We will respond on this blog to questions and comments related to science and faith, especially those inspired by Dr. Ankerberg’s current and past programs on creation. Sometimes the question is shortened in the interest of brevity. Questions emailed to science@johnankerberg.org will be answered by return email and may appear on this blogsite. Questioners will be anonymous.
Comment: Tonight’s show with Hugh Ross. Please! There was and is no mention of “explosion” in Genesis. God “created” it all with divine control. The word create in Genesis is above man’s intelligence to define. Explosions create chaos. Period. May I suggest you read Genesis once again. Response: Personally, I would prefer several thousand pages detailing the creation events. But in His wisdom, God chose to give us two brief chapters. I would also prefer more detail about God’s concept of the term create. That word most certainly has nuances of meaning beyond our human ability to understand. In the context of Genesis creation events, if we assign chaos and destruction to “The Big Bang,” we are in error. Dr. Ross carefully described this event, and events in the eons following it, as one of fine-tuned precision beyond our wildest imagination. It has characteristics, therefore, of a wonderful creative event. God has graciously given us the ability to use science to enlarge our understanding of how God accomplished His creative work in this cosmos.
Question: Do you really believe Dr. Hugh Ross’s theory? What about the Bible that states that God created the heavens and earth in 6 days? I am so disappointed! You’re saying this was millions of years. We take the Bible literally. It didn’t happen with a BIG BANG! Response: When one studies the many hundreds of independent scientific evidences for a very ancient universe and earth, along with Hebrew scholarship which permits several “literal” meanings of “yom” (day), we may conclude that science and Hebrew scholarship both support an old universe, not a young one.
Question: (re History Channel’s doomsday, end of calendar, end of earth program) Does science show the earth will be in the middle of the Milky Way, a once every 25,000 year occurrence, on 12/21/2012? What will occur? Please have the astrophysicist address this issue. Response: Dr. Hugh Ross would not subscribe to any such doomsday scenario for 2012. Popular, sensational Merlin or Nostradamus type speculations about the end of the world are not valid truth.
Question: I had not heard the argument (from the ATRI January mailing list letter) that Noah’s ark could carry only a maximum of 30,000 species, but that today many millions of species exist. I asked a number of friends (how so many species survived the flood). One is a science teacher and he told me that if you eliminate fish, amphibians, and arthropods, the remaining species of “land animals” remaining today would easily fall within the capacity of the ark. So it would seem that there is not actually any difficulty here. I was wondering if you had a response for that? Thanks. Response: There is enormous difficulty. Considering arthropods only, the problem is insurmountable. There are 750,000 species. 350,000 of them are beetles. A few are aquatic, but even those wouldn’t fare too well in the salty ocean envisioned to cover the entire globe by those who believe the flood was “global,” covering even Mt. Everest. Just imagine THAT many arthropods on the ark! Dr. Ross believes in the flood, but not a GLOBAL flood. He believes in a UNIVERSAL flood – the UNIVERSE of that day, a relatively small area of the mid-east. Remember, all the earth’s people had not yet spread around the world and were confined only to that area. The same problem occurred later at the Tower of Babel. No doubt we had a widely scattered distribution of species around the entire world, just as we have today. I doubt that Noah journeyed off to Australia to collect kangaroos. A reasonable solution is that the flood was local, and that the ark animals were needed to repopulate the flood area quickly to help provide food for Noah’s family when the flood receded. A global flood covering all the mountains, even Mt. Everest, presents unimaginable difficulties. So does the time-warp speciation of 30,000 species becoming millions of species in just a few thousand years! That would necessitate macro-evolution on a scale inconceivable to the most ardent evolutionist. A UNIVERSAL (local) flood does not conflict in any way with scripture.
