is getting much stronger
that this is not a naturalistic event
well this is what led me to write my book is atheism dead
I met Dr. James Tour who specializes in talking about the very thing
that you you've just mentioned and it
absolutely blew my mind because I thought, how come I've never thought of this? I mean, I think about,
you know, the subject of evolution or why I don't believe in evolution or whatever, but I thought,
forget that. Let's just talk about the idea of life emerging from non-life. We never talk about that.
Most Christians don't even think about that. We think about evolution. We think about the issue of
evolution, but evolution presupposes life. Forget about that. Let's start with the universe. There's no
life. How do you get life?
And when I had the conversation with Dr. Tour, I just thought, this is big news.
Most people are under this ridiculous impression, which we were taught in school, that life just pops up.
And when you begin to see the complexity of a single cell, you think that that's ridiculous.
And then the more science discovers about the complexity of the cell and what goes into it, you just refer to some of it.
you realize this is absolutely impossible.
So I guess my question for you,
and I think I asked Dr. James Tour the same question,
surely people have to be coming to terms with this.
There have to be people in the scientific community
who recognize that what we've been taught all along
is simply not so.
Well, I've been debating a lot of atheist scientists
who call themselves,
atheists, but when you press them, you discover they're really not
atheist as it was defined a decade ago. I mean, even Lawrence Krauss in his book,
A Universe for Nothing, says on page 167, we can't take deism off the table.
I mean, the atheist, physicists, and astronomers I've been debating recognize they can't
get around Hebrews 113. The universe that we detect did not come from that, which we can detect.
there has to be something beyond what we can detect that's responsible for bringing the universe into existence.
So they're not atheists, they're deists.
And when I've been debating paleontologists and evolutionary biologists,
I discover the majority of call themselves atheists are default atheists.
They've never really taken the time to think about the big questions.
What's going to happen when I die?
Is there something beyond the universe?
I mean, what I recognize is they're so focused on their scientific research and it's addicting.
I mean, it's like a video game.
They just can't stop getting the thrill from doing their scientific research
and that diverts them from obeying the Sabbath to take regular time out of your life
to focus on the most important issues of life.
And I've had some even admit publicly, yeah, you're right, I'm a default atheist.
I've never really thought about the issues to a degree that you're not.
justifies calling myself an atheist. So there's been a big turn in the 21st century away from pure
atheism to at least deism and default atheism and basically points, hey, there's something going on
in the research community. Now, I tell people, it's a real thrill to be alive in the 21st century.
At least 10 research papers get published every day that adds to the scientific evidence for the
Christian faith. I mean, what, I'm just thrilled that God allowed me to live in the 21st century,
just to actually see this explosion of scientific discoveries being published in the scientific
literature. It is, it is amazing. One of the things that we talked about in our Socrates and
the city conversation, which I'd love to touch on briefly, is your guesstimate on when Adam and Eve
lived, your guesstimate on when the Tower of Babel occurred.
on when Noah's flood occurred.
I'm trying to remember what you said for Adam and Eve
that maybe roughly 100,000 years ago is a guess.
Well, just based on what the Bible tells us,
we know that both the Garden of Eden event and Noah's flood
must have happened during an ice age
because Genesis 2 tells us that the Garden of Eden was a place
where four known rivers come together.
Well, two of those rivers are dry today, but during the ice age, all four rivers were flowing.
And today, the location is more than 200 feet below sea level,
but during the last ice age, it would have been above sea level.
And then with respect to Noah's flood, it tells us the flood lasted 375 days.
You know, the Bible tells us where the waters came from,
the 40 days and 40 nights of torrential rain, God lifting up water from,
from the aquifers, but that water would flow quickly into the ocean.
Something had to replace the water of the flood,
and I believe that would have been rapid snow and ice melt during the previous ice age,
and we now know there were seven really major melt events during the last ice age,
and that puts the flood somewhere between 47,000 and 87,000 years ago,
and that would put Adam and E previous to that,
I mean, we don't have any direct scientific dating tools between 50,000 years ago and 250,000 years ago.
So often you'll see in the scientific literature, they'll say the origin of human beings 150,000 years ago, plus or minus 150,000 years ago.
That's just a recognition.
You know, we have huge errors on these dates because we don't have a good radio isotope clock.
but the Bible tells us it's a nice age event.
So I find it interesting, we actually get a somewhat more accurate date
for when God created Adam and Eve
than we get from the scientific record.
But both dates agree.
And you don't see any conflict, in other words, when,
because there are some people who will look at,
I mean, I think of Ken Ham, for example,
who will look at what the scripture says about, you know,
who the descendants of,
the descendants of Adam and Eve,
they'll go down and they'll sort of add up the generations and say, well, it adds up to
7,000 years or 8,000 years. You have a different view. Well, I actually quote answers in Genesis
Ken Ham's organization where they try to calculate a date from the flood based on the genealogies.
If you start permatum, assume no gaps in the genealogies. You come up with 2348 BC for the flood.
but if you start with Moses and go back to Noah, you get a different date 110 years earlier.
So even based on their assumption, there are no gaps in genealogies, they get inconsistent dates.
That alone tells me, based on Ken Ham's own website, that there has to be gaps in the genealogies,
and so the real question is, how many gaps are there are genealogies?
But when you compare the biblical genealogies, you notice that none of them are complete.
as based on the fact that the Hebrew word for father
is the same word for grandfather, great-grandfather,
et cetera, same thing but the word for son.
