The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God

One cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. But one can provide a strong argument for God's existence. Dr. Hugh Ross does just that in his book, The Creator and the Cosmos.He clearly explains the Big Bang and the fine tuning necessary to have life on Earth as we know it. He cites example after example of the complexities of the universe, and provides a compelling case that creation did not happen by chance, but rather was an intelligent design done by something outside of our known universe. He points to the Bible and says that this intelligent creator is none other than the God of the Bible. He provides many biblical references to support this.Dr. Ross also does a good job of going through the arguments that non-theists have, and logically refutes them.The Creator and the Cosmos is an excellent book for those who question their faith or wonder if there really is a God. It's a book that will make readers think.

Retired from nearly 50 years of engineering and science with NASA, DOT, primary contractors, etc., and roughly 65 years studying and teaching God's inerrant written word, I had developed, but shared with only a limited audience, a model which correlated God's general and special revelations of Himself. Many years ago I came across Dr. Ross' works and have been a devotee ever since. I have found maybe 99% agreement of my views with his, but he goes beyond me in detail and scope. Just last night I recommended this and another RTB book to a local pastor-columnist who wrote that, while his reasons to believe kept him in the faith, doubts still lurked in the background over such things as why God does not reveal Himself visibly and audibly today. My suggestion was that he is looking in the very narrow frequency of visible light without the aid of instrumentation necessary really understand the entire electromagnetic spectrum; that the "preponderance of evidence" attesting to God places the facts of His existence and character "beyond reasonable doubt".

I read a lot of positive reviews here on Amazon, but found Ross to be a weak thinker.I knew I was in trouble when, on the second page, Ross presented a false dichotomy: that we face a choice between materialism and a transcendental omnipotent creator. Then he compounded his reasoning errors by asserting that human value, AND morality, can only exist if there is an omnipotent creator. There are thousands of secular moral thinkers, and it is easier to ascribe value to our actions if they can have appreciable consequences in the universe -- which is impossible in a universe with an omnipotent being.He very correctly points out soon thereafter that any message from a divine source such as he postulates the Bible is would be error-free, self-consistent, and absolutely clear (not requiring any sophistry to interpret). He then uses nothing but sophistry in the remainder of the book to try to interpret the Bible as correct.He claims that the creation story in Genesis is completely correct in its astrophysics and geophysics and biologic sequence of events leading first to life then humans. He does not present the justification for this claim, which is simply false. Genesis 1:1 asserts simultaneous creation of earth and heavens, and light does not appear until Genesis 1:3. the Big Bang has a lot of light (photons) from the start, but neither matter (earth) nor space (heavens).Within 2 pages of his "no sophistry" assertion, he discusses the assertion of the Bible (in Genesis, Job, Psalms, and Proverbs) that life and stars have both existed since the earliest times of creation. Since neither were possible for considerable time after the BB, this is another obvious falsification. But instead he asserts it is a CONFIRMED assertion, and that it is really a claim that the LAWS which lead to life and stars existed from the earliest time. I laughed out loud at the extreme straw-clutching sophistry this "no sophistry" writer was engaged in.He also, in a personal aside, says he was an atheist, then spent 18 months trying to falsify the Bible and failed, in the end becoming convinced. Since I ran into an obvious falsification on page 1 (noted above), I have to conclude that Ross was motivated by his false dichotomies to WANT to believe..The primary evidences that Ross wrote this book to discuss were those of the Big Bang, and the probability of life. Ross is an Old Earth Creationist. He believes God created the universe in a Big Bang, then life 10 billion years later, then individually created each of the billions upon billions of species revealed in the fossil record, sequentially. I will start with his discussion of the Big Bang.The Big Bang theory has a few simple core principles:{ The universe had an origin in time{ At a very small point{ Which was very hot{ Space stretched, making the universe larger{ And cooler{ Eventually stars formed{ Then much later, the Sun, and Earth{ Stretching of space is continuingRoss claims the Bible asserts and describes the Big Bang. It does not contain the above in any passage anywhere in the Bible, so it does not satisfy his earlier ¡§absolute clarity¡¨ requirement for divine origination, but Ross makes the claim anyway. Basically, all he is able to find are statements that the universe had an origin in time, that God "stretched out the heavens", and some verb tense implications that God is still "stretching" the heavens. I will only grant the first of these points. All the stretching passages are best interpreted as using a "tent-over-ground" metaphoric cosmology for the sky and earth, with God stretching out the dome of the sky above the ground as a herdsman stretches out his tent over its frame. Ross also claims that the Bible asserts the cooling aspect of the BB, in a passage describing the universe in a state of "frustration and futility" or "bondage to corruption," by claiming this asserts the law of entropy, and entropy requires cooling as the universe expands. The mental gymnastics this "no sophistry" writer goes through here are exhausting to watch.Ross then presents several chapters on the details of the Big Bang, and its confirmatory evidence. These are excellent chapters, clearly written, and explaining the evidence for the Big Bang in terms that non-scientists can understand. The are marred slightly by the paranoia that creeps in, where he repeatedly asserts that all competing hypotheses have been motivated by atheists trying to refute the Bible. This is the best lay-level discussion I have ever seen of the justification behind the Big Bang model, and it may be worthwhile for interested parties to get the book just for this discussion.There are several interesting chapters which follow. He presents the Fine Tuning argument, claiming the universe was fine-tuned for life. Since half of the Fine Tuning points have to do with the time necessary for evolution to proceed, and he thinks evolution is impossible, his Fine Tuning argument is self-contradictory. What he asserts is the universe is uniquely tuned to support life, but life STILL required divine intervention to exist. So he is actually asserting universe is NOT Fine Tuned for life, but only half-tuned. He also mentions that the mass of neutrinos and other non-interacting particles is 5x that of ordinary matter in the universe, but does not discuss how that shows fine tuning to support life (hint, it shows a universe far off of perfect tuning).Then there follows an interesting discussion of the probability of a life-supporting planet existing. He has many peculiar assumptions in the discussion, such as that the size and rotation rate must be just like Earth¡¦s, that the star must be basically just like the Sun, and that the galactic location must be stable long enough for life to gradually appear (using evolutionary timescale, even though contradictorily he also assert special creation, so no long time-scale is necessary). He concludes that the odds of a life-supporting planet existing anywhere in the universe are vanishingly small, so God must have intervened to form the Milky Way galaxy, and then later in the location of the Sun, AND in the formation of the Earth. I found this discussion absolutely unconvincing. He provided almost no justification for his nearly 100 assumptions about planetary conditions for life. It also further undercuts his claim above that the universe is Fine Tuned for life, since he is here asserting that there is no way this fine-tuned universe could support life naturally ¡V making it not even a half-tuned universe.He finally discusses the evidence he thinks exists against evolution. He is at least a good enough scientist to accept the old age of the Earth, and the billions of successive species in the fossil record, so he rejects most of the bogus arguments of Creationists. What he does accept are the rationalizations of the Intelligent Design movement. He assumes that Information is a measurable quantity, and the 2nd law of Thermodynamics applies to it like it does to Entropy. Neither of these assumptions are accepted scientific principles. They are at least coherent hypotheses, and represent some of the best of what the ID movement has produced. But asserting that these unsubstantiated hypotheses are true, and using them to argue against evolution, is very unscientific. This is to use a theoretical argument to argue against evidence, which inverts the process of scientific reasoning. He also shows calculations of the low probability of new macro-molecules forming. Since we see macromolecules evolving all the time (yearly, in the case of new influenza strains), his calculations are falsified by test. His asserted model of special creation with the goal of humanity at its peak is also patently absurd given the fossil record ¡V why would a Creator God diddle around with only successive strains of single-celled life for 2 billion years, then suddenly develop an inordinate fondness for Tribolites at the Cambrian Explosion, keep replacing species with only subtly different ones for 2 more billion years, before finally getting around to making humanity, if humanity was the purpose from the start? Since he asserts design, and by implication the intent of a designer, is obvious in the Universe, then the answer to these questions SHOULD be obvious by his own reasoning. And why would all these species show the adaptive local optima structures, and have a matching evolutionary trace in their DNA, if they were all independently specially created by miracles? Basically, all of these details of our history are DIFFERENT from what special creation would predict, but MATCH what evolution would predict. His critical faculties were never applied to the hypothesis he is presenting.Ross provided me with some intellectual exercise, in dismantling his arguments, but overall I was extremely disappointed.

