Ross–Hovind Debate, John Ankerberg Show, October 2000

Analysis by Jonathan Sarfati

21 December 2000

On the John Ankerberg Show, the leading progressive creationist Dr Hugh Ross debated a young-Earth, six-literal-day creationist, Dr Kent Hovind. This was aired early October.

Before reading this article, readers might be interested in hearing this webcast by Ken Ham and me (9 Nov. 2000), about this debate and the problems with Progressive Creationism in general. Ross responded with radio broadcasts of his own (11, 18, 25 Nov.) My article Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet! (21 Nov. 2000) refuted several major errors Ross made in this debate and broadcast in astronomy and Hebrew, so this should also be read before this article. Since this has already generated some responses, it would also be helpful to read my counter-response Answering some Hugh Ross supporters.

Ross doesn’t seem to like being called a ‘progressive creationist’ although that is the commonly accepted term. Here we agree with Ross—there is nothing progressive about this! But we will continue using it as a shorthand for belief in six long days of creation, billions of years, successive acts of creation during those eons, a local flood, pre-Adamic non-human human-like creatures.

Before I present the key points of the debate with my comments, it would be worth seeing the spin- doctoring about this debate by Hugh Ross.

Ross’s own analysis

From the Reasons to Believe newsletter, October 9, 2000

The cameras weren’t rolling that day, but they did roll on the set of The John Ankerberg Show in North Carolina. With great reluctance I agreed to a ‘friendly’ televised debate with Kent Hovind, also known as ‘Dr Dino’. For several hours Hovind berated me as an incompetent, deceitful scholar, a cult leader, and a heretic. I did my best to ignore the insults and stick to presenting the Biblical case for a big bang creation event and for a long-day creation model. The packed studio audience, mostly Hovind supporters (as was Ankerberg, initially), began to lean in my direction. By the end of the evening, a profound shift had occurred.

In fact, Ross is being totally disingenuous—Ankerberg had been a Ross supporter for years before—as Ross couldn’t possibly NOT know! See Dr David Menton’s letter to Ankerberg (1992) outlining the disrespectful way Ankerberg treated high-profile young-earth creationist Ph.D. scientists who had given up much time to record programs for him, and instead substitute Ross’s errors.

And while Hovind was probably an unfortunate choice as the representative of YEC (I suspect that this was exactly Ankerberg’s intention), he was by no means as abusive as Ross claims.

In Ross’s radio broadcast (11 Nov.), the following dialog occurred:

Announcer (Krista Bontrager): And I want to add that John Ankerberg does an outstanding job of moderating this discussion …

HR: That’s right.

Announcer:… clarifying Hugh’s points in a very fair and balanced manner.

‘Clarifying’ is hardly the word—Ankerberg repeatedly went out of his way to make points for Ross gratuitously. And I thought a ‘fair and balanced’ moderator would have equally tried to clarify Hovind’s points, but even Ross can’t bring himself to make such a claim, so Ross is inadvertently revealing Ankerberg’s obvious partiality.

The Debate

Note: I haven’t presented the whole debate, first because copyright provisions permit only ‘fair use’ for the purposes of criticism, and second because parts of it are superfluous or repeated. I have used ellipsis (…) to indicate an omission.

It is also a very long file, and debates by their nature don’t always lend themselves to systematic order of topics, so I’ve provided internal hyperlinks to headings and key topics discussed in this article in the table of contents (right):

Today on the John Ankerberg show, we invite you to listen to a debate on science and the Bible. Our topic—are the universe and the Earth billions of years old or just thousands of years old? Does the information in Genesis chapter one and two agree with contemporary scientific evidence? My guests are astronomer Dr Hugh Ross, and educator Dr Kent Hovind. We invite you to join us for this special debate, on the John Ankerberg show.

Big Bang

Moderator (Ankerberg): We’re talking tonight with two special guests about the topic, is the universe and the Earth, are they billions of years old, or just thousand of years old? And are Genesis one and two compatible with contemporary scientific evidence today? My guests are Dr Hugh Ross, who received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto, his post-doctoral research on quasars at Cal Tech; also Dr Kent Hovind, who received his Ph.D. in education, writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject of creation and evolution. Guys, we’re glad that you’re here tonight, and we’re gonna start right off with an important question to Dr Ross, I’d like to start with you. The Bible says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. Now you believe the scientific evidence for the Big Bang proves that this statement is true, but you also believe that the Big Bang theory shows that the age of universe and the Earth is billions of years old, and the scientific evidence astronomers have discovered about the Big Bang, it perfectly fits the Biblical creation account in Genesis one and two. Why? Talk to us.

Ross: Sure. Well, I’d like to give credit where it’s due. You know, a lot of people think Albert Einstein and George Gamow were the ones that discovered the Big Bang, but in truth they were upstaged by two thousand years by Moses and David and Zechariah, Jeremiah, Isaiah.

These were a lot more than 2000 years ago—David more like 3000, and Moses 3500.

Ross: ’Cause what you see is eight times the Bible states that the universe was transcendently created, a transcendent beginning of matter, energy, space, and time, which is identical to the Big Bang concept of a singular beginning. And likewise in eleven different places in the Bible it tells us that the universe is continually experiencing ongoing expansion, you know, the stretching out of the heavens. It’s in the qal-active participle form, this continual stretching out.

Ross is correct to claim that the verb ‘stretch’ is a participle, but his claims show that he doesn’t understand Hebrew grammar. A more detailed explanation can be found in this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!’

Ross: And the third point is that you have in Romans chapter eight that the entire creation is subject to the law of decay, and that implies that the universe was much hotter in the past than it is now, otherwise you’re not gonna get this progress towards decay.

This is pure eisegesis. Proper exegesis involves working out what the original author intended to teach his intended initial readers. Would the Roman readers have gained the impression that the universe was much hotter in the past? And the science is wrong too—the reason the universe is decaying is that it was once far more organised than it is now, but because of the Curse, God has withdrawn some of His upholding power, and things are becoming less organised. Also, a uniform hot temperature means nothing, but temperature differences mean there is an ability to decay into a state of more uniform temperature (the ‘heat death’).

Ross: And those are the three fundamental principles of the Big Bang theory, and so the question is not whether or not it’s a Big Bang, but really the thing that divides us is how long has the universe been expanding. And I can suggest seven easy tests—there are a dozen more that are more complicated—but I think the two that are the most compelling is that stars and planets are impossible unless the universe has been expanding for billions of years. If it’s only thousands all you get is hydrogen gas, if it’s trillions, all you get are black holes. Moreover, you can only get stable orbits of planets about stars and stars about the centers of galaxies if the universe has been expanding continually for billions of years.

