Hugh Ross, who has a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Toronto, is the founder of Reasons to Believe, a ministry which advocates Progressive Creationism, and heavily uses modern scientific research and fine-tuning data to evangelize. This work, Creator and the Cosmos - How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God, is his most well-known book, having been originally published in 1993. This review will be for the fourth edition, which was published in 2018, and contains "90 pages of new content" (Preface) as compared to the third edition from 2001.
My desire to read this book came from watching a lot of Hugh Ross's lectures and debates, in which I found him to be reasonable and thoughtful. Further, it seems that many popular apologetics books that I have read cite him, or his ministry, and so it seemed sensible to read some of his original work directly.
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Chapter 1 - The Awe-Inspiring Night Sky, begins by observing that "our concept of the universe shapes our worldview, our philosophy of life, and thus our daily decisions and actions". Ross then calls for more cooperation between theologians, scientists, and philosophers, in order to avoid what he terms "Cosmological Chauvinism", in which each of these three see the other groups as incompetent intruders in the cosmological domain.
Chapter 2 - My Skeptical Inquiry, is a biographical chapter about Ross. He recounts being fascinated with astronomy from a very young age, and studying it to the extent that he was giving public lectures on the topic by the age of sixteen. Ross then chronicles his investigation as a young man into the world's religions, which culminated in an 18-month study of the Bible. In this study, he found the Bible to withstand scrutiny - general and scientific - and so he became a Christian.
Chapter 3 - Big Bang - The Bible Taught It First!, details a brief history of the Big Bang theory, before arguing that the expansion of the universe is taught in Scripture:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 3
The characteristic of the universe stated more frequently than any other in the Bible is its being "stretched out". Five different Bible authors pen such a statement in eleven different verses: Job 9:8, Psalm 104:2, Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 51:13, Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15, and Zechariah 12:1. Job 37:18 appears to be a twelfth verse to make this statement. However, the word used there for "heavens" or "skies" is shehaqim, which refers to the clouds of fine particles (of water or dust) located in Earth's atmosphere, not the shamayim, the heavens of the astronomical universe. Three of the eleven verses - Job 9:8, Isaiah 44:24, 45:12 - make the point that God alone was responsible for the cosmic stretching.
What is particularly interesting about the eleven verses is that different Hebrew verb forms are used to describe the cosmic stretching. Seven verses - Job 9:8, Psalm 104:2, and Zechariah 12:1 - use that Qal active participle form of the verb natah. This form of natah literally means "the stretcher out of them" (the heavens) and implies continual or ongoing stretching. Four verses - Isaiah 45:12, 48:13, and Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15 - use the Qal perfect form. This form of natah literally means that the stretching of the heavens was completed or finished some time ago.
Ross also argues that the Second Law of the Thermodynamics can be found implicitly in Scripture:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 3
In Romans 8:20 we are told that the entire creation has been subjected to "frustration" or "futility". The next verse declares that all of creation was and currently exists in a state of "slavery to decay" or "bondage to corruption". Ecclesiastes 1 and Revelation 21 also support the conclusion that the whole universe suffers from progressive decay. Genesis 2 and 3 teach that work and pain are part fo the creation, both before and after Adam's rebellion in Eden. Such ongoing slavery to decay describes well the second law of thermodynamics - the law of physics that states that, as time proceeds, the universe becomes progressively more disordered, decayed, and run down.
In light of this, Ross states that the essential elements of Big Bang cosmology are taught in Scripture:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 3
Many big bang theories exist. What they all share, however, are three fundamental characteristics: (1) a transcendent cosmic beginning that occurred a finite time ago; (2) a continuous, universal cosmic expansion; and (3) a cosmic cooling from an extremely hot initial state.
All three of the fundamental characteristics of the big bang were explicitly taught in the Bible two to three thousand years before scientists discovered them through their astronomical measurements. Moreover, the Bible alone among all the scriptures of the world's religions expounds these three big bang fundamentals. Scientific proofs for a big bang universe, thus, can do much to establish the existence of the God of the Bible and the accuracy of the words of the Bible.
Ross then goes on to note that the "Big Bang" is a problematic term, as it conveys imagery of a dynamite explosion, when in reality it "represents an immensely powerful yet carefully planned and controlled release of matter, energy, space, and time within the strict confines of carefully fine-tuned physical constants and laws that govern their behavior and interactions". Ross then discusses that there are technically dozens of variations on the Big Bang model, which get refined as more observational data is gathered.
