Astrophysicist Hugh Ross Reveals New Evidence for God and the Bible
Inside This Episode
Can modern science and the Bible tell the same story? Astrophysicist and former atheist Dr. Hugh Ross says “yes” — and he’s spent decades studying the cosmos, the Scriptures, and the deep harmony between them. In this episode, Dr. Ross shares the scientific discoveries that led him to believe not only in God, but in the truth of the Bible. From evolution to the creation account in Genesis, he presents compelling new evidence that challenges the idea that science and faith are enemies.
Learn more about Hugh Ross ➜ https://reasons.org/
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: Does science contradict the Bible or confirm it? Is it ignorant to believe that the book of Genesis perfectly explains the creation of the earth and everything in it? Today, former atheist and astrophysicist, Dr. Hugh Ross, shares the scientific reasons behind his decision to follow Jesus, and he boldly proclaims that Christianity is the only scientifically accurate faith.
Dr. Hugh Ross, welcome to Maybe God.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, thank you for inviting me.
Eric Huffman: I'm honored to have you. I've followed you for quite some time, and we'll talk about some of the ways folks watching and listening can find you online and your many, many articles that you've written and talks you've given. We'll give that information as we go.
But first, let's talk about your background and upbringing. I understand you hail from the 51st state, as President Trump calls it, born and raised in Canada. Were you a part of a religious family? Were you very church-going or devout growing up?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, my parents really believed in moral training, so they stressed that, but they did not believe that there was a God. They just believed in a morality. We did go to church for, gee, a few weeks during my growing-up years. My family got kicked out of the church, so we stopped going.
Eric Huffman: Huh.
Dr. Hugh Ross: That's another little story.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, I'm curious.
Dr. Hugh Ross: But no, I was not raised in a Christian home, and I didn't really know Christians in our neighborhood. They're hard to find in the big cities of Canada.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, interesting.
Dr. Hugh Ross: It was my science that brought me to faith in Christ.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Well, you know, the cliche that you often hear skeptics say about folks that have some big testimony of coming back to faith is that they started with faith and walked away from it, and so there was a predisposition. Your story's a little bit different in that regard. What kind of kid were you growing up? Were you a nerdy, brainiac, or what were you?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Yeah, I was definitely a nerdy kid, but I was in a neighborhood filled with nerdy kids, so I didn't feel out of place. But my studies in astronomy began when I was seven years of age. I mean, I was regularly taking out four or five books on astronomy and physics from the Vancouver Public Library every weekend. And I knew from the age of eight onwards, astrophysics would be my future career.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Hugh Ross: I wound up doing research on T Tauri stars during my teenage years. It was age 16 that really things started to turn around for me, because that's when I spent a whole year studying cosmology. That's the science of the origin, the history of the universe.
And at that time there's a lot of debate. Is it a Big Bang universe, a steady-state universe, an oscillating universe, a hesitating universe? But even at that time, I knew that the astronomical evidence was heavily favoring Big Bang. And if it's Big Bang, the universe has a beginning. If there's a beginning, there must be a cosmic beginner.
And so it was at age 17, I said, "I wanna find that cosmic beginner." Really had no idea where to look. I thought a good place to look would be the books of Immanuel Kant, since he's considered the father of cosmology.
So I read his Critique of Pure Reason, and realized, you know, this really isn't matching what I know to be true about the universe. I read René Descartes. And the high school I was going to was filled with refugees from all over the world. We had people from all different religious backgrounds. And when people found out what I was doing, they said, "Oh, you need to check out Islam. You need to check out Hinduism and Buddhism."
So I began to look at the books on which those faiths are based, and realized they were filled with scientific errors, things I knew about the universe that couldn't possibly be true.
Then I began to look at Zoroastrianism, and I looked at... and finally, I did pick up a Bible. I actually had one. It was given to me by the Gideons when I graduated from elementary school, but it literally stayed on my bookshelf untouched until age 17. So I pulled that Gideon Bible down. This is the Gideon Bible right here.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Hugh Ross: The covers no longer exist because our dog chewed it off.
Eric Huffman: I'm glad you were a young man then, because you needed those young eyes to see that tiny print.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Oh yeah, the print was tiny. But I literally began to study it. And I studied it between midnight and two in the morning, every night for 18 months. Read through... I mean, what I got was the New Testament Psalms and Proverbs. I wound up getting a whole Bible, going through it, and realized even during the first month, this book was different from the other books.
Eric Huffman: How so? I'm curious. What was lacking in the other books that you had read previously, the other holy books?
Dr. Hugh Ross: What I saw in the other books was they were esoteric, there was an appeal to intellectual snobbery. If you're one of the enlightened ones, you'll understand what this is all about. As a scientist, what really bothered me was the lack of clarity. Very vague on history, science, geography.
Also, I saw an appeal to subjective testing. You know, if you have good feelings, this is the evidence that it's true. That didn't cut it for me as a scientist. And when I picked this book up, I found many passages that said, "Hey, you have to put everything to the test."
I think what especially appealed to me was 1 Thessalonians 5:21, "Everything must be tested. Hold fast to that which proves to be good and true."
And then I began to go through the creation text, and what astounded me is they all perfectly followed the scientific method. And I'd been taught the scientific method from grade one all the way through my public education, but none of my public school teachers told me where the scientific method came from.
It was years later when I read the 28 volumes set by the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance, I recognized, Oh, the scientific method comes from the pages of scripture. It comes from Reformation theology that explains why the scientific revolution exploded out of Reformation Europe.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. So for the average layman like myself, I'm not super scientifically minded, and most people aren't. Most of us just were taught or have come to believe that the scientific method emerged from doing science, I guess, and observing the universe and coming up with a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis. Where did you find the origins of the scientific method in the Bible?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, I saw it right away in Genesis chapter 1. I mean, step one of the scientific method, do not interpret until you first establish the frame of reference or the point of view. You look at Genesis 1:1, it's talking about the universe. You go to Genesis 1:2, it changes the frame of reference from the universe to the surface of earth's waters. The spirit of God is hovering over the surface of earth's waters, under the clouds, not above the clouds. So I use that frame of reference.
Then step two of the scientific method, don't interpret until you first establish the starting conditions. Well, notice that's also given in Genesis 1:2. The earth begins with water over the whole surface as dark over the whole surface of the waters of the earth, and the earth is empty of life and unfit for life.
Then step three is, don't interpret until you establish the order of events, the sequence of events, and you observe what's happening. Those are the six creation days. Then you get a summation statement.
Step five of the scientific method, you take an initial interpretation, then you want to test that by other experiments, observations. And what really attracted me about the Bible, it's not just one text on creation. There's over two dozen chapter-length correct texts on creation in the Old and New Testament.