What nonsense. One must wonder what sort of God Ross worships if He was unable to make planets in stable orbits just by the power of His word. As usual, Ross presupposes that stars and planets formed in the big bang billions of years ago, then uses this to ‘prove’ billions of years.

Moderator: Before Kent answers here, the fact is, where is the scientific community? Do they, are they admitting that the universe had a start?

Ross: Yes.

Moderator: Give me an example.

Ross: Well, you’ve got Stephen Hawking for example, who produced the space-time theorem of general relativity. And that theorem is based on only two conditions—if the universe contains mass, and a bathroom scale is usually enough to convince most skeptics; and number two, if the dynamics of the universe is governed by the equations of general relativity, then there must exist a cause that brings the universe into existence independent of matter, energy, and ten space-time dimensions.

As Ph.D. astronomy professor Dr Danny Faulkner points out, the big bang is an essentially atheistic theory—see The dubious apologetics of Hugh Ross.

…

Hovind: There’s no difference between what you’re saying and what Carl Sagan says. That’s what I see. I see what you say as being totally foreign to God’s Word, and I get real nervous when somebody teaches something—

Ross: Hold it—

Hovind: When somebody teaches something where we have to have a guru to explain it. Now you have a cult.

It was comments like that that prompted Ross’s complaint that Hovind was continually calling him a cult leader. As can be seen, it didn’t happen that often, although Hovind should have said that it is an almost universal cultic practice effectively to deny the key Reformation and Biblical doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, so requiring a cult leader to tell the followers what it means. Reasons to Believe doesn’t have other cultic characteristics like a definite organisational structure for its followers, adding works to salvation (e.g. baptism, speaking in tongues), denial of the Trinity and Christ as fully God and fully man (although William Lane Craig, a self-confessed Ross supporter, says: ‘I find his [Ross’s] attempt to construe God as existing in hyperdimensions of time and space and to interpret Christian doctrines in that light to be both philosophically and theologically unacceptable’).¹

…

Return to heading/topic index

Ross: Well, let me underline the principal point, though—the very existence of stars and planets means it’s been expanding for billions of years. To support thousand of years, you’ve got to get rid of all the stars, planets, galaxies, and moons. And as an astronomer I can tell you there really are stars out there, there really are planets and moons. It’s not a mirage. We live on a planet. There’s a star that supplies us with heat. That’s all you need, it’s very simple, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. to figure this out. If the universe expands too fast, none of the protons and neutrons will ever—

Once again Ross is blind to the blatantly tautological reasoning here.

Moderator: How do we know how far away they are and how long it’s been expanding?

Ross: Well, because of the new paper published just in the June 1^st issue of Astrophysical Journal, I’ve got the paper here with me,

Another Ross tactic—argument from authority. But there is no need to be intimidated by him. Not only is science limited when dealing with the past, so can never be a threat to the Bible, but also Ross doesn’t understand the science involved (or at least was extremely sloppy and misleading in his explanation), as was shown in this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!’

…

Hovind: And thirdly, the God that I worship is able to make a full-grown man in a full-grown garden and full-grown universe. He doesn’t need seventeen billion years to get it put together so we can live here. He can make it right in six days. And He’s capable of writing a book that the average person can understand.

Ross: He’s capable of doing all of that, but He’s also capable of doing it in two nano-seconds—

Hovind: Sure.

Ross: The question would be is, what did He do?

The answer to the question is simple: what He said He did in His written Word!

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Days of creation

Moderator: [re-introduces debate and debaters, and reads from Genesis 1:1–5] Now it seems to me you got a couple things here—God created the universe, God created the Earth, it was formless and empty, God creates light—what kind of light, was He talking about the sun or something else? God separates light from darkness. Does scientific evidence agree with this order? What else do you see that’s going on? Kent, you want to start us off?

Hovind: Well, sure, I think anybody with average intelligence can read that and say, well on the first day God created the material, He created the heaven and the Earth, and then He made light. And He chose six days to do this and then a day of rest to establish a seven-day week for us. It’s just six normal days, just like we have today, there’s no difference at all. And Exodus 20:11, the only thing God ever wrote with His own finger, He wrote on a rock for Moses, the Ten Commandments, everything else He had somebody write for Him, He wrote on a rock with His own finger and He doesn’t stutter—He said I made everything in six days. To me that means He made everything in six days.

Moderator: Okay. Hugh, what happened there? What’s happening in day one?

Ross: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, that’s matter, energy, space, and time as you can easily establish by going to seven other Bible passages. Which means there’s light in the beginning, but it’s dark on the surface of the waters of planet Earth, because the light of the heavens could not get through the Earth’s atmosphere to the surface of the Earth. As it says in the first creation day, let there be light. He uses the verb hayah, distinct from the verb bara in Genesis 1:1.

Of course He does: hayah is the verb to be, and bara means ‘to create’. God said ‘let there be light’, and there was light, just by the power of His word. Did Ross expect God to say ‘Let light be created?’ Who else was around to create? Just more obfuscation, with Ross trying to give the impression that he’s knowledgeable in Hebrew, when his published books get singular and plural back to front, which I explain in this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!’ and when challenged he was unable to say even ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in Hebrew (see this section of my Exposé of The Genesis Question).

Ross: God creates the light in the beginning, it shows up on the surface of the Earth on creation day one. So creation day one is not the creation of light, it’s the appearance of light on the surface of the waters of planet Earth, and now photosynthesis is possible on planet Earth. So Genesis 1:2, in my opinion, is simply the statement of four initial conditions—the Earth began dark, water over the whole face of the Earth, unfit for life and empty of life, and now the Spirit of God begins to work and transform.

Moderator: All right, what about this word—and there was evening, and there was morning, the first day?

Ross: Sure. You’re reading out of the King James?

Moderator: No, I’m reading this one off NIV, and—but it is a distinct phrase that is used there, the first day.

Ross: It should say, and there is evening and there is morning, right?

Moderator: Yes.

Ross: Okay, two verbs, right? Two subject complements, and one of our Hebrew scholars Paul Elbert …

Paul Elbert is not a Hebrew scholar, he is a physicist and an adjunct prof (i.e. part-time lecturer) of New Testament at a small college, and not even a New Testament scholar.

Ross: … has written a piece on this very theme, and his point is that if it was gonna be twenty-four hours, it would have to be an evening and an evening, or a morning and a morning, the fact that it’s evening and morning establishes that the text is not speaking of twenty-four days, but one of the other two literal definitions of the word day, there being three. It could be twelve hours, twenty-four hours, or a long time period. All three are literal. Paul Elbert’s point is the structure of the evening and the morning establishes that it is referring to something other than a twenty-four day.