When you consider the wonders of Heaven, do you ever think of its multi-dimensional nature? From an imaginative science perspective, Hugh reduces biblical paradoxes ["I live, but not I," how God can hear a billion prayers simultaneously, and how billions of earth years can be a moment in eternity, etc.] to wonder at the "nothing is impossible with God" who is unlimited by the things we experience.At an early age I dabbled in drugs. This is much better.

This book identifies many links between Science and the Bible, it demonstrates how there is not only definite agreement, but that the Bible was the first to record these facts. Embedded in scripture are many jewels, available for those who dare to exercise Faith. And Dr Ross brings out that these jewels are not just existent in isolated verses, but in many different verses, and from different authors as well. For example, the idea of the heavens being "stretched out," as an explanation for our expanding Universe, is written by five authors in eleven different verses. Also included is evidence for the Fine Tuning of the Universe showing that God's imprint is everywhere.

I enjoyed learning about the scientific details and their relationship to what I already knew from the Bible and my own experience. The science is hard, even though I had earlier read up on String Theory and have had some mathematical and less astronomy and physics education. Tying the multiple dimensions to God Who created/creates helped fill the gap. Providing such a reason for why now so much information exists made sense, though I didn’t need it.

All of the Hugh's books are amazing scholastic endeavor...

Faccio questa recensione perchè molti può darsi stiano ancora cercando di capire se Dio è o menoil Creatore di questo mondo e se la vita sia un caso oppure qualcosa di accuratamente studiato e creato.Beh, questo libro, in modo molto semplice, pieno di esempi ci porta alla dimostrazione naturale ma scientificache Dio è per forza di cose il Creatore di tutto ciò che vediamo e che la vita non si è sviluppata per casoperchè scientificamente non sarebbe stato possibile. Non un Dio qualunque ma il Dio della Scrittura, la Bibbia.Unica nota, sarebbe stato meraviglioso se fosse stato in Italiano, ma con la traduzione di Kindle siamo lo stesso OK!

Para aquellos que buscan literatura que ayude a comprender mejor el vínculo entre ciencia y fe, este libro de Ross es fundamental. Este libro disipa la tentación de los legalistas a divorciar la ciencia de la fe cristiana, y acerca a la fe a los de mente rigorista que ven el cristianismo como un conjunto de historias morales y fantásticas que no hay que tomarse muy en serio. Por si fuera poco, pone a la Biblia en el lugar que le corresponde al ser la verdad revelada a la humanidad que, como tal, está en perfecta armonía con los hallazgos científicos.