Hugh Ross: Creationist, Incorrect

A long time ago, Hugh Ross was a scientist. Nowadays he is a professional creationist who manipulates real science to justify his belief in the Christian God.

Recently he visited the Rochester Institute of Technology, so not only was he on our physical turf, but our intellectual turf as well: he claims to have a scientifically testable creation theory.

For a review of his claims and the skeptical responses to them, this site is a good resource.

The main thrust of his argument amounted to what is called the Anthropic argument. The anthropic argument essentially states that because the universe is so "fine tuned" for life, that it had to have been created by an intelligence that desired life to exist.

The anthropic argument is in a way a confusion of causation. Douglas Adams wrote about the puddle which believed that the pavement had been designed for it because the pothole fit the puddle perfectly. It may be true that life as we know it would not exist if the universe was different, but we only have one sample for what type of life could exist. Even on Earth, where life did evolve, human life isn't the only type of life. There is a huge diversity of lifeforms that have managed to fit into our particular pothole.

Furthermore, when we examine the universe it isn't even particularly well suited to life. All the life we know exists in a thin layer surrounding a single planet. Humans, for example depend on a narrow temperature range, specific atmospheric gas mixture, pressure, chemical intake (food), lack of radiation, etc. Since we can only exist in a very small space in a universe that is unimaginably huge, it does not follow that that universe was designed for us to exist in.

The anthropic argument tends to involve probabilities, usually without scientific basis, or context. Occam's razor says that we shouldn't multiply hypotheses. The answer that has the fewest improbabilities is usually the correct one. The hypothesis that an omnipotent, omniscient god created the universe is a more complex explanation than one that posits a natural universe.

The second part of Ross's argument was that the Christian bible was proved to be true by physics. The whole argument smacked of the Post hoc fallacy. He claimed that the bible predicted the expanding universe theory. Had this been true, however scientists discovering the theory would not have been so surprised. To say that the bible was making actual predictions about the physical world, you would have to be able to write down the predictions beforehand, and then test them. Applying scientific knowledge to a text in a way that is better interpreted as being metaphorical, after the information is available does not lend any credibility to the text.

Hugh Ross is a charismatic speaker, and it is easy to see how people might be convinced by him. Part of his charisma comes from techniques of sophistry that he uses, what are at the very least intellectually dishonest.

Overall, those of us who attended were not convinced of Ross' argument.