This would be news to just about every Hebrew scholar who has written on this topic. Luther and Calvin certainly didn’t think this way, and neither do commentaries by many evangelical and liberal scholars including Archer, Waltke, Sailhamer, Hamilton, Barr, Leupold, Wenham, Kidner, Arnold, Speiser, Young and Davis. These are all outstanding Hebraists, yet none argue in this way. In fact most (even those who believe in billions of years) admit that the presence of the evening and morning clauses is strong evidence for taking the days as literal.

Return to heading/topic index

Moderator: Okay, let’s just stay right here for a little bit, because both of you are Christians, both of you believe that the Bible’s the inerrant word of God, so that it’s not making a mistake here. Kent, do you agree that we have three options?

Hovind: List them for me and I’ll tell you if I agree.

Moderator: Well, you’ve got the—how the word yôm is used all through Scripture. You’ve got the day of the Lord, which has got to be more than a twenty-four hour period of time.

Hovind: Okay.

It doesn’t have an evening/morning and a number, so it’s totally irrelevant to the specific context of Genesis 1. This wonderfully impartial moderator is committing the exegetical fallacy of unwarranted expansion of the semantic field (see this section of my Exposé of The Genesis Question).

Moderator: Okay. You’ve got the fact of a twenty-four day, and then also it’s used for just a twelve-hour period of time, like the daytime.

But the context is totally different once again, without evening/morning and number.

Hovind:  I think if you gave this book to five thousand people and said, read this, tell me what it says, all five thousand would come back and say, this is saying He made it in six days. When you have to have a guru to tell you what it says, you now have a cult. That’s what makes me very nervous. I think—let me read what James Barr says, he’s a professor of Hebrew, or was, at Vanderbilt University, former Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, he said,

Probably so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew of Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writers of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the idea that the creation took place in a series of six days, which were the same as the days of twenty-four hours we now experience. Or to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the days of creation to be long eras of time, the figure of years not to be not chronological, and the Flood to be merely a local, Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by such professors, as far as I know.

Ross: That’s simply not true, it wasn’t true when James Barr stated it, and it’s certainly not true today. Now I speak on seminary campuses all the time, and the majority uphold the idea that the text, the plain reading of the text indeed implies long periods of time, not twenty-four hours. I mean, I’m testimony to that. I didn’t meet Christians till I was 27. When I read the Bible for the first time, it was obvious to me it’s speaking about six long time periods. There’s no closure on the seventh day, you’ve only got an evening and morning for the first six days.

Previously, the systematic theologian, Dr Douglas Kelly, had responded to the same argument from Ross as follows:²

DK: To say the least, this places a great deal of theological weight on a very narrow and thin exegetical bridge! Is it not more concordant with the patent sense of the context of Genesis 2 (and Exodus 20) to infer that because the Sabbath differed in quality (though not—from anything we can learn out of the text itself—in quantity), a slightly different concluding formula was appended to indicate a qualitative difference (six days involved work; one day involved rest)? The formula employed to show the termination of that first sabbath: ‘And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made’ (Gen. 2:2) seems just as definite as that of ‘and the evening and the morning were the first day’.

See also Is the seventh day an eternal day?

Ross: You read Genesis chapter two, and look at everything that happens on the sixth day. There are ten creation accounts in the Bible. In order to develop a correct interpretation of creation, one must faithfully integrate all ten, not just focus on a couple of verses out of Genesis chapter one.

Moderator: Let me give you a little hint here,

How nice of this epitome of impartiality to help Ross out here. How on Earth can Ross claim that Ankerberg was originally a Hovind supporter?

Moderator: Dr Gleason Archer was my Hebrew professor,

A man, indeed a defender of Biblical inerrancy, who allowed himself to be intimidated by ‘science’ so didn’t believe what he admitted was the most obvious interpretation—24-hour days. Archer writes:³

GA: From a superficial reading, the impression received is that the entire creative process took place in six twenty-four hour days. If this is was the true intent of the Hebrew author (a questionable deduction, as will be presently shown), this seems to run counter to modern scientific research, which indicates that the planet Earth was created several billion years ago.

The rest of this is a rationalization to explain away the clear Biblical teaching of six 24-hour days, to fit in with uniformitarian ‘science’.

Moderator: and if we go to the next chapter, there’s a tip-off I think in terms of what it is, Genesis 2:4, referring back to the seven days, says, this is the account of the heavens and the Earth when they were created, referring back to those seven days. And then it says, in the day that the Lord God made heaven and Earth. So you have one day referring to all seven, so you have it as a period of time. Now Gleason Archer writes about this, all Biblical scholars admit that yôm, day, may be used in a figurative or symbolic manner as well as in a literal sense, and he says this is very evident in Genesis 2:4—this is the account of the heavens and the Earth when they were created.

Here, yôm is prefixed by be— beyôm—so it is an idiomatic expression for ‘when’ as the NIV has it. The context is totally different from Genesis 1, where there are no prepositions with yôm.

Moderator: Henry Morris, of all folks, says the King James version translates the word yômas a period of time 65 times.

Yes, of course—Ankerberg makes it sound like this is Earth-shattering news to creationists. Why give the impression that creationists have ever said that yôm only means a 24-hour day? We just claim that it means a 24-hour day (or a part of this cycle) when it has an evening/morning or a number.

Moderator: So the door is open, and it’s very interesting that even Moses himself is quoted in 2 Peter 3:10 this way—but the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Actually, it’s uh—but do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and he’s quoting that from, I think it’s Psalm chapter 90 verse 4, which is a Psalm of Moses, and that’s how Moses, who wrote this passage, used it. I’m simply saying that there’s exegetical grounds for opening the door for a stage or a period of time among the scholars.

Not at all.2 Peter 3:8 says that one day is as a thousand years, so it’s a figure of speech called a simile to teach that God is outside of time, because He is the Creator of time. It is not defining a day because it doesn’t say ‘a day is a thousand years’. In fact, the figure of speech is so effective in its intended aim precisely because the day is literal and contrasts so vividly with 1000 years—to the Creator of time, a short period of time and a long period of time may as well be the same. So we humans should be patient with God as He will fulfil His promises in His time.

Also, Ankerberg didn’t quote Psalm 90:4 in full, because it clinches what I say about the contrast between a short and long time period: For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. This is synonymous parallelism, so to be consistent, Ankerberg would have to say that a watch in the night can sometimes mean 1000 years. It’s a little difficult to imagine that a Psalm writer (Ps 63:7) was thinking on his bed for thousands of years or that his eyes stay open for thousands of years (Ps 119:148).

See also Q&A: 2 Peter 3:8—‘one day is like a thousand years’.

