Questions for Dr. Hugh Ross

For those who do not know, Hugh Ross is the leader for the Progressive Creation viewpoint. Though he denies evolution, his ideas are close to theistic evolution. He says that God did many creative acts throughout the billions of years that the universe existed. He accepts the 4.5 billion years of earth history. He says that the Flood was only a local flood. He says that humanlike animals existed for millions of years before God gave souls to a pair, making them Adam and Eve. His doctorate is in astrophysics. He makes many claims contrary to Scripture, promoting nature as the 67th book of the Bible and having equal authority with it. Most American seminaries have adopted Hugh Ross's claims and the teachings of his Reasons to Believe organization.

You may find refutations of the Ross claims at www.answersingenesis.org. The Volume 13 (No. 2), 1999, issue of the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal contains two major papers pointing out some of the Ross errors. On pp. 52-60 Danny Faulkner (Ph.D. in astronomy) titles his article as "The Dubious Apologetics of Hugh Ross". On pp. 22-30 Jonathan Sarfati reviews the book "The Genesis Question" by Hugh Ross (NavPress, 1998), strongly condemning the errors. Sarfati went on to publish an important book refuting Ross, which is available from Answers In Genesis.

I have not yet prepared my own list of questions, but here are some ideas (no particular order) to get you started on your own. If you understand my questions and their impact, feel free to ask them when you are there. You can be sure that he will not keep calling on the same people who ask hard questions.

A. The definition of a black hole involves a tremendous mass confined to a small volume of space, such that nothing can escape outwards through an event horizon, not even light. The description of the Big Bang puts the entire universe inside a tiny ball. How could the universe ever have escaped and expanded outwards from black hole conditions?

B. The red shift is normally thought of as only a Doppler shift caused by radial speeds that increase with distance from us. Yet relativity theory says that tangential speeds also create a red shift. Astronomers have no way of measuring tangential speeds at distances of billions of light years. Therefore the tangential red shift is ignored. A universe that rotates like a solid body will have a red shift phenomenon similar to the radial red shift from an expanding universe. How will your Progressive Creation teachings have to change if some day it can be shown that the red shift is rotational or derives from some other mechanism?

C. For the past thirty years we have had corner reflector arrays on the moon and have been able to directly measure with lasers the distance to the moon. The measurements confirm that the moon is gradually moving away from the earth. Therefore it was closer in the past, causing stronger tides and beach erosion. Where was the moon 100 million years ago? Was it inside the Roche Limit? The speed of recession does not allow the moon's age to be anywhere near the quoted 4.5 billion years.

D. The angular momentum of the rotating sun is tiny compared to the angular momentum of the planets revolving around the sun. A condensing nebula would have a more uniform distribution of angular momentum. How did the sun end up with such a slow rotation?

E. A condensing nebula hypothesis indicates that all axes of planetary rotation should be approximately perpendicular to the orbital planes, with the direction of rotation matching the orbital motion and the solar rotation direction. Please explain how Uranus can have a rotational axis tilted more than 90 degrees from expectations. Also explain how many of the satellites of the outer planets can have retrograde orbits.

F. The dynamo theory is used to explain the magnetic field of the earth. By this theory the field is caused by electrical currents in the earth's core. The stronger the currents, the stronger the magnetic field. When the field decreases to zero, the electric current must also become zero. Once the currents have decayed to zero what mechanism exists for the electric current to build up again in the opposite direction to create a magnetic reversal? That would be like bringing the dead back to life
again.

G. The presumed age of fossil fuels, on the order of 100 million years or so, indicates that no carbon-14 should exist in them. Yet careful researchers (allowing no contamination from modern sources) have been able to detect measurable carbon-14 in such substances. (For example some Lower Cretaceous charcoal that I recently sampled had a radiocarbon age of about 18 thousand years, not 100 million.) Such evidence points to a very young earth. How can your Progressive Creation theory allow for the presence of carbon-14 in fossil fuels?

H. (He has heard this one before!) If the Flood was only a local flood, why did Noah have to take 120 years to build an ocean liner and pack it with animals if he could have walked to the ends of the continents in only a year and thereby avoided the local flood?

I. The time scale for dating ancient primate fossils is usually based upon the Potassium-Argon radiometric measurements, giving ages in hundreds of thousands and millions of years. A few years ago brand new rock, photographically dated at only ten years old when collected, was sent in to a commercial laboratory for Potassium-Argon dating. The answer came back as about 1/3 million years for most of the rock and up to 3 million years old for some minority minerals in it. The 5 percent
error bars greatly exclude the actual 10 year age. If the Potassium-Argon method cannot date the present, how can we trust it for dating ancient humanlike remains?

J. Danny Faulkner (in "The Dubious Apologetics of Hugh Ross", pg 53) has a good question regarding Ross' greater regard for nature as a 67th book of the Bible than for the other 66 books. In fact Ross does a bait and switch. We might agree that God's creation (nature) should be in good accord with the Bible, but then he switches from nature to science, as interpreted by modern scientists. The question: "So how can a cursed creation [nature] interpreted by a fallible methodology [science] of sinful humans determine how we interpret the perfect, unfallen Word of God?" (My inserts in [-] .)

K. What happened to all of the antimatter that should have been produced in equal amounts as normal matter by the Big Bang?

L. What are the different sources of comets - both short period (with elliptical orbits) and single visit (with hyperbolic and parabolic orbits) - and what does that mean about how long they can exist?

M. Six years ago you wrote [in The Creator and the Cosmos, 1995, NavPress] that the rate of expansion of the universe "cannot differ by more than one part in 10 [to the 55th power] from the actual rate", otherwise life could not exist. Yet the Hubble constant keeps getting revised by factors exceeding 10 percent. If we cannot measure the expansion better than 1 part in 10, how can you claim anything about 1 part in 10 to the 55th power?

N. Did Job ever see behemoth, and how big was its tail? If not, how could he understand what God said to him in Job 40?

O. What were the composition and transparency of the early earth atmosphere. [Ross claimed that the opaque gasses cleared on Day 4 allowing the sun, moon, and stars to become visible. However, the gasses that he named are all transparent.] Were the sun, moon, and stars MADE on Day 4, as the Bible claims, or did they simply APPEAR?

P. Jesus said that from the BEGINNING of creation God made people as male and female. Why do you place Adam and Eve billions of years AFTER the beginning of creation?

Q. What did animals eat at the time of Adam and before the Fall; did it include meat?

R. We can measure the rate at which helium-4, from radioactive decay, enters the atmosphere. We can both calculate and measure that helium-4 does not escape from earth's gravity except in trivial amounts. If the earth is billions of years old, where did all of the helium go so as to shrink atmospheric concentrations to what would accumulate in only a few million years? [The problem is made worse by the greater decay rates in the past.]