Chapter 4 - The Discovery of the Twentieth Century, 1992 Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, three major discoveries - the cosmic background radiation (2.72 Kelvin) - heat left over from the Big Bang, and the fact that there are irregularities in the density of the radiation - certain parts are hotter. Third, the energy was from a single bang, not multiple smaller bangs.
The CMB has also been confirmed by a series of measurements going further and further back in the universe's history, and finding the corresponding increase in temperature of the CMB as predicted by the Big Bang model at that time.
Chapter 5 - Twenty-First Century Discoveries, Part I, begins with the discovery of the Cosmological Constant in 1998 AD. This constant represents the behavior of dark energy, which is "the self-stretching property of the space-time fabric, or surface, of the universe". It was later proven that this rate of expansion is accelerating. Ross then details the well-known and often-puzzled-over fact that this value is extraordinarily fine-tuned:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 5
A fine-tuning measure of one part in 10122 ranks as the most spectacular fine-tuning measurement so far achieved by scientists. This fine-tuning is 1043 more exquisite than someone blindfolded, with just one try, randomly picking out a single marked proton from all the protons existing within the entire extent of the observable universe! Or, if one were to compare the fine-tuning design of dark energy to make advanced life possible with the best example of fine-tuning design achieved by humans, the design of dark energy would rank about 1099 superior, that is, superior by a factor of one thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times.
Chapter 6 - Twenty-First Century Discoveries, Part II, details some ways in which the Big Bang model has been confirmed by discoveries in the 21st century. Some of these were demonstrations of the model predicting a certain value, and then that value being confirmed by observation - such as the abundance of deuterium and helium in the universe, and the cosmic expansion velocity. Another method involves observing that the most distant galaxies are more tightly-clustered than galaxies which are closer. This matters, Ross explains, because when we look at distant galaxies, we are viewing very old light which has been in transit for a long time, and therefore, we are viewing those galaxies as they were billions of years ago. Other methods included observing cosmic cooling, cosmic inflation, primordial magnetic fields, star populations, and the spectral characteristics of old stars.
Chapter 7 - Einstein's Challenge, covers Albert Einstein's (1879-1955 AD) breakthroughs in the field of physics. Ross covers Einstein publishing his theories of special relativity (1905 AD) and general relativity (1916 AD), proving that the universe is not static, that there was no absolute reference system for measuring motions in space, and that the velocity of light with respect to all observers never varies - the velocities of the observers are irrelevant.
Chapter 8 - Closing Loopholes: Round One, is the first of two chapters covering competing models to the Big Bang:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 8
A challenge for Big Bang opponents came when Edwin Hubble's research not only confirmed that the universe is expanding but also measured the rate of its expansion. With that measurement (adjusted a little for the slowing down caused by gravity) and a rough estimate of the distance to the farthest-out galaxies, it was no complicated matter to produce a ballpark figure for when the universe began - the Hubble time. It was somewhere in the range of a few billion to several billion years.
Whatever illusions certain paleontologists and origin-of-life theorists may have embraced, many astronomers recognized that billions of years was hopelessly too brief for atoms to assemble into living things free of any input from a divine Designer (see ch. 16). Therefore, many of them invested enormous energy and creativity in attempts to escape the limits imposed by the Hubble time.
This chapter then go on to discuss the Steady State model, proposed most famously by English astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001 AD) in 1948 AD. Ross details how this model, and its modified successors, has been consistently proven wrong by observational science, in favor of the Big Bang model.
Chapter 9 - Closing Loopholes: Round Two, covers a second competing model to the Big Bang - the Bouncing Universe, in which gravity overcomes the force of dark energy to draw the universe back toward a single point, triggering an unknown mechanism which will make the universe expand again, repeating this cycle infinitely. Ross covers many problems that scientific investigation has uncovered with this model, including:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 9
The latest measurements establish a cosmic mass density that is roughly 29% (0.2934 +/- 0.0107) of what is needed to reverse cosmic expansion. But missing mass is not the only difficulty. Even if the universe did contain enough mass to reverse its expansion, and even if a bounce mechanism were discovered or devised theoretically, the number of bounces or oscillations would be limited because of entropy (energy degradation).
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of the universe increases with time. This entropy increase means a decrease in the energy available to perform mechanical work, such as bouncing. So less and less mechanical energy would be available with each bounce to make the bounce happen.