Ross: Yeah, Gleason Archer also made the point that on the sixth day you’ve got Adam and Eve both created, Genesis chapter one, when you go to Genesis chapter two, Adam hangs around a long time before Eve gets created. He’s got to work the Garden of Eden, he’s got to name all the animals, he goes through an operation, he recovers, and frankly I think what’s going on is God’s dealing with him because men have a hard time integrating the physical creation, the emotional creation, the spiritual. He says Eve doesn’t need this college class, but Adam does. I think it took him at least a semester to get through it.

Pseudo-psychology is no substitute for sound exegesis. There is no need to deny the plain meaning—that the 6^th day was an ordinary day—see Naming the Animals: All in a day’s work for Adam.

Moderator: Well, the fact is, is uh—for folks who don’t know Gleason Archer, Gleason Archer has taught most of your Hebrew scholars, he graduated from Harvard with his Ph.D. I think he knows like 22 different languages, he used to take notes in Hittite when he was in class. I used to quote from the lexicon and he said that’s wrong, he would correct the lexicon. I never knew anybody that corrected the dictionary, he’d write a letter and they would correct it. He got my attention, and so if he’s open to the idea, I’m open to the idea, but the fact is, is regardless, let’s go on here in terms of the order. What happened on day two?

No-one is disputing Archer’s expertise in Hebrew, but Ankerberg overlooks the reason Archer felt compelled to interpret Genesis the way he did. Archer was trying to defend Biblical inerrancy against charges that it contradicted uniformitarian ‘dates’, but he should have questioned the inerrancy of the ‘dates’ rather than re-interpreted Scripture.

Hovind: I didn’t get to respond to that one.

Moderator: Oh, please, go ahead.

Hovind: I would disagree very strongly with what Dr Ross has said.

Moderator: Yes.

Hovind: I think the days have to be six normal days because there’s so many other references in Scripture. For instance, Exodus 20:11, in the Ten Commandments. God said, I want you to rest on the Sabbath because I made everything in six days. He wasn’t telling them to work six million years and then finally take a break, and the only two references you referred to about 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90 verse 4, both of them say a day is like a thousand years, they don’t say a million or a billion.

As shown above, Hovind is missing the point here.

Hovind: Plus I think if you just read the first chapter, you’ll see God made the plants, the grass, and the trees on day 3, He made the sun on day 4, and the Bible says clearly He created the sun. He didn’t just make the light visible. I don’t know where Dr Ross gets this idea that the smoke cleared and all of a sudden they could—the sun was already there. That’s just simply not true. He created the sun—

Ross: Hold on, you’re wrong—

Hovind: Let me finish now. The Hebrew word is very clear there. The six days of—I mean, how long can the plants live without the sun? Plus the insects are made on day five, and they pollinate the plants. Plus animals breathe in oxygen and breathe off carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite. The idea of these days being long periods of time is just ridiculous.

Moderator: Well, let me just say this—the sun wasn’t created on day one?

Hovind: The light was made, it doesn’t say the sun was made.

Moderator: Okay, I just wanted to make sure you were saying that.

Hovind: Oh, yeah. God is light.

Moderator: Do you think the sun was created then?

Ross: Definitely. The fourth day does not say the sun was created. It uses the verb again hayah, let there be the great lights.

Another smoke screen with hayah.

Ross: In the sixteenth verse where it says so God made the sun, moon, and stars, it’s in the qal-perfect form, it simply states the sun and stars were made at some unspecified time in the past. Moreover, not—

No, it’s a waw-consecutive qalimperfect (aka, a preterite)! This is explained in this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!’

Hovind: In your interpretation.

Ross: —can the plants survive twenty-four hours. They’re not gonna make it even a nanosecond without the heat and light of the sun. So obviously there’s something wrong with your interpretation.

They could survive in the light God created on the first day (it’s reasonable to assume that other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum were created then too, e.g. infrared (heat) rays. But surviving for billions of years in a dense haze where sunlight was blocked out, that’s another matter.

Hovind: What I’ve seen from reading your work, and I’ve probably got—I’ve got an awful lot of letters from people who said, boy I wish I could be there to debate Hugh Ross, you know. I got a lot of people who would like—there’s a, many websites devoted to this topic, you know, of your appearance of knowing Hebrew, when you don’t know any Hebrew.

Ross: I know a whole stable of Hebrew scholars that volunteer for Reasons to Believe, okay?

They obviously didn’t bother to tell Ross the difference between singular and plural, perfect and imperfect, or how to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’!

Hovind: Well, so do I, and I can read too, sure, and I can talk to people who read Hebrew also, but I don’t want you to, you know, mislead the audience into thinking you know Hebrew when you don’t, and neither do I. All I can do—but I don’t think God writes a book where we have to know Hebrew. The God that I worship is able to write a book and then preserve and give it to us in a form that I can read and understand, and I’m telling you, nobody—if you went to a mission field where there were no Christian, and no concept of Christianity, and just gave this book to them and said, what does it say? All of them would come back and say, it says six days just like we have today.

Ross: Kent, I’ve been on the mission field, that’s not simply true. I mean, I’ve met all kinds of people who’ve drawn the conclusion these are long periods of time.

Hovind: Please name one.

Ross: Okay—I mean, there’s some ladies that work with us in our office, raised in Arkansas, read the Bible on their own, came to that conclusion, high school education. These are plain folk.

Hovind: Well, there you had the key right there. If they’ve got a high school education in the public school, they would have been taught evolution, and then they would have read the Bible with—

Ross: I’m talking eleven years of age, this is before they hit the high school years.

Ross is ignoring that modern civilisation indoctrinates children from very young ages with literary and media references to evolution and that children in government schools are taught evolution progressively from the earliest grades.

Hovind: Well, and when I read your testimony also in your book about how you came to the Bible, you’d already decided the Big Bang theory’s true. That was already a given in your mind.

Ross: Of course, the Bible teaches it.

Ross skirts around the issue. First, if the Bible really did teach this, it’s amazing that God’s people were in the dark about his important fact till the 20^th century. Second, he claims that before he came to the Bible, he was already convinced that the big bang as true. So how can he say that he regarded the big bang as a given because the Bible teaches it, before reading the Bible?!

Hovind: No, it doesn’t. But you’d already decided the Earth is, the universe is billions of years old, and now you come to the Bible and try to force that interpretation on God’s Word. That’s the wrong way to come to it.

Hovind is right. Ross had already decided that the big bang was correct.

Moderator: Well, let me bring up this thing about Exodus chapter twenty again.

Ross: Yes.

Yes let’s. Why did Ankerberg even bother asking Ross and Hovind, since he may as well have pushed his compromise position all by himself!

