Sunday, April 24, 2011

Hugh Ross/RTB - Overview (section 7 of 7): Some Final Comments

The reader should notice that, while RTB presents an old earth viewpoint, they present themselves as standing in opposition to a purely naturalistic (atheistic) evolutionary position. 42   The RTB creation model is one characterized by God’s supernatural, intentionally designed and finely tuned 43 intervention. “Because chance governs biological evolution at its most fundamental level, repeated evolutionary events much result in dramatically different outcomes. . . . The nature of the evolutionary process renders outcomes nonreproducible. . . . biological evolution must take place along a unique pathway each time, if and when it occurs. In other words, evolution cannot repeat.” 44

Finally, RTB makes a significant observation, one which I agree with and one which creationists need to be reminded of on occasion. “Although materialism is the reigning worldview in science, Christians must realize that the scientific community’s resistance to creation stems largely from the view that the biblical perspective represents a religion, not science.” 45   This does not mean that God’s creation is immeasurable or unquantifiable in a scientific way. What it does mean is that Christians interpret the world and see God’s hand in the marvels of His creation from the presupposition of faith – something that is unquantifiable from a scientific point of view.

In future papers, we will take a closer look at some of the biblical assertions of RTB that we have mentioned here.



42 “A 14-billion-year-old universe is vastly too young for any conceivable natural-process scenario to yield, on its own, even the simplest living organism. Yet biologists and chemists have spent years building naturalistic models based on these inadequate boundary conditions.” Ross, A Matter of Days, 121.

43 “No other characteristic of the universe is so well designed as this cosmic expansion.” Ross, A Matter of Days, 139; “This observed stability indicates that the universe is expanding at a highly fine-tuned rate.” Ross, A Matter of Days, 146; RTB spends a fair amount of time in their literature speaking about the anthropic principle, namely, that the physical aspects of our universe, including the seeming arbitrary values of physical constants (e.g. gravitational constant, strong nuclear force, etc), have all been finely tuned/determined. If any one of those constants would have been slightly different than its current value, life would not be possible.

44 Rana with Ross, Who was Adam? 23. Rana here is referring to Stephen Jay Gould’s conclusion that, from an atheistic evolutionary perspective, humanity’s arrival in evolutionary history is a “wildly improbable evolutionary event.”

45 Rana with Ross, Who was Adam? 12.