Ross also notes that these cyclical models extend beyond the realm of observational science into the field of metaphysics:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 9
Many theoretical attempts to escape a singular cosmic beginning by invoking a bounce from a previous period of cosmic contraction have shown up in twenty-first century scientific literature. They are all variations on a theme in that they all propose the introduction of some unknown, undiscovered physics to alter the physics we do know, can measure, and understand.
Chapter 10 - Science Discovers the Creation of Time, covers the publication of the first of the space-time theorems by physicists, which proved that time had a beginning:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 10
Even before the death of the oscillating universe model, the failure of those cosmological models that rejected the finite age of the universe was uncovered. In a series of papers published from 1966 to 1970, three astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose, extended the solution of the equations of general relativity to include space and time. The result was called the space-time theorem of general relativity. Four assumptions undergirded the theorem:
The conclusion of the space-time theorem guarantees a past singular boundary for the universe. This singular boundary means that not only are matter and energy traceable back a beginning but space and time are as well. In Hawking's works, "time itself must have a beginning".
- Time always progresses forward, never backward.
- Gravity always is attractive.
- The universe contains enough mass to generate at least one black hole.
- General relativity reliably describes the dynamics of the universe (the movements of massive bodies in the universe).
Chapter 11 - A God Outside of Time, but Knowable, looks at some pertinent passages from the Bible, and emphasizes how they demonstrate God to transcend physics and space-time. After reading the preceding chapters, viewing these verses from this point of view is an interesting experience.
Chapter 12 - A Brief Look at A Brief History of Time, reviews the book A Brief History of Time, published in 1988 AD by Stephen Hawking (1942-2018 AD). Ross details how subsequent research has demonstrated that the Hartle-Hawking model of the universe, proposed in the book, does not work. He then addresses Hawking's book The Grand Design (2010 AD), and its claims that earth, and the formation of life on earth, may not actually be remarkable.
Chapter 13 - A Modern-Day Goliath, analyzes four Atheistic explanations for the universe which attempt to utilize quantum mechanics, and explains why they are insufficient. These are:
Chapter 14 - The Divine Watchmaker, begins with the watchmaker analogy, originally given by William Paley (1743-1805 AD), which states that if one were to happen upon a watch in nature, they would have to conclude that it had a maker, rather than conclude that it could have come about by naturalistic processes, even if those processes were allowed to run forever. Yet, all organisms are fantastically more complex than a watch. Therefore, "if a watch's complexity and capability demand an intelligent and creative maker, surely, Paley reasoned, the living organisms on our planet demand a Maker of far greater intelligence and creative ability".
Ross then addresses three critiques of the argument from evident design, by David Hume (1711-1776 AD), Charles Darwin (1809-1882 AD), and Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002 AD).
Chapter 15 - A "Just Right" Universe, covers a swath of evidence for the fact that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for life. Some of the many examples given are as follows:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
How delicate is the balance for the strong nuclear force? If the strong nuclear force were just 4% stronger, the diproton (an atom with two protons and no neutrons) would form. Diprotons would cause stars to so rapidly exhaust their nuclear fuel as to make any kind of physical life impossible. On the other hand, if the strong nuclear force were just 10% weaker, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen would be unstable and again physical life would be impossible.
Does this just apply to life as we know it? No, this holds true for any conceivable kind of life chemistry throughout the cosmos. This delicate condition must be met universally.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fred Hoyle discovered that an incredible fine-tuning of the nuclear ground state energies for helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen was necessary for any kind of life to exist. The ground stats energies for these elements cannot be higher or lower with respect to each other by more than 4% without yield a universe containing insufficient oxygen or carbon for life. Hoyle, who has written extensively against theism and Christianity in particular, nevertheless concluded on the basis of this quadruple fine-tuning that "a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology".
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
The (German-Hungarian) astrophysical team mathematically constructed models of red giant stars that adopted slightly different values of the strong nuclear force and electromagnetic force constants. They discovered that tiny adjustments in the values of either of these constants imply that red giant stars would produce too little carbon, too little oxygen, or too little of both oxygen and carbon. Specifically, they determined that if the value of the coupling constant for electromagnetism were 4% smaller or 4% larger than what we observe, then life would be impossible. In the case of the coupling constant for the strong nuclear force, if it were 0.5% smaller or larger, then life would be impossible.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
In the first moments after creation, the universe contained about 10 billion and 1 nucleons for every 10 billion antinucleons. The 10 billion antinucleons annihilated the 10 billion nucleons, generating an enormous amount of energy. All the galaxies and stars that make up the universe today were formed from the leftover nucleons. If the initial excess of nucleons over antinucleons were any less, there would not be enough matter for galaxies, stars, and heavy elements to form. If the excess were any greater, galaxies would form, but they would so efficiently condense and trap radiation that none of them would fragment to form stars and planets.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
The neutron is 0.138% more massive than a proton. Because of this extra mass, neutrons require slightly more energy to make than protons. So as the universe cooled from the hot big bang creation event, it produced more protons than neutrons - in fact, about seven times as many.