So I said, "Wow, I got multiple opportunities to test my initial interpretation of Genesis 1. So that, in a nutshell, I mean, even in the first page, you see the elements of the scientific method.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. I want to kind of dissect that a little bit. The first step being the frame of reference or the perspective from which you observe. And what I think I hear you saying is that the frame of reference has to be beneath the clouds, right? It has to be on the earth.
When I think of my interpretation of Genesis 1, I usually think of my perspective being beyond the clouds, beyond this earth, more from God's perspective. I think that's how most people think of Genesis 1, whether they're religious or not. Why does that matter?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, it matters because if you put the frame of reference above the atmosphere of the earth, the events you see described in Genesis 1 are all provable scientific nonsense. If you put the frame of reference on the surface of the earth, everything is scientifically correct. Everything is in the scientifically correct chronological order.
It was Galileo who stated, "The biggest mistake you can make in Bible interpretation is to get the wrong frame of reference." Genesis 1 is a great example and explains why you have all these scientific skeptics saying, "Genesis 1 is nonsense. I can't believe the Bible. I'm not going to read it." They got the wrong frame of reference.
What's interesting is 37 and 38 and 39 of Job, they parallel Genesis 1. They take you through the same content, but not chronologically. But in Job 38:8-9, it says that God blanketed the early seas with clouds that kept the seas dark. So there it's explicit in stating that in the beginning, indeed, it was dark on the surface of the waters, not because of the lack of the light, but because the clouds wouldn't let any light through.
Eric Huffman: Wow, because one of the nitpicky sort of arguments you'll hear from skeptics is that the story in Genesis 1 doesn't make sense because there was no light, but the stars were already shining in the sky and we would already have had light on the earth and the order doesn't match. But if the atmosphere was blanketing the earth or the waters, in this case, from the cosmos, then yeah, from that perspective, it would make sense that there was darkness covering the earth.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, I had a little bit of an advantage because of my studies in astronomy. I knew that the more distant the planet from its host star and the more massive it is, the thicker will be its initial atmosphere. And all the rocky planets in our solar system fit that, except planet Earth.
We should have had an atmosphere 200 times thicker than we got today. And indeed, earth began with an atmosphere that thick. If you want an analogy, think of Venus. Its atmosphere is 90 times thicker than the Earth's. The only light that gets through to the surface of Venus is at the extreme red end of the spectrum. Earth beginning with three times as much atmosphere, no visible light would have gotten through to the atmosphere at all.
But today we know that there were five rocky planets in the early solar system. And one of those planets collided with the Earth. And it was that collision event that had Earth's atmosphere thinned out to where it's now only a half percent of what it had in the beginning. And so when it says "let there be light" in creation day one, notice the text doesn't say that God created the light or made the light. It says, let the light be.
God created the light in the beginning when He created the universe. But with the atmosphere now thinned out, light from the sun, moon, and stars could come through to the surface of the earth.
As a pastor, you're probably aware that the spirit of God was rachaf over the surface of the waters, which implies it's bringing to life. And so I believe that Genesis creation day one is speaking about the origin of life.
Eric Huffman: Wow. Let's go back again in time to year 17, I guess purposefully reading the Bible under the cover of night to not be discovered as a Bible bumper by your intellectual friends and family. So what else did you notice as you went day by day in the Genesis 1 creation story?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, what I noticed even in Genesis chapter 1, it was predicting future scientific discoveries that the original authors would have no clue about. And that was something I was looking for. I read the Hindu Vedas, the Quran, and the Buddhist commentaries. How well did it do in describing science as beyond their time? And they got a score of zero.
As I looked at the Bible, it was actually stating, you know, when different events happened in the history of earth. And that was way beyond what Moses could have possibly known. How would he know that the earth began with an atmosphere 200 times thicker than it has today, or that water covered the whole surface?
That was interesting for me as a teenager. Because at that time, plate tectonics was barely emerging. And so I had the opportunity when I entered the University of British Columbia to take the first college course ever taught in plate tectonics.
And I remember asking the two professors, is it actually possible that Earth began with no continents at all? And they said, "Well, maybe." We think it's probably between 5% and 10% coverage. And then it became 29. But it's possible it could be zero. But years later, they proved that indeed, it started off as zero.
Eric Huffman: Is that right?
Dr. Hugh Ross: So that was evidence that the Bible got it right. And that was actually beyond the science of the time when I was reading it for the first time. And so over those 18 months, I had a little notebook and I just recorded all the places where the Bible had accurately predicted a future scientific discovery.
I think what especially blew me away, it predicted four of the fundamental features of what we might now call the Big Bang creation model. Nobody even had a hint about that until the 20th century in the astronomical community.
I also wondered, is it possible theologians before my time saw this in the text? Interestingly, it was Jewish theologians that spotted all these Big Bang features in the Old Testament. Even 1,000 years ago, they recognized that according to the Bible, the universe must be expanding from a creation event. It must be expanding under laws of physics that don't change.
And one of those laws is a pervasive law of decay. I mean, that's Big Bang cosmology. So that got me motivated to keep reading through the rest of the Bible just to see, okay, I wonder how well it does as I get through.
Eric Huffman: What did you find specifically about the development of life and different forms of life through the rest of the six days of creation that piqued your interest as a scientist?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, one thing that piqued my interest was creation days four and five. Because in creation day four in Genesis 1 is when the atmosphere becomes transparent enough that creatures on the surface can actually see the sun, moon, and stars in the sky. Before that, it was hazy. And I knew as a scientist why it was hazy. There wasn't enough oxygen. It takes oxygen to transform Earth's hazy atmosphere to a transparent atmosphere.
But I also knew that animals need to have access to the position of the sun, moon, and stars at least at certain times of their life cycle in order to regulate their biological clocks. The plants don't need that, but the animals do, at least the large-bodied animals do. And what you notice is you don't have large-bodied animals until creation day five. It's after the clearing of the atmosphere. So I said, "Hey, it got all those points right."
Eric Huffman: Wow. I mean, I remember first learning about Genesis one as a scholar in seminary. I went to a very progressive, I guess, liberal seminary. We were basically taught it's a beautiful story. It's a poetic narrative that speaks of God's supernatural nature and power but we shouldn't interpret it literally.
What I hear from you, Dr. Ross, is when you finally opened your Bible and started reading it yourself, what you saw was a very systematic literal interpretation of the earliest possible events.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Yes, and I would say to your liberal friends, it's not either or. It's both. It is beautiful. I mean, the prose is just amazingly beautiful. So I appreciate that.