Moderator: And that again Archer comments on this. He did this at the council for Biblical inerrancy when they were writing the draft and they asked him to do the exegesis on this. Gleason Archer used to teach at Trinity Divinity School. Bruce Waltke used to teach, chairman of Old Testament at Dallas, these guys wrote a workbook on the Old Testament together, and this is part of their commentary. In terms of Exodus 20:8–11, in terms of what the Sabbath is mentioning in referring back to, he says, ‘By no means does this demonstrate that twenty-four hour intervals were involved in the first six days any more than the eight-day celebration of the feast of tabernacles proves that the wilderness wanderings under Moses occupied only days.’ Remember Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years. So it was a symbolic commemoration of that time is what they’re saying.

This is just a rationalisation. Yes, this was a symbolic representation of one time period by a different one. But the Fourth Commandment compares like with like. There is no point even trying to understand the Bible if a word in the same passage and same grammatical context can switch meanings, without any hint in the text itself. Also, the Fourth Commandment is unique in that both Ex 20:11 and 31:17 have the causal explanation ‘For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the Earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day’. The word ‘for’ (Hebrew ki, also having the sense ‘because’) at the beginning of this expression shows that the creation week is the very basis of the working week.

Moderator: And I just point this out that, how do we, the very question you guys are grappling here, for our people that are at home, how are they supposed to approach this? You’ve got the verse in Genesis chapter two where it does seem to say that a day refers to the whole spectrum of whatever time period those six days, seven days occurred in the first chapter. You have the day of the Lord which everybody seems to agree can go on into eternity. You’ve got other suggestions of periods of time.

Of course, but they are in completely different contexts, without evening/morning or a number—something we have to point out repeatedly because guys like Ankerberg persist in abetting Ross’s caricaturing our position with juvenile word games.

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Ross: Well, let’s pick that theme up, I mean, Exodus twenty. That whole idea of the fourth commandment’s repeated five times in the Levitical law. Only two of the five times does it give you the divine analogy, for in six days.

I’m not sure what Ross means, but how many times does God have to say something before he will believe it?

Ross: And we also note in both cases the preposition is not in the original. It simply says for six days—

Hovind: Here you’re going off in your imagined Hebrew again. Now listen—

Ross: It’s not imagined Hebrew.

Hovind: You don’t speak Hebrew and neither do I.

Ross: No, I’ve checked it out, I’ve checked it out with Hebrew scholars, …

Are these the same Hebrew scholars who got singular and plural, and perfect and imperfect, back-to-front?!

Ross: … they assure me that the preposition’s not there. I’ve read the original text, it’s not there in the original.

So? No explicit word is there in the Hebrew, but the grammar requires it when translating into English. It’s nonsensical to require word-for-word translation. Also, how does this help his case if there is no preposition? It’s just another smokescreen. What Ross needs to do is to get rid of the causal word ki, which he cannot do. So the link stands between six days of creation and six days of work, with a seventh day of rest after both.

Hovind: And have you read the long critique of what you just said on [Creation Ministries International] website on this very topic you’re talking about?

Ross: Sure have.

Hovind: And what’s your response?

Ross: My response is, it doesn’t withstand the scrutiny of Hebrew scholarship.

Oh really? This is the expert opinion of a man who gets singulars and plurals back to front, can’t understand lexicons, or tell the difference between perfect and imperfect verbs!

Ross: It also ignores the problem of Leviticus chapter 25. There you’ve got the case of God setting up a work period and a rest period for the agricultural land. It was to be worked six years and rested on the seventh year.

I ‘ignore’ it because there is no ‘problem’ at all! Leviticus 25 has no causal phrase making any connection with the six days of creation, unlike Ex. 20:8–11.

Hovind: Correct.

Ross: So I go along with Gleason Archer. What you’ve got in Exodus 20 is an analogy, not an exact equation.

Hovind: I disagree.

And rightly so, because the other examples are clearly analogies because they compare oranges with apples (40 years and 8 days), but Ex. 20 is indeed an equation because it compares apples with apples (6 days + 1 day of rest in both).

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Day 2

Moderator: …. We hit day one last time, we’re now going to talk about day two, [reads Genesis 1:6–8]. Hugh, what happened on day two?

Ross: Well, hopefully, we agree here. I see that as a reference to God establishing a stable, abundant water cycle. In fact one of our colleagues, Dr Robert Newman, is both an astronomer and a theologian, wrote his masters’ thesis in theology on that very point. Careful exegesis of the words revealed, that it’s speaking about God setting up an abundance of water in the atmosphere, in the troposphere more correctly, water in the ocean, and you’ve got a cycling which is gonna make possible sufficient water and the future continental land masses.

Moderator: All right. Kent?

Hovind: All right, if God set up the water cycle then, why did it say later it had not rained upon the Earth? What you’re saying is, this—had it rained upon the Earth for millions of years, was there a normal water cycle before? Is this in day two?

Ross: Definitely.

Hovind: Well but the Bible says very clearly it had not rained upon the Earth.

Ross: No, it doesn’t. No, you’re quoting from Genesis chapter two.

Hovind: It says mist went forth and watered the face of the ground because it had not rained upon the Earth.

But it is saying that there had been no rain up to the time man was created, which would not be possible if the days were long ages. NB: the text does not say there was no rain at any time before the Flood.

Ross: Yeah, but it’s in the same context that there is no man, no plant, I mean it’s simply a re-statement of the initial conditions you’ve got there in Genesis one. I mean, what you have in Genesis two is a second account of creation, with a focus on human beings.

Hovind: A second account of creation focusing on day six.

Ross: Yes.

I wouldn’t call it a ‘second creation account’. Ross is right to point out that it’s focusing on humans—it would be better to refer to Genesis 1 as a summary outline of the whole creation, and Genesis 2 as zeroing on the creation of mankind, preparing for Genesis 3 which explains the origin of sin, suffering and death. See Q&A: Genesis under ‘Do Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other?’ Both sides would answer ‘no’, and I doubt that either would disagree with the explanations on this page.

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Hovind: How much later did He create Eve? Was it the same day?

Ross: Uh, the same sixth day, correct, which was a long period of time.

Hovind: Which was a long period time.

Ross: Right.

Wrong! This is not a deduction from the text, but from the big bang.

Hovind: Okay, this is where you gotta make sure I understand what you really mean by what you say, because I’ve read enough of your stuff to know to check that out. The—so you think Adam was there a long time by himself. You say he had to recover from surgery, and had to go to college for a semester and learn—

Ross: Had to name all the animals.

Hovind: Name all the animals, and that took a long time.

No, not all the animals! Only ‘the beasts of the field’ and ‘birds of the air’. Also the ‘kinds’ were broader than today’s species. This is covered later in the discussion on ‘kinds’.

Ross: He had to work the garden of Eden.