If the neutron were just another 0.1% more massive, so few neutrons would remain from the cooling off of the big bang that there would not be enough of them to make the nuclei of all the life-essential heavy elements. The extra mass of the neutron relative to the proton also determines the rate at which neutrons decay into protons and protons build into neutrons (one neutron decays into one proton + one electron + one neutrino). If the neutron were 0.1% less massive, so many protons would be built up to make neutrons that all the stars in the universe would have rapidly collapsed into either neutron stars or black holes. Thus for life to be possible in the universe, the neutron mass must be fine-tuned to better than 0.1%.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
Unless the number of electrons is equivalent to the number of protons to an accuracy of one part in 1037 or better, electromagnetic forces in the universe would never have overcome gravitational forces so that galaxies, stars, and planets never would have formed.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
The dark energy density must be even more spectacularly fine-tuned. The original source or sources of dark energy must be at least 122 orders of magnitude larger than the amount astronomers now detect. This implies that somehow the source(s) must cancel one another so as to leave just one part in 10122.
As Lawrence Krauss and many other astrophysicists noted, this one part in 10122 is by far the most extreme fine-tuning yet discovered in physics.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
For relativity to operate so that certain proteins containing copper and vanadium will adequately support life means that the velocity of light must be fine-tuned. This is not the only reason why the velocity of light must be held constant and fixed at the value of 299,792.458 kilometers per second. Because of Einstein's equation, E = mc2, even small changes in c (the velocity of light) lead to huge changes in E (the energy) or m (the mass). Thus, a slight change in light's velocity implies that starlight will either be too strong, or too feeble for life, or that stars will produce the wrong elements for life.
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 15
A fourth measured parameter, another very sensitive one, is the ratio of the electromagnetic force constant to the gravitational force constant. If the electromagnetic force relative to gravity were increased by just one part in 1040, the full range of small star sizes and types needed to make life possible would not form. And, it it were decreased by just one part in 1040, the full range of large star sizes and types needed to make life possible would not form. For life to be possible in the universe, the full range of both large and small star sizes and types must exist. Large stars must exist because only their thermonuclear furnaces produce most of the life-essential elements. Small stars like the Sun must exist because only small stars burn long enough and stably enough to sustain a planet with life.
Ross then addresses five nontheistic responses to the evident fine-tuning of the universe:
Chapter 16 - Responding to Nonempirical, Nontheistic Creation Models, addresses various methods Atheists propose to avoid the conclusion that God made the universe.
Chapter 17 - Earth: The Place for Life, details how the earth is situated in the right galaxy cluster, galaxy, location within the galaxy, and solar system for carbon-based life to arise, which given the properties of the elements, is the only viable base for complex life:
The Creator and the Cosmos - Chapter 17
Everything written so far in this chapter assumes that physical life must be carbon-based. As physicist Robert Dicke observed 50 years go, if you want physicists (or any other life-forms), you must have carbon.
Arsenic, boron, and silicon are the only other elements on which complex molecules can be based, but arsenic and boron are relatively rare and, where concentrated, poisonous to life, and silicon can hold together no more than about a hundred amino acids. Only carbon yields the chemical bonding stability and bonding complexity that life requires. Given the constraints of physics and chemistry, we now know that physical life must be carbon-based.
Ross also references the Reasons to Believe Design Compendium, which is an extensive compilation of fine-tuning data.
Chapter 18 - Extradimensional and Transdimensional Powers, is a brief discussion of the Trinity, and the nearness of God, and how both concepts are better understood by recognizing that God is not bound to our four-dimensional experience.
Chapter 19 - The Point, is a short chapter with a brief evangelistic message, and then Ross argues that God has provided the kinds of scientific evidences discussed in this book in order to essentially give a seeker of truth enough to make the right decision, in the face of the extreme attacks of secularism on God, in our culture.
This book makes a strong scientific case for special creation, and the God of the Bible specifically. It covers a large breadth of scientific topics and theories, from the point of view of a Christian expert in the field.