And I also look at every biblical chapter as having multiple messages. I mean, I was impressed that when I looked at Genesis chapter 1, it was teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. So there's doctrinal teaching in there. And it's something we did in our church years ago. Eight of us taught eight different messages on Genesis chapter 1, trying to make the point to our congregation, whenever you read the Bible, don't just look for one message.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah, there's layers. It's like archeology in that way. You just keep peeling back one layer after another and learning more truth.
How long did it take you, after you started reading the Bible, to some decision where you became a follower of Jesus? And what was that process like for someone in the context you were in?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, I said, I'm not going to make any decision until I read the entire thing. I said, I'm gonna wait till I get all the way to Revelation 22. But I kept finding stuff. So it took me 18 months to get to Revelation 22, because I was nitpicking every single detail.
I think the turning point for me, I was now a sophomore physics student at the university, and our thermodynamics professor assigned us a statement, which was to calculate the probability that one of us in a class of 600 physics students would be killed by a sudden reversal of the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm not gonna go into details, but it's fairly straightforward to calculate that probability. I mean, to give you an example, you can be in a large auditorium. There's a statistical possibility that all the air molecules in that auditorium that are below the freezing point of water will suddenly descend on one individual and freeze him to death. And the probability of that happening is one chance in 10 to the 80th.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Hugh Ross: And our professor's point is, hey, when you get a probability that tiny, that's equivalent to saying it's impossible. It'll never happen anytime, anywhere in the entire universe.
But I had just completed a calculation where I looked at about 200 places in the Bible where it predicted future scientific events, future scientific discoveries. Also, as you're aware, the Bible also predicts future historical events. The probability I calculated that all this could be in the Bible without the being who is in control of all of history and creation inspiring the biblical authors was way less than one chance in 10 to the 300th power. Yeah.
Where I said, what I've just done has proven that the Bible, at a minimum, has 10 to the 220 times more reliable than the second law of thermodynamics. Had I trust my life totally to the second law of thermodynamics, it would be foolish for me not to put even more trust in what this Bible is telling me to do with my life.
I wanna give credit to the Gideons. The Bible they gave us in the public schools had two pages at the end about what you need to do once you become convinced this book has an error-free message from the one that created the universe. I'd already read the New Testament, so I was aware of the claims that the creator of the universe became a human being, lived amongst us, lived a morally perfect life.
And I guess what impressed me going through the Gospels, there was one occasion where Jesus declared to a large crowd, "I am morally perfect. Can any of you accuse me of sin?" In the audience was his mother, his four brothers, and his sister. And it's like they all nodded their heads. I was like, "This guy had to be who he said He was."
But what the Gideons basically explain is that the creator of the universe is prepared to trade His moral perfection for my moral imperfection, if I simply come to Him and ask me to forgive me of all of my sins and offenses past, present, and future.
But they added this one thing. He knows better than you do what's best for your life. It only makes rational sense to put Him in charge of your life and let Him run your life for you.
And they don't let you off the hook. The Gideons had a place for you to sign your name and date it and put the timestamp on. So I literally recorded the exact date and time when I committed my life to Jesus Christ at age 19.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Hugh Ross: And the signature you can still see is in here.
Eric Huffman: That is amazing. My Gideon friends, I have a few Gideons that are part of my church, and they'll be thrilled to hear that because Gideons are feeling a little bit forgotten these days like they're a relic of a bygone era in the modern church, but they're still doing great work and obviously changing lives that change many more lives. And so praise God for the Gideons. Let's give a shout-out. That's great.
Dr. Hugh Ross: All means. And I've spoken to the Gideons many times.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. You've used a phrase, error-free, in reference to the Bible. And I think that's something that's going to pique a lot of people's interest, and especially folks that are skeptics and think they've read the Bible and found plenty of errors. So, how do you come to that conclusion: the Bible is not just inspired or fundamentally good, but that it is error-free?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, what I did with all the holy books or religions of the world is that I'm going to put them in the best possible interpretive light. And what I discovered when I did that with the Quran, the Hindu Vedas, the Buddhist commentaries, I couldn't defend it. But when I did that with the Bible, I'll be honest, I found passages I didn't understand, but I couldn't find any provable error or contradiction.
When I run into skeptics today and say the Bible's full of errors, I say, "Well, give me your best shot. What do you think is an error?" Almost always they come up with a numerical inconsistency. I said, "Look, I'm a scientist. What we do in science, we round numbers off. The Bible does too. So you can't throw out the Bible just because you think it got the value of pi wrong."
I mean, yeah, Solomon said the value of pi was three, and that's accurate to one place of the decimal. So, I mean, if he had said 3.456, I think you might have a case. And likewise, you have instances where David was counting up the number of soldiers in the Israelite army, and you get two different figures.
Notice two tribes were dropped out in one of them. And in both cases, he was rounding the number off. He was not giving an exact number.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Dr. Hugh Ross: In my experience, that's about two-thirds of what atheists think are contradictions and mistakes in the Bible. And then sometimes they'll say, "Well, I can't make the four gospels coexist." I had issues with that when I went through the gospels. Personally, I've found that if I have the ministry of Jesus lasting four years into three years, I get rid of all the problems.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Just by taking another year into consideration?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Taking another year into consideration. I've run into Bible scholars that make it work in three years, and I say, "Yeah, it's possible you can make it work in three years. I just think it's a lot easier if you not throw another year in there."
Moreover, as I read the gospel accounts, I don't see Jesus in a hurry. I mean, you squish it into three years, that's a pretty panic-driven ministry. As I read it, he seems relaxed all the way through. And moreover, I look at the relationships He had with His disciples is that they seemed to have a very strong bond with Him at the end. And I think an extra year would explain why they had that strong emotional bond.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. And for people that are listening, and maybe you're a Christian adjacent, or you're raised in the church, and you were taught that the Bible says Jesus only ministered for three years. It doesn't. Nowhere in the Bible does it say how long He ministered for, how many years.
It mentions three different Passover's that take place between the beginning of His ministry and His death. But that doesn't mean there were only three Passover's or only three years. I have one really solid Bible scholar that I trust. Actually, he was the guy that helped lead me to Christ, who thinks it was even more than four years, and that Jesus died around age 38 is what he would say.
And so I don't think it really matters factually because the Bible doesn't make a claim to that end. But it is very interesting to think about just how long Jesus spent ministering and walking around the region and pouring into His disciples.