The text doesn’t say that he had started working by then, only that this was the purpose for placing him there (Gen. 2:15).

Moderator: Well, let’s go back to day three, we’re gonna get to that, all right, what happened with Adam and Eve. But let’s keep in context because our folks out here are trying to follow. So the fact is basically day two, we have what happen?

Ross: Water cycle.

Moderator: Water cycle.

Hovind: I disagree. I think on day two we had a firmament established, which is clearly later spelled out in Genesis 1:20 as being the place where the birds fly. Genesis 1:20 says the birds fly in the firmament of heaven. So that’s the atmosphere. It says there was water above this atmosphere. That’s what it says very clearly. And then also in Psalm 148 verse 4 it says, there are still waters above the heavens. I suspect God made three heavens. The first heaven is the atmosphere where the birds fly. The second heaven is where the stars are, we call it outer space, sun moon and stars. The third heaven is where God lives, 2 Corinthians chapter 12, the apostle Paul tells about being caught up to the third heaven. And apparently there was a water barrier between each of those. The first one is probably now gone, that’s what fell down at the Flood. I don’t know if it was ice or water or moisture or what, but—

CMI doesn’t accept the Canopy Theory (which is what Hovind is referring to here) as a direct teaching of Scripture—see CMI’s explanation for the Flood waters from Q&A: Flood under ‘Were the flood waters solely caused by rain, or something more? …’, as well as Hanging Loose: What should we defend? for good advice on dealing with extra-Biblical explanations of Biblical teachings.

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Day 3

Moderator: All right, let me move you on, because you’re gonna get into it in the day three here as well. Let’s just roll over into it. This is what happened on day three. [reads Genesis 1:9–13]. We have the receding waters of the ocean, seas and lakes taking place, we have the emergence of land above the seas taking place, plants and trees come forth at that point. What else do you guys see taking place and how long was this going on?

Hovind: It took one day, 24 hours.

Ross: Oh, I would see it as taking a much longer period of time.

Hovind: Like how long?

Ross: Huh?

Hovind: How long?

Ross: Oh, probably in the order of a few hundred million years. I mean, you’re gonna get these continents forming, right?

Hovind: The continents we have today?

Ross: Yeah.

Hovind: No. The continents today are a result of Noah’s flood, the shapes are—

Ross: That’s—Kent, that’s six thousand miles of plate tectonics in just a few months of time.

Hovind: That is assuming, of course, that today’s continents are like they were in the days of Adam and Eve. See, what you’ve done is you’ve taken some Scriptures that clearly apply to the flood, the worldwide flood in the days of Noah, and—

Ross: Do you believe that tectonics is operable on the Earth?

Hovind: I was just on the San Andreas fault last week, yeah, it’s moving.

Ross: Okay.

Hovind: Sure. That’s a result of the Flood 4,400 years ago. The plates are still moving. "The fountains of the deep broke open," the water came to the surface. They’re still settling and shifting. I’ve climbed 40 volcanoes and taught earth science for years. Yes, sir.

Ross: But if you squish that much tectonics in that brief of a period of time—

Hovind: Well, how much tectonics? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to put Africa and South America together, is that what you’re judging this by?

Ross: Either that, or just produce the mountains that are necessary for your flood interpretation.

Hovind: No. In order to make Africa and South America fit for the Pangea theory they put in the textbooks, they shrank Africa 35-40%. The Pangea theory is just pure baloney. Plus, if you look—

Hovind should check out John Baumgardner’s theory of catastrophic plate tectonics before saying things like this in public—see Q&A: Plate Tectonics

Ross: Have you checked that out with geophysicists?

Another argument from authority. However, Dr Baumgardner is recognised even by secular geophysicists as having the leading supercomputer model of plate tectonics—see interview.

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Ross: How about during the flood?

Hovind: I don’t know, the Bible says the fountains of the deep were broken open. There was probably some incredible continental movement during that flood. And how you can teach it was a local flood, I—I don’t understand that. I mean, why would God tell Noah to build a boat, fill it full of animals, stay in there for a year—tell Noah to move. I mean, I can figure that out, it was a worldwide flood.

Ross: He could have told him to move. But the main purpose here is that God set up Noah to be a prophet. He says, build this gigantic boat in the desert and preach to this wicked generation. If he had moved, he would have lost his opportunity to preach.

But if the people had moved just to get away from Noah’s preaching, the Flood wouldn’t have reached them. And what sort of credibility would Noah have had with the antediluvians, building an ocean liner sized vessel to escape a local Flood? And if the Flood was really local, did Noah realise this? If so, did he merely warn the people against a coming local Flood, from which they could have easily escaped by migrating? Such are the problems with denying the clear teaching of a global Flood. Note that Ross’s and Ankerberg’s authority, Dr Gleason Archer, also firmly rejects a local flood and affirms that the language teaches a global one.⁴ See also Q&A: Flood under ‘Does the Bible really claim that Noah’s Flood was global?’

Hovind: Do you really believe that?

Ross: Yes, it says so in Hebrews and Peter.

Hovind: (laughs) So the purpose of this ark was just to get attention, it was a ‘Hambuger Sunday’ to bring all the kids in?

Ross: God always gives his prophets a pulpit.

Where does Ross find this in Scripture? No other prophet had to make an ocean-liner-sized pulpit! The Bible explains the reason for the Ark—to save Noah’s family and representative land animals, without any hint of Ross’s ‘explanation’.

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Day 4

Moderator: All right, we’re gonna, we got to get to that too, but we’ve got to get through these seven days here. Can I move down to day four, because this gets us into the light again [reads Genesis 1:14–19]. Question: Did God make the sun, did God make the stars on day four? Hugh?

Ross: I’d say no, it’s in the qal-perfect form, …

Here again Ross says that the verb in Gen. 1:16 translated ‘made’ is qal-perfect, when it’s actually qal-imperfect. As I said, this is explained in this section of ‘Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!’

Ross: … which means that they were formed either on the fourth day, the third day, the second day, the first day, or in the beginning. Go back to Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created" the Shamayim wa’eres. That includes all the matter, energy, space and time, stars and galaxies. So that’s when the light was. That’s when the stars existed. And what you see there in the text is, these are to serve for signs for the animals that are going to be created in the fifth and sixth days. You’ll note that all the animals mentioned in the fifth and sixth days are sufficiently complex they need at least the occasional visibility of the sun, moon and stars to regulate their biological clocks.

Moderator: This is one I actually looked it up and the Hebrew verb is wayya’as in verse 16 and according to Archer again, "God had made the two great luminaries. This would be, Hebrew had no special form for the pluperfect tense but uses the perfect tense, or the conversive imperfect here to express either the English past or the English perfect. So what he’s saying is God had made two great lights. So that seems to open the door that sun and so on were already there, but it does say, He also made the stars. Did He make stars on day four or did he make them at the beginning?