So we have to read it in the Hebrew
if you want to get the details.
Well, that's a big deal.
The idea that, you know, in other words,
it's like when you say that the same word for father
and grandfather, whatever,
it means I'm the descendant of,
the direct descendant.
of so and so, but it could be my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather,
and it's not making those distinctions.
But, you know, again, there are some people who say, well, but if you take the Bible literally,
well, you and I effectively do, that's the point is that we're trying to be as accurate as possible.
And it's cavalier, I think, to just insist on this definition or that definition.
But that doesn't mean that you and I have a liberal view of the scripture on the,
contrary, I would say we have a higher view of it to not play around with it, to try to actually
understand. I would agree. It's not only necessary to read it literally, you have to read it consistently.
So, for example, the Hebrew word for day yom has four distinct literal definitions. One is a 24-hour
period, but one is a long extended period of time. If we look at all the creation texts,
You discover, for example, that Psalm 95 in Hebrews 4 tell us we're still in God's seventh day.
Actually, forgive me for interrupting.
We're going to have one more segment.
We're talking to Dr. Hugh Ross.
Don't go away.
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support. If you want your donation to have direct measurable impact, this is one of the clearest ways
to do it. Go to savinglifeisrael.org. That's savinglifeisrael.org. Welcome back talking to Dr.
Hugh Ross with reasons.org, reasons to believe. You were just making a point and we had to go to a
break. What were you saying, Dr. Ross? Yeah, we normally need to take the biblical creation text
literally, but interpret them consistently so that none of the creation text.
contradict one another. And so, for example, the Hebrew word Yom has four distinct literal definitions,
one of which is a long period of time. But when you look at Psalm 95 in Hebrews 4, both state that
we're still in God's seventh day. And you go to Genesis 2, there's no closure on the seventh day.
You have an evening morning phrase appended to the first six days, telling us each of those days
has a start time and an end time. But notice there's no evening was, morning was phrase for the
seventh day, indicating it began but it has not yet ended. And then you got God calling himself
the ancient of days. Why would he give himself that title if there's only been 6,000 years of history?
Why does the Bible refer to the mountains of Judea as being age old and ancient? And these are things
that even the ancient peoples would have realized. I mean, I've been into the mountains of Judea.
You see rock piles at the bottoms of those mountains. And maybe once a week, a rock falls off
the mountain to accumulate. You look at the pile of rocks, you realize this mountain is eroded,
and it's been here a long time, where you see the meandering of rivers. So it doesn't take a 21st
century geologists to figure out that the earth has been here a whole lot longer than 10,000
years. And it explains why these Old Testament authors wrote the way that they did. And notice, for six
days God creates, on the seventh day, he rests from his work of creation. That struck me
before it became a follower of Jesus Christ. That when you look before the human era,
we see a huge amount of evidence of God's miraculous interventions in creation. During the human
era we see zero. For six days God creates, on the seventh day he stops creating, what is he doing
on the seventh day? He's redeeming. And what really struck me as the Bible actually talks about
God beginning his works of redemption before he creates anything at all, implying that everything
that God creates is to make possible the redemption of billions and humans from their sins.
And that's kind of the theme of my latest book
Design to the Core
is when we look at the design features of the universe,
it's all designed to make possible
the redemption of billions of human beings
from their sin.
And I've been sharing this with my atheist peers.
Look, I know you don't believe this,
but just do your biblical research,
your scientific research,
from the biblical perspective,
a redemptive perspective,
it'll make you a more successful scientist.
And I'm hoping is they experience,
set success.
Now, the latest book I thought was Noah's Flood?
It's Noah's Flood.
Yeah, a year before that I brought out the book
Designed to the Corps and also the book,
Rescling and Errancy.
So those are my three most recent books.
Designed to the core, rescuing and eros'clock.
Thank you.
So Noah's Flood is the one that we discussed mainly
at Socrates City in Palm Beach,
but there's so much.
And I just want to challenge.
folks who are listening or watching right now. These are really wonderful books and Reasons.org
is an extraordinary website to explore this, to explore these questions. And I think they'll bring
you closer to God. This is what's so wonderful to me, Hugh, is that I think that there's some
people that think the more I study science, the less I'll have need for God. And this has been
the paradigm in our lifetimes. But it's just the opportunity.
the more you study, if you're studying honestly and openly, our awe of God becomes greater
and greater. When you talk about the fine-tuning, and we just touched on it, but it is breathtaking
level of fine-tuning. I find it almost frightening. Actually, I do find it frightening that you kind
of try to think, who is God that he could do this? It's just, it's too much to take in.
Yeah, and the Bible said it first. It's in Job and Psalms, the more we learn about
nature, the more evidence will see for the handiwork of God. And we happen to be living at a time
when that evidence is exponentially exploding upon us. It really is. And I think we're experiencing
the beginnings of revival. I think that there are many, many people who are coming to faith.
And it's one of the reasons I'm so grateful for you and the existence of your ministry, because
when I was at first come to faith, I really wondered, where do I look for answers that I control?
from somebody who knows the Bible is the word of God, who knows Jesus is the Lord, who takes
that seriously, and who's interested in science. And you've been a great, great blessing to me
over the decades now. So, folks, I recommend Reasons to Believe, Hugh Ross, and the website is
reasons.org. Dr. Hugh Ross, thank you.