I think another category of debate or pushback, I'm sure you've experienced from skeptics and atheists, agnostics, who would say that their problem with the Bible isn't necessarily factual errors or numbers off here and there. It's just the supernatural claims. Some of the things relating to the origin of human life and evolution as we understand it today, or we think we understand it today, contradicting the Bible record. Some would say just a tertiary reading of Genesis 1 into Genesis 2 would show two conflicting, seemingly conflicting creation stories. How do you deal with these more, I guess, ideological feedback, pushback, criticisms of the Bible?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, I was in the same position when I first picked up the Bible at age 17. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 seemed so different. But as I carefully was looking at it, I noticed, oh, what I see in Genesis 1 is giving a strict chronology of all the physical creation events. And then it just gives a very quick summary of the spiritual point, which is basically God assigning responsibility and authority to human beings.
When I looked at Genesis 2, it seems the whole focus was on God assigning responsibility and authority to Adam and Eve and their descendants. And what I noticed there is that the spiritual part was in a strict chronology.
The physical part was just a short list with no chronological clues. And when I ran into skeptics, they were saying, well, if I look at Genesis 2, 5, and 6, it puts certain creation things in a different order than it does in Genesis 2. But what they're overlooking is there's no chronological indicators in Genesis 2, 5, and 6.
It's an abbreviated list without any chronology, whereas in Genesis 1, it's a strict chronology. And if you look at the spiritual part, it's the other way around. There's no chronology in Genesis 1 for the spiritual part, but there certainly is in Genesis 2.
And the whole point is God created us as a physical being. He also created us as a spiritual being. So even at age 17, almost two years before I became a Christian, I said, "This makes sense. If indeed God created us body, soul, and spirit, I would expect that He would give us two side-by-side creation texts, one with a physical focus, one with a spiritual focus." So I didn't see any contradiction between the two.
Eric Huffman: Help me understand the distinction. I understand the physical chronology of events in Genesis 1. What do you mean by spiritual chronology or timeline of events in Genesis 2?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, notice what you see in Genesis 2 is a God... Okay, I'll go back to Genesis 1. You see the word bara, 'to create,' used three times. First for the universe, then for the soulish animals, and last of all for us spirit beings, human beings.
What you see in Genesis 2, God first introduces Adam to the physical creation, saying, "Hey, manage the garden. Take care of it." I'm sure he got a lot of enjoyment out of that. But He realized there's something missing. Then God says, "Okay, now I want you to relate to these animals that are not just physical entities, they're endowed with mind, will, and emotions, a reference of the birds and mammals. And that's where Adam discovered, "Hey, I can have a relationship with these animals. I can attain them. They want to relate to me."
And he gave them different names and realized God had designed each one in a different way to relate to him in a different way. So he got a lot of fulfillment out of that. And so that was his introduction to the second component of creation.
But then God looked down on him and said, "This man is lonely. There's something missing." And you know, we men take a while to figure that out. But God put him under anesthesia, took a biopsy from his side, made this new creature. And when Adam recovered from his anesthesia, he saw this creature and realized this is a creature like me, body, soul, and spirit. And so now Adam was introduced to the entirety of creation.
I think it's making a point that just like Adam had to relate to God's creation on all three levels, we too in the 21st century need to do the same. This explains to me why we see so many lonely people in the 21st century, even in the church. Their relationship is not three-dimensional. They're basically relating at a purely physical level or they're relating an emotional or an intellectual level, but they're not relating on all the levels God wants us to relate.
I kind of see it as a responsibility for pastors to help people get past that loneliness, just like God helped Adam get past that loneliness. That's why I love Genesis chapter 2.
Eric Huffman: Just to boil it down, is it accurate to say Genesis 1 and that account of events is where you want to look to find the semantic sort of practical outline of the order of creation, how it actually happened? Genesis 2 is just as important but explanatory in a spiritual relational sense and adds more meaning to the story of Genesis 1. Is that sort of your take?
Dr. Hugh Ross: My take is that God didn't just create us so that we can enjoy life here on planet Earth. He had a purpose for our lives. He's given us authority. And that comes with responsibility. Genesis 2 is basically laying that out.
Notice in Genesis 1, you get a single sentence. "I'm putting you in charge of the planet to manage its resources for your benefit and the benefit of all life." And that's a mandate that's upon all humans for all time. I mean, you look at today, we're experiencing a lot of environmental crises.
I look at what I see in Genesis 1 and 2, a promise that God has given us the resources that we need to manage the planet, both for our benefit and the benefit of all their life. One of the books I've written is on global warming and climate change, basically saying we don't have to choose. You know, God has already given us the resources. We just have to find the solutions where we can resolve climate change for our economic benefit but also the benefit of all other life from planet Earth. There are win-win solutions.
Eric Huffman: That nuance is what really turns me on to your ministry. And I will be honest, as a recovering, angry, anti-Christian skeptic, I had grown accustomed to coming across Christian apologists that claimed to be scientific in their thinking, sort of following the science insofar as it's convenient for them to do so. And then I just waited for the other shoe to drop where they talked about young Earth creationism or they talked about, you know, just sort of loopholes in their thinking that really allowed them to square a circle and ignore science in some ways.
Your faithfulness, not just to God and the truth of Scripture, but also to fundamental scientific principles, it's consistent. It runs throughout your thinking. And what I find interesting about you is that you're not afraid to step out in a landscape where a lot of people would expect a Christian apologist to say, yeah, the Bible's numbers add up, the Earth is 5,000, 10,000, whatever years old, and we just have to make science fit into that. You're not a young-Earth guy, are you?
Dr. Hugh Ross: No. No. [00:35:08] I founded reasons to believe on the two-books doctrine. That God reveals Himself inherently through two books: the book of nature and the book of Scripture. You see that in Psalm 19, you see it in Romans 1, many other biblical texts.
And so it doesn't mean that our theology is perfect or that our science is perfect. I keep telling people science is not the same as the record of nature. It's our interpretation of the record of nature.
Our theology is not the same as the words of the Bible. So when we see a contradiction between our theology and our science, we know we've made a misinterpretation and want to read the book, because God's promises the two books agree.
I kind of look at it as a court case where a lawyer brings in two expert witnesses that cooperate one another. What makes the cooperation work for the lawyer is that the witnesses are truly independent. They're not saying the same thing, but they overlap enough that they cooperate one another. Oh, I'm saying, you know, God has given us two faithful witnesses so we can be assured that what He's revealing really is the truth we want to understand.
I love it when I find anomalies in my Bible study or anomalies in my science, because it tells me I've got more to learn. If something's not fitting... but what I've noticed in my career, anomalies always get resolved if I put enough work into it. And when I resolve them, I discover more anomalies.