There is no basis for using the pluperfect from the Biblical text here (as opposed to outside ‘scientific’ influences), because the reader reading the waw consecutive would connect the making (NB not appearing) of the lights with ‘Let there be lights’ of the previous verse. This is different from Gen. 2:19 where the pluperfect makes sense, because the reader would think of the prior creation of animals in Gen. 1. For further explanation of the pluperfect in Gen. 2:19, see Creation Account, Times Two.

Note that the Ankerberg/Archer explanation ‘had made’ contradicts Ross’s explanation that the sun, moon and stars really ‘appeared’, which is not possible from the text. See The Sun: our special star, note 1.

Ross: Well, it’s in the same qal-perfect form, which means it could have been made any time in the past.

Actually it’s the same verb covering the stars as well, and it’s imperfect as I’ve said.

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Hovind: Why not do it in six days like He said?

Ross: He did do it in six days like He said. Six literal long periods of time.

As I pointed out in my Exposé of The Genesis Question, Ross has a very non-literal use of the word ‘literal’ if he thinks that this is a literal meaning of ‘six days’. Nowhere in the Bible does ‘x days’ mean anything but ordinary days (or parts of days). The same is true of all other languages that I’m aware of.

Hovind: Six literal long periods of time. So here you have day three, the plants living for millions of years without a visible, clearly visible sun.

Ross: I’m saying the sun was always there. What was going on is the atmosphere from day one to day four was translucent. Light was coming though, but the observer on the surface of the Earth—the Spirit of God is brooding over the surface of the waters—from that perspective, He couldn’t make out the distinction of the sun, moon, and stars, only the light. It’s like where I was raised in British Columbia. We got to see the sun maybe two days out of the year, cause the rest of the time it’s overcast, which you’ve got going on before the fourth day, as where it’s overcast all the time. Fourth day, we have the atmosphere becoming transparent for the first time, and now we can have God creating creatures that need these things for signs to regulate their clocks.

Hovind: Okay, I disagree. You’re saying that the sun and moon were created. The word created and made are used interchangeably all through the Scripture, I’ve got a list of about I don’t know fifty or sixty places where they’re used interchangeably, means the same the same thing. He created and made. It means Genesis—

Ross: Scholars don’t agree with that. There’s a distinction between asah and bara. Bara means you’re talking about something that’s really brand new.

Both bara and asah are used interchangeably in Genesis 1:26–27: ‘Let us make ( asah) man in our image, … So God created ( bara) man in his own image …’ Both are used of making man in God’s image so it’s Hebrew parallelism.

The distinction between these words is highly overdrawn. Just as in English, there is considerable semantic overlap. Sometimes asah is used to mean ‘create ex nihilo’, e.g. Nehemiah 9:6:

You alone are the LORD. You made ( asah) the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the Earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.

Indeed, Genesis 1:26–27 is far from being the only place in the Old Testament where the two words are used interchangeably in the OT, even in synonymous parallelism, e.g.Isaiah 43:7:

everyone who is called by my name, whom I created ( bara) for my glory, whom I formed ( yatsar) and made ( asah).

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Days 5 and 6

Moderator: [Rehashes for the audience …] Our topic is—are the universe and the Earth billions of years old or just six thousand years old, also are Genesis one and two compatible with contemporary scientific evidence? And this is a dynamite program right here because we’re gonna talk about what aspect, what part did evolution play in the origin of life, if any. We’re gonna talk about when, how did God create Adam and Eve, and we’re gonna talk about light and a few other things. And we’re doing it in the—just going down the list here of Genesis chapter one. And I’m gonna combine two days here, guys, because it’s taking us a little longer than usual to get through these days. What happened on day five and day six? [Reads from Genesis 1:20–28] So it seems in these two days, you got let the water teem with living creatures, the birds fly across the Earth across the sky, above the Earth across the sky, He made the great creatures in the sea, then the livestock, creatures that move along the ground, wild animals, and finally, man. All right. First of all, start me off, does evolution have any place in any of this?

Ross: I would say no.

And CMI would agree, despite Ross’s claims to the contrary. That’s provided that evolution is defined properly in the molecules-to-man sense, requiring an increase in genetic information without intelligence.

Moderator: Why?

Ross: Well, just by scientific modeling, we can determine that there is no possibility for a species changing into a distinctly different species unless it exceeds one quadrillion individuals with a body size less than one centimetre and a generation time less than three months. Which means it’s gonna work for viruses and bacteria, but it’s gonna have no capacity to explain the existence of new species of birds, mammals, or any of the creatures we see from the Cambrian explosion onward.

I know of no biologist who says the things Ross says, and Ross is not qualified in the subject. What has body size to do with anything? A chromosomal rearrangement can result in mutual infertility, as can polyploidy. Of course, no new information arises, so it is not evolution. But it is definitely speciation by definition. There are proven examples of new species arising that don’t meet Ross’s criteria—see Brisk Biters—Fast changes in mosquitoes astonish evolutionists, delight creationists and other articles on Q&A: Speciation.

In answer to such points in Ken’s and my webcast, Ross in his 25 Nov broadcast proclaimed:

Ross: Well, we have the research papers right here, and all these papers are claiming as evidence for reproductive isolation. That’s not the same as speciation.

Here we go again—Ross’s attempt to intimidate intellectually by saying ‘we have the research papers here’. And again what he says is nonsensical—reproductive isolation is the very definition of biological speciation!

Moderator: So folks on PBS are doing specials on chaos theory saying that that’s the way it came about. What do you think?

Ross: Chaos theory in my opinion doesn’t work. Yes, you can get departure from thermodynamic equilibrium, if you got a complicated enough system and pick a small enough volume element in that system. But there’s an important corollary. The farther you depart a system from thermodynamic equilibrium, the faster it must snap back. As something as complex as a virus, the snap back time is less than ten in the minus 120 seconds, so the fact that we’re all older than that means that’s not how we got here.

Although Ross is here not saying anything that undermines Scripture and is attempting to answer an atheistic theory, his apologetics is dubious and Christians who try it might be burnt. Ross clearly doesn’t understand physical chemistry (my speciality field) any more than he understands most of the other subjects on which he pontificates. Ross is confusing what chemists usually refer to as thermodynamics v. kinetics. The thermodynamic equilibrium depends only on the free energy differences between starting and end materials (reactants and products), while kinetics (reaction speed) depends on the free energy differences between starting material and the transitional state or reaction intermediate. E.g. a diamond exposed to the air at room temperature is very far from equilibrium (which would be to form CO₂), but the reaction is too slow to measure because it requires a very high activation energy [diamond in isolation is not at equilibrium either, but again conversion to graphite is too slow to notice].