But what pulls me on the pathway to truth, the new anomalies are not as significant as the anomalies I've already resolved. As a scientist, as a theologian, that's your cue that you're on the right track. If the anomalies get less significant, you're on the right track. If the anomalies get more significant, you probably got the wrong model.
Eric Huffman: I think that works theologically, too. If I come across a Christian that claims to have no doubts, no hesitations about anything whatsoever, I just don't feel like they're doing the work. And there's so much beauty and wonder and exploration of the Scriptures and so many things we can't fully understand, but God can give us wisdom and knowledge to interpret things and discover new things about the Bible.
I just think when the Bible says—I think I've heard you say this—when the Bible says, love Him, worship Him with all of our minds, that's what He wants, is for us to explore, ask questions, doubt, explore, you know, find the answers.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, when I speak to theologians, I tell them, you don't have to worry about being unemployed. There'll always be more to learn from the Scriptures
Eric Huffman: Yeah, amen. One thing we've sort of circled it, but we haven't really gotten at it, is the age of the universe, the age of the earth, I guess, more specifically, and then the age of humanity. Where do you land on those key questions, especially age of the earth and human beings and our origins?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, for the universe, it's 13.79 billion years, plus or minus 0.04. We have a more accurate date for the Earth. That's 4.5662 billion years, plus or minus 0.0001. So we know that one to five place of the decimal.
Where we have uncertainty is the origin of human beings. And the reason why is that we don't have a radioisotope dating tool between 45,000 years ago and 250,000 years ago. And so, from a scientific perspective, we're forced to use indirect dating methods that have huge systematic errors.
I tell laypeople, when you read the scientific literature on human origins dating, you need to recognize that they're only giving you the statistical error. That's the random error of their measurement. They're not taking into effect that there could be some environmental effect that shifts all the measurements, say, by 30,000 years in one direction or the other. So it's not like physics, where we know both the statistical errors and the systematic errors.
But what I find interesting is that the Bible actually gives us a more accurate date for God creating Adam and Eve than we get from the genetics or that we get from these indirect dating methods. I mean, the best we can do scientifically is say that the origin of anatomically modern humans is somewhere between 45,000 years ago and 250,000 years ago.
The best mathematical genetics models kind of put it in the neighborhood of, say, 90,000 to 160,000 years ago. But again, you've got big systematic errors. Whereas what I see in the Bible, it tells us that God placed Adam and then created Eve in the Garden of Eden, and it gives us a location. It tells us it's near the place where four known rivers come together.
What's interesting, that location today is about 200 feet below sea level. It's in the middle of the Persian Gulf. But during an Ice Age, it's above sea level. So the Bible is basically telling us God created Adam and Eve during an Ice Age. I think most likely the previous Ice Age.
Well, the previous Ice Age was from 15,000 years ago to 120,000 years ago. I say, well, that overlaps the best scientific dates we have. Where we do have some really good dates is for what happens in Genesis 10 and 11, where God becomes concerned that humanity is repeatedly disobeying His command to multiply and fill the earth.
They're staying in one locale. They're building one city, one nation, one tower, so they will not be scattered over the face of the earth, Genesis 11. And then we see God in Genesis 11 forcibly scattering humanity over the whole of Africa, Europe, Asia. And we now have, for the first time, indisputable dates that tell us that humans quickly migrated from the Middle East area in Eastern Africa into Northern Europe, Southern Europe, all of Asia, including Japan, Borneo, Indonesia, all of Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, all of Africa.
Those dates are all the same. They come in at 42,000 to 49,000 years ago. Which tells me Noah's flood has to predate that.
An interesting thing you see in Genesis 7 and 8, it took a whole year for the flood waters to recede. For it to take that long, there'd have to be a huge amount of melting snow and ice to replace the water that would be flowing out into the oceans from the five months of the flood. So that again tells me Noah's flood must be an Ice Age event.
The latest book I've just finished is on Noah's flood, where I basically come up with, I think, three reasonable dates based on what we see in the Ice Age, when the sea levels were low enough to fit what the Bible says about Noah's flood, and likewise doing the same for Adam and Eve. And also looking at those dates because the earliest archaeological evidence we have for anatomically modern humans shows up in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Africa.
But there are three times during the Ice Age when there is a very easy rapid migration route between the two locations. And there is a land bridge joining the Persian Gulf to Eastern Africa. So I've come up with, I think, a few reasonable dates, but slightly earlier than what you get from the science.
Eric Huffman: I tried to follow everything with my little brain, but I think you're saying maybe somewhere around a hundred thousand years ago the first humans appeared?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Plus or minus 50,000.
Eric Huffman: Okay. And then somewhere around, I guess, 30,000 to 50,000 years passed between the first humans and the flood, is that correct?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Plus or minus 20,000. Okay. I mean, I got an article on our website where I talk about just how accurate these dates are.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. Hugh Ross: And a lot of late people think we got radioisotope dating methods all the way through. We don't.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Dr. Hugh Ross: There's gaps in the history of the Earth where we don't have any radioisotope clocks.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. What do you say to the Christian apologist or Christian scholar that might say, well, the generations listed in Genesis 1 through Genesis 11 don't account for that kind of passage of time? Does it not matter that generations may have been skipped and not mentioned in the Bible record? How do you make sense of that?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, probably the organization that pushes that most aggressively is Answers in Genesis. But even on their own website, they note they can't make it work.
So they start from Adam, assume there's no gaps in the genealogies, and calculate a date for Noah's flood. Then they do the same thing starting with Abraham and working back. The two dates disagree by a hundred years. That alone should tell you the genealogies in the Bible are not exhaustively complete.
If you actually look at it in the original Hebrew, the Hebrew words for father and son also mean grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and-
Eric Huffman: Ancestor.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And a number of scholars like yourself have gone through the genealogies and made the point that every biblical genealogy drops names. None of them are exhaustive. And the theology is, why are certain people dropped and why are certain people added?
Personally, I think the gospel is in there. I noticed, for example, some genealogies make a point to mention women as opposed to men. The gospel is for both sexes. I noticed two genealogies mentioned Rahab the prostitute and Tamar who seduced her father-in-law. It's like, you can commit really grievous sins and God can forgive. Amen. I don't ignore the genealogies. I think there's some deep theology in them.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I remember a professor telling me that they're not just about accuracy, they're also about advertising. And what he meant was that they're telling a story about God and His providence and His mercy a lot of the time, like you've mentioned.
But I still want to get after the fundamental question I bet everyone's thinking, which is creation of humans versus evolution of humans. I mean, the dominant narrative in the scientific community continues to be that human beings evolved from other species. I don't think that's where you land, and I just wonder where you would say human beings came from. Were we specially created as human beings, ex-nihilo, by God, or is there a possibility that we evolved from lower species?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, with my colleague, Fazale Rana, our staff biochemist, wrote a book called Who is Adam? It's 400 pages long. But my latest book is on biblical inerrancy, Rescuing Inerrancy. I got one chapter where I give an update on the human origins, basically saying the latest data is telling us that the biggest population size for Neanderthals never exceeded 15,000 individuals, and probably more in the area of 8,000. The genetics tells us that their DNA was highly inbred.
So the idea that we evolved from Neanderthals or a common ancestor of Neanderthals, that doesn't fly in light of the population levels. It also doesn't fly in light of the fact of how different we are from the Neanderthals.
So I did a deep dive in the scientific literature. Indeed, there are people who claim that Neanderthals had control over fire like we do, but my research says they had control at the level of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, when a wildfire breaks out, they gather up all the nuts that they're not able to crack open, they throw them on the fire, they run away. When the fire is over, they come back, they collect the nuts, and now they can get the meat out of the nuts. They're opportunistic.
And we notice about Neanderthals is all the evidence that we have of them having an association with fire, it's summertime, not winter. If they truly had control over fire, given where they lived, we would see much more evidence in winter than we do in summer. We don't.
Likewise, when they say that they use spears, well, chimpanzees use spears. We have no evidence that anything is sophisticated as a bow and arrow. We notice about Neanderthals, they were here from 400,000 years ago to 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. No advance in their technology. We humans show up and we put people on the moon in less than a hundred thousand years. And so our technology exponentially advances.
Then you look at the anatomy. Neanderthals had this very powerful jaw structure with powerful muscles because they were eating raw food. We humans had to be processing food right from the beginning because we don't have those strong jaw muscles. Our tooth structure, our jaw structure forces us to eat soft food.
And so we now have evidence that even the earliest humans were gathering grains, they were roasting them, grinding them, boiling them, so they could consume them. One reason they out-competed the bipedal primates that coexisted is that we could eat poisonous vegetables.
So, veggies, for example, were very common where the early humans lived. They're poisonous to eat raw, but they have a lot of calories and nutrients in them. The very first humans were gathering those and they were grinding them, roasting them, boiling them, made them safe to eat. They were easy to eat. We humans can consume all of our nutritional needs in about 20 minutes a day. My sons could do it in eight minutes a day.
Eric Huffman: I think there's still...
Dr. Hugh Ross: For Neanderthals, it was four to six hours they had to spend eating.
Eric Huffman: I think there would still be the skeptic that would say, "Look, there's still ample evidence that there was... that's how evolution works. You know, you had this lower form of even digestion and consuming calories and it evolved into what humans became. Maybe we're missing a few links in the fossil record or whatever."
What do you say to the... I mean, it is still the overwhelmingly dominant narrative that speciation exists and that resulted in the development of human beings.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, here's the good news. Not anymore. Even the latest atheist physical anthropologists are saying humans are exceptional. We're radically different from the primates that we share the planet with, including the ones that have gone extinct. So we had a conference at our headquarters on human origins and we invited some of these atheists to speak. And they said, yes, we have a lot of similarities with the animals, particularly the higher animals. And our response is, well, it's because God wanted us to relate to them and use them to further our civilization.
So you look at our agriculture, that's heavily based on these animals. But I said, when you actually look at the properties we manifest and, you know, just looking at... So, for example, Neanderthals, their brains are radically different than our brains. Same size, same weight, but their brain is like a Coke can. It's cylindrical.
Ours is like a basketball. We have a large parietal lobe. We have large frontal lobes, which enable us to do mathematics, philosophy, and theology. Neanderthals, their brain was devoted to their sense of sight and smell and hearing, so way better than we were at that. But they lacked all these intellectual capabilities.
And even though our brain is the same size as theirs, our neuronal density is way higher. If you actually look at the structure of the human brain, it's much closer to that of a raven or a crow than it is of any of the primates past or present.
Eric Huffman: I think one of the more convincing arguments I've heard to that end is that there just wasn't enough time. In the timeline we've...
Dr. Hugh Ross: Exactly.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, we think we've pinpointed, more or less, give or take, you know, however many years, there just wasn't enough time for A to become B, for the Neanderthal brain in this case, or even a high A form to become human. There's not enough passage of time to allow for that level of speciation. Is that accurate?
Dr. Hugh Ross: It is, and it's all the more compelling when you realize that the generation time for Neanderthal is about eight years between being born and able to give birth. For us humans, it's about 20 years. So if you look at the population numbers and the generation time, then you look at the time frame in which it all happened, you realize it can't work.
It would work if you were a bacterium where you reproduce every 20 minutes and you got a quadrillion individuals, but we only got a few tens of thousands with long generation times and very complex and large body size. Yeah, you can't make it happen that fast.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, so interesting. What about some of the other common misgivings you'll hear people express about the Bible, like Methuselah, 969 years old, you know, people living hundreds and hundreds of years before they die. How do you make sense of that from a scientific perspective and reconcile it with the Bible?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, that's the chapter we give away for free on my book, Navigating Genesis, basically making the point that there's a British astronomer who teamed up with a Russian astronomer, [Wolfendale and Erlykin? 00:54:18]. They've been looking at supernova remnants in our galaxy, and they found one that's about, you know, 30 moon diameters across in the sky. It's a huge one. And they basically determined 95% of the killer cosmic rays come from that single supernova eruption event. And they're trying to date when it exploded, and they're basically saying somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to 100,000 years ago.
So it's possible that you could have a scenario where people were living before that supernova eruption event, and therefore the potential to live longer, then once the eruption happens, their lifespan would exponentially decline. And that's what you see in Genesis 11. You see a genealogy with an exponential decline in lifespan, and so that would fit a supernova event.
I make the point in the chapter that it's not quite as simple as that. You also have to isolate humans from significant exposure to igneous rocks. And today everybody's exposed to those rocks. If you drive a freeway, if you live anywhere where there's granite, you get exposed to the decay of uranium and thorium.
But what you see in the Bible is that the first humans were living in sedimentary plains, and so being localized to sedimentary plains, they would have been protected from igneous rocks, and if they lived before that supernova event, they would have been protected from those deadly cosmic rays, which inevitably would have engendered cancer.
And you have God saying, I'm going to shorten the human lifespan down to a maximum of 120 years, and I don't care how healthy you live, you're not going to make it much past 120. That's just because of the radiation environment in which we live.
Eric Huffman: The igneous rocks effect, what does that do to us?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, in igneous rocks, you've got potassium 40, uranium 238, thorium 232, and that radiation will do damage to your body. Also, you notice in the Bible, it says, hey, you can't eat meat. If they were eating meat, they wouldn't be able to live that long.