Furthermore, Ross’s comment about ‘the snap back time is less than ten in the minus 120 seconds’ is just absurd. Since the smallest viruses have a radius of about 10 nm, it would mean a speed (distance/time) of over 10¹⁰³ times the speed of light!

Moderator: So you’re saying all the plants, all the animals, and man, none of that evolved.

Ross: No evolution beyond, you know, not the species level, the genus level, order, family, none of that. Unless the species happens to have more than a quadrillion individuals, which is only a few.

As will be shown later, Ross treats these man-made categories far too respectfully. There has definitely been change across what has been called the genus level, as shown by large numbers of fertile hybrids between so-called genera. This is discussed in detail later.

Moderator: Kent, you’ve offered 250,000 dollars to anybody that could prove that theory, give me some illustration of why you think they never will.

CMI would prefer that creationists refrained from gimmicks like this.

Hovind: Well, all we’ve ever observed is dogs produce dogs. Nobody’s ever seen a dog come from a non-dog. They might want to believe that a dog and a banana have a common ancestor. I don’t care what they believe, but that’s not science. And I certainly resent my tax dollars going to support that.

I certainly sympathize, but the Bible does command us to pay taxes even to unjust governments (as the Roman Imperial system certainly was)— Romans 13:6–7.

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Hovind: … Do you—do you believe Adam was literally made from dust and God breathed into his nostrils?

Ross: Definitely. Definitely.

Hovind: And Eve was literally made from a rib.

Ross: Uh, no a side of Adam. It doesn’t say rib in the text. It says a portion of Adam’s side. So we don’t really know what kind of biopsy God took out of Adam.

The Hebrew word tsela can mean either rib or side, depending on the context. However, ‘rib’ is the right meaning in context, as all Bible translations show, despite Ross’s dogmatism to the contrary, because v.21 says that God took ‘one of the tselot (the plural form)’, meaning that Adam had more than one of them—‘one of his “sides”’ doesn’t make sense. The next verse says that God made Eve out of the tsela He had taken out of the man — if Adam had a whole side rather than a whole rib taken out, he would have been in a bad way. Modern medical science has shown that the rib was the optimal bone for God to use—see Regenerating ribs: Adam and that ‘missing’ rib. So once again Ross can’t resist trying to score points off Hovind even in an issue where they are in broad agreement, and once again it backfires.

Hovind: But you believe this literally took place.

Ross: Yes.

Hovind: Well, we finally agree on something. There’s one.

Good.

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Genealogies

Moderator: Okay. So we believe that God made Adam. Now let’s—what are the tip-offs of when? We also have bipedal hominids going around, it seems, from anthropologists, that go back past what the Bible says in terms of the genealogies that are given.

Ross: Sure.

Moderator: Okay, let’s talk about that. How far back do you think the genealogies take us in Genesis? Ussher said it was 4000 years BC.

Ross: Well, the Hebrew scholars I’ve talked to said there’s obvious gaps in the genealogies, you can’t fix a precise date like Archbishop Ussher did, who assumed no gaps.

Where are these ‘obvious gaps’? I can’t see them in the text. I discussed the Genesis genealogies at length in this section of my Exposé of The Genesis Question, and I have yet to see any response from Hugh Ross.

Moderator: But there’s also a—a parameter. There’s a limit.

Ross: Yeah, I would be hard-pressed to push it any earlier than fifty, sixty thousand years. I’ve got friends who try to push it back as far as a hundred thousand. Anything beyond that, I think, is illegitimate.

But still, 50–60 ka is younger than many evolutionists claim the Australian aborigines are. This would mean that according to secular dating methods, most of which Ross accepts uncritically, and Ross’s chronology, the Aboriginals were not descendants of Adam. Ken Ham and I pointed this out on our webcast.

On his 11 Nov broadcast in reply, Ross claims that some of the Aboriginal dates are widely disputed, because they are due to the dubious thermoluminescent dating method. Ross is certainly right that thermoluminescence is a dubious method, but it’s a shame he is not as sceptical about other dating methods—see Q&A: Radiometric Dating. And 40,000 years is widely accepted using methods that Ross accepts are right (although CMI does not, obviously). For example, ¹⁴C with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is widely accepted, and the oldest ¹⁴C ‘date’ for human occupation is 41,000 years ago for the Carpenter’s Gap site in the Kimberly.⁵ Ross failed to deal with my point about this widely accepted date, but sidetracked on the thermoluminescence dates of the 60+ thousand year dates, which are not necessary for our argument.

Even Ross in his book The Genesis Question says: ‘Australian Aborigines, who date back to 25,000 B.C.’ (p. 108). However, Ross’s own date for Noah’s Flood, which he believes was local but wiped out all mankind, is ‘between twenty thousand and thirty thousand years ago’ (TGQ p. 173). So Ross’s own dates call into question whether he thinks the Aborigines descended from Noah and his three sons and their wives, the only survivors among Adam’s descendants. Certainly the generally accepted ‘dates’ for Aboriginal occupation place them well before Ross’s date for the Flood. There seems little basis for Ross’s selectivity here.

Moderator: Right. So the fact is, is that both you and Kent are in trouble as far as the anthropologists who want to take some of these other bipedal primates, or hominids, back to oh, what a million years?

Ross: If you interpret the bipedals as human, then you’ve got a problem.

Moderator: All right, so what do you guys do with them?

Ross: They’re not human.

Moderator: Why aren’t they human?

Ross: They’re just like the primates. They’re like the chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas …

Hovind: Do you include Neanderthals as being in this category?

Ross: They’re in that category, too.

Hovind: I disagree.

Ross: Why?

Hovind: Neanderthals were deformed humans, probably post-Flood, they were still—they were burying people after they died. If a person lives past a hundred years, there’s a disease called acromegaly where the pituitary gland keeps secreting growth hormones, your ears get longer, your nose gets bigger, and your bones in your forehead get thicker. The Neanderthals were simply post-Flood humans were deformed from diseases, arthritis, rickets—

This is correct. However, Ross in his 11 Nov. Broadcast says:

I’m also surprised given the date for Neanderthals dating back 150,000 years that these young-Earth creationists would want to make them part of the descent of Adam and Eve.

Should be obvious—we don’t accept the date!

Ross: Kent, are you aware that they have enormous nasal capacities, and that their DNA is radically different from human DNA?

Hovind: Well, now that’s deceitful to say it’s radically different. It’s about 4% different, and it’s within the range of humans today.

Ross: That’s huge.

Not at all. In fact, the DNA difference between the first Neandertal measured and modern huma