Now, I'm convinced that people before the Flood, some of them were eating meat. We have evidence of that, but those are the ones that weren't living to be 969 years of age. If you eat a lot of meat, you're going to concentrate heavy metals in your body. And I'm not saying you have to be a vegetarian, since you're not going to live to be 120, don't worry about it.
Eric Huffman: Eat, drink, and be merry?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Exactly. If you want to live to be 800, you have to avoid meat.
Eric Huffman: I'm good with checking out at 100 if I can have a steak once in a while.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Let's shift gears for a second and away from the scientific, the numerical data and all of that, and talk about what you discovered in the Bible that compelled you from a moral perspective. What is it about the morality of the Bible that you found to be perfect without error?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, that's what really motivated me to keep studying the Bible, because I looked at these other holy books, and every one of them has a moral message. But what I saw in the Bible was like an order of magnitude above. And I was really impressed just saying, hey, yes, all these books teach us that we should live moral lives, but the Bible goes into it in great detail.
And what struck me was the elegance and the beauty of the moral messages saw in the Bible, and how compatible. I saw contradictions when I looked at, say, the Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. You know, some of their morality didn't fit.
They allowed certain things. I said, hey, you know, how can I call that to be moral? And I had the benefit of parents who wanted me to live a moral life. And, you know, as I read the Bible, I said, that's how I want to live. The morality was just so beautiful and so perfect, I said, "That's the way to live."
I basically dedicated my life to try to live up to the moral standard I saw in the Bible. And particularly when I got to the New Testament, I said, "This is just such good news. This is really the way to live." But I quickly discovered I couldn't do it. And when I got into the epistles, I realized, hey, that's the whole message of the Bible.
And what's interesting is I had Carl Sagan as a professor once, and he was talking about how aliens have given us an Encyclopedia Galactica. And my comment was, well, don't we already have an Encyclopedia Galactica? His comment was interesting. "I know exactly what you're referring to, but nobody can live up to the standard that Bible gives."
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Hugh Ross: It's like, "Carl, that's the whole point of the book. Nobody can live up to it. But God's prepared to do for us what we can't do for ourselves." That's really what motivated me to sign my name in the back of the Gideon Bible, is realizing I love this moral message. I can't attain it, but the Creator is willing to do for me what I can't do for myself.
Eric Huffman: It's His morality at the end of the day that really takes center stage in the Bible.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, what got to me was the promise. "I'm gonna give you the Holy Spirit and He will step by step enable you to live this life you want to live. And that's the wonder of being a Christian.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, amen. What are some of the specific differences from a moralistic point of view between the Bible and these other faith traditions you explored? What really caused you to see Christianity more moral?
Dr. Hugh Ross: What I saw in the Bible was, you know, love your enemies, be gracious to people who don't believe like you do, you'll live an exemplary life before them. But I was seeing these other holy books as they were treating people who had a different faith system as an enemy. And if you can't convert them, then you need to shun them or, worse yet, kill them.
And I said, "Hey, that's not the God that I see in the universe." I mean, what I see in the universe is a God that seems to be... you know, he loves harmony, beauty, elegance. He provides in abundance. This is a loving being. That being wouldn't behave the way I see what, you know, in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism.
Eric Huffman: So at this point, Dr. Ross, I feel like I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about some of the major complaints people have about the Bible, which is the seeming lack of morality on God's part or on His people's part with Joshua and the... they call it a genocide in in the book of Joshua, and then slavery being regulated throughout the Bible. I mean, I'm sure you've wrestled with those kinds of things before. What do you make of them?
Dr. Hugh Ross: I get that almost on a daily basis on my social media pages. Atheists just keep bombarding me with that one, which is why I've written a lot making the point. The God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament. What's different are 'we' human beings.
And what Jesus told His disciples, when the holy spirit comes upon you, you will become the salt of the earth. And I make the historical observation. Before that event, we have multiple examples of societal reprobation, which I define as an entire city or town or nation becoming so evil that they're incapable of doing anything good, and all they want to do is, you know, physical harm, and oppression in everybody that they meet. There's zero evidence for that after the day of Pentecost.
So in the New Testament era, we do see reprobate individuals, people who are like that, but we don't see entire cities, towns, or nations. And the reason being is we have people on the face of the earth today that are the salt of the earth, and they're preventing that societal reprobation. So God no longer has to perform merciful surgery.
And I refer to that in the sense that, you know, the reason why God took out Sodom and Gomorrah, their reprobation had become malignant. They were in danger of infecting everybody around them and the nations around them with the evil that they had. And so just like a surgeon will tell you, "There's a stage four tumor in your body. If I don't operate and kill that tumor, it's gonna kill your entire body." And so you give the surgeon permission, yeah, operate. Take it out.
But what I noticed in the book of Joshua and Judges is that God performs precise surgery. He only removes the malignant reprobate society and leaves a healthy tissue alone. I think a good example of that is where God tells Abraham, "I have to take out Sodom and Gomorrah. Their evil has reached a level where everybody, every man, woman, and child has bent on this evil behavior."
And Abraham says, "Well, what about these Amorites up on the hill with me?" And God acknowledges, "Yes, they're not pleasant individuals. They are evil, but their evil has not yet reached its fullness. I will not touch them, but your descendants 400 years from now, they will deal with their evil, malignant reprobation. But right now, it's not time." And so it basically makes the biblical point.
God only performs surgery when it's necessary to save the rest of humanity. That's my interpretation of Noah's flood is that humanity was in danger of self-extinction. In fact, I calculate that the murder rate was well above ninety percent. So, yeah, if God hadn't acted, there have been no humans left on the face of the Earth.
Eric Huffman: Wow. I have not quite heard that specific interpretation before. I'm really fascinated by the analogy of surgery, extracting a malignancy in terms of what happened in the book of Joshua. I heard you say that everything changed at Pentecost.
And people that may not know this, Pentecost is the day in the New Testament where the Holy Spirit's poured out on the believers. And the whole world doesn't receive the Holy Spirit, but your point is that these sort of malignancies are no longer festering in the world or in societies, maybe in individuals but not in societies, because of the residual effects of many people being filled with God's spirit and preventing-
Dr. Hugh Ross: I use the analogy as kinda like an antiviral, and so it's preventing this reprobation from reaching that level. So it's a preservative. That's what Jesus said. You will become the salt of the earth, preventing that level of reprobation, from ever spreading again.
And to put it in the context of the book of Revelation, you know, people would take certain passages literally. There'll be a time when Christians are removed from the Earth. And what does it tell us in Revelation? Societal reprobation will return. Well, if the salt's not present, it's going to happen. But the bottom line is God has not changed. It's the same immutable God. It's we who have changed.
Eric Huffman: That's important. Dr. Ross, we're almost out of time, and I'm grateful for your time today. Maybe just tell us a little bit about what you spent your time doing now. For folks that aren't familiar with you and your many years of work, what do you do to spread this message?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, for 35 years, I was a CEO of Reasons to Believe. Our board of directors said, "Hey, we want you to spend virtually all your time on research, writing, and speaking." So that's what I'm doing. I'm writing books. I'm actually publishing in the secular peer-reviewed literature because I wanna reach people who read that literature for Christ.
I'm also busy equipping people on how to be more effective in sharing their faith. The one thing I think I would leave you with this is a book I wrote, Always Be Ready, basically takes the book of Acts and says, if you will prepare sound reasons for your faith in open Jesus Christ, and according to 1 Peter 3 and 4, present those reasons with gentleness and respect, you will see God supernaturally bringing non-Christians to you that God in advance is prepared to hear and respond to those sound reasons.
And if you will do that, you'll have hundreds of experiences just like what you see with God bringing, Peter and Cornelius together so that Cornelius could hear and respond. As a pastor, I think it's important for people in the pew to have those regular experiences. I've seen nothing that strengthens the faith of a believer as seeing God perform miracles to bring people into their lives that can respond to the reasons they developed.
And no other experience motivates you to develop good reasons. And no other experience motivates you to develop that Christian demeanor. Because non-Christians are gonna listen to your demeanor more than they will your words.
Eric Huffman: That's right. So I'm curious, given your background and how your mind works, does has God put you in positions to speak to certain people that have the, you know, scientific background or way of thinking, you know, not just from the pulpit where they might not be in attendance, but in everyday life, you know, going from place to place? Tell us about, you know, a time you've encountered someone that had the same doubts you had growing up.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, the reason why I'm convinced that, you know, God will do for Christians what He did for Peter and Cornelius is that... you know, I fly a lot in my speaking, and I get to have conversations with people in airport waiting rooms and on airplanes. Well, over half of those conversations are with people with doctoral degrees in science or theology. And you and I both know that doesn't make up half of the flying public. It's a very tiny percentage.
But God knows who they are. He knows who I am, and somehow he has a seating right next to one another, and conversations get started. I've had the pleasure of leading, several of them had a faith in Christ as a result.
I've seen it happen to other people. You know, I have a friend who came out of the Mormon faith, and he says, "I fly a lot too, but I can't tell you how often I get seated beside a Mormon or an ex-Mormon and I get a conversation and have an opportunity to lead people to faith in Christ."
My point is God will do that for any Christian as long as you prepare those good reasons and work on developing the Christian character.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Amen. Let's talk as we wrap just about the answers you've prepared on average day, average flight. What are your go-to sort of responses when people present their most common questions about the Bible or about Christianity? What's the strongest evidence you hold on to that's explanatory and powerful?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, there's probably two I cite, especially when I'm talking to scientists. And that is that, you know, we have theorems that establish that there's a beginning to the universe, there's a beginning to the cosmic expansion, there's a beginning to space and time, which implies there must be a being beyond space and time that created it all.
And I say to scientists, say, I wanna see evidence for a miracle. Well, what bigger miracle could you ever hope to prove than that there's an agent beyond space and time that created everything?
Then I look at the fine-tuning argument. I've noticed that's been the go-to scientific argument for theologians for 2,000 years. You see it especially in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, is that we look at creation, everywhere we look, we see fine tuning.
I've written seven books on it basically saying we see it on all cosmic size scales. The entire universe has to be fine-tuned so we can live. We see it in the cosmic web. We see it in the galaxy clusters, the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the interior of the earth, moon, and sun. We see it at the level of fundamental particles.
Whatever size scales you look at, you see overwhelming evidence that has been fine-tuned, not just to make life possible, but to make human beings possible; not just to make humans possible, but to make our redemption from sin and evil possible.
In fact, lately, what I've been telling my scientific peers who are not yet Christians, I say, "Look, I know you're not a believer yet, but if you'll do your scientific research from a biblical redemptive perspective, I guarantee it'll make you more successful at making scientific discoveries." Of course, my goal is when they are more successful, they'll say, "Gee, maybe I better consider this Christian faith."
Eric Huffman: That's awesome. In the spirit of just full, honest disclosure, I'm curious to circle back with my last question to your point earlier that curiosity and exploration of problems and questions continues to matter to you today. What are your ongoing questions or hang-ups about things you come across in the bible as a Christian that you're continuing to explore today? Things you haven't quite figured out yet?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, I sure struggle with the last eight chapters of Ezekiel. Talks about three different temples. It's really hard to get the timeline figured out. That's probably the one that's hanging me up the most. You know, what are all these temples all about? And what's the theological point?
But I also find it fascinating as it bringing in extra dimensions into the book of Ezekiel. And I'm persuaded that when you try to deal with God, eternity, and time, and where we're going in the new creation, God's gonna remove us from the dimensional realm of the universe and put us into a brand new dimensional realm. But there's a lot of history in that.
I'm still in the same position as the angels. How do you really figure out the depth of God's grace? Fortunately, we get to experience it. The angels have to be content to watch it. But it's like even those of us who experience it, we really haven't plumbed the depths of what that's all about.
Eric Huffman: That's interesting. It kinda opened a can of worms. I would love to get into. We don't have time. But if anybody watching is interested in Hugh Ross's take on the multidimensionality of the universe as it relates to the modern conversation about aliens and things like that, there are great videos on YouTube where you can search. Just search "Hugh Ross aliens", and you'll find what I'm talking about. You have a lot to say on that topic as well, and I think your perspective is really interesting and needed right now as everybody's losing their minds about what's going on with these extraterrestrials.
Dr. Ross, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. Thank you for your work and your commitment to truth and the kingdom of God. I hope everybody watching or listening will look up the great breadth of work you've done on your website. Is it reasons.org? Is that correct?
Dr. Hugh Ross: Reasons.org. Correct.
Eric Huffman: Reasons.org. And, of course, you get a lot of books out there folks can buy, and you offer free chapters of some of those books on your website. So they can find those there.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Great. Dr. Ross, I'd love to have you back sometime. Maybe you can come to Houston and visit us in person or something. You're fascinating. I'm so grateful for the time today.
Dr. Hugh Ross: Well, I really love this opportunity to talk to you. You're a man after my own heart. So thank you.
Eric Huffman: I'm honored by that. Thank you, Dr. Ross. Have a great day.