| Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet! |
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Hugh Ross lays down the gauntlet!Either CMI or Hugh Ross is seriously misleading the public on some testable claims21 Nov 2000 Introductory explanation from Creation Ministries International: We make these public comments with a heavy heart, and with the overriding emphasis that our intention is not personal attack. Our mandate is to defend the faith, and the authority of Scripture. We have long believed that (and explained why) one of the most dangerous attacks on biblical authority in evangelical circles today is ‘progressive creationism’. This widespread compromise with the plain words of Scripture is capable of immense harm, precisely because it is proclaimed as being done in the name of upholding Scripture. ‘Progressive creationism’, in accepting the secular time-scale for Earth history, seriously undermines the Gospel by putting death, disease and suffering in God’s very good creation (Genesis 1:31) before Adam and Eve sinned and brought about the curse of death and the corruption of the whole creation (Genesis 3:19; Romans 8:20–22). So it undermines the reason for and meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection (Romans 5:12 ff.; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22). This is no trivial matter. See Some questions for theistic evolutionists (and progressive creationists) We have previously critiqued the teachings of its most influential advocate, Dr Hugh Ross. On this occasion we zoom in on some major false statements about testable issues, not differences of opinion. We have chosen to do this, even though it will involve exposing personal failure, because: The issue is so vital, as it involves the way we handle the very Word of God. We need to be like the Bereans commended by Paul in Acts 17:11, checking the Scriptures about all such matters. Unfortunately, however, we have over the years observed instances of Christians, including prominent leaders who influence others, being misled by Ross. If it were just a matter of a mistaken opinion it would still be a problem, but it is particularly serious because of the frequent pattern of bluff/bluster, using authoritative-sounding statements on such things as the grammar of the original Hebrew, etc., which most Christians do not have the ability to check, or just do not bother to check. When Ross recently used such tactics in front of large numbers of listeners (debate with Dr Kent Hovind, John Ankerberg Show, Oct. 2000), Ken Ham and I commented in a webcast (9 Nov. 2000) on a number of outright errors he made. In response, rather than retract, Ross ‘came out fighting’ to a large radio audience (11 Nov.), once again using smooth-sounding authoritative bluster to make it seem in each case as if CMI had made the mistake. If we had, we would retract immediately. There is no shame in that. But now that Ross has ‘thrown down the gauntlet’ so openly, we feel it is not only appropriate, but vital to go into detail in exposing, not his errors for their own sake, but his tactics. Because many thousands of people are being led astray by smooth-sounding words of apparent reason and authority. We have seen the devastating results when people fall down the ‘slippery slide to unbelief’ when they start re-interpreting God’s infallible Word with man’s fallible opinions, e.g. the former evangelist who once excelled even Billy Graham, Charles Templeton. People in public ministry, making public statements, need to be prepared to have false teaching rebuked in public (Galatians 2:11 ff.). This is especially legitimate when the false teaching is so emphatically repeated, and the charge of falsity laid at the door of those who exposed the error. Please read the following material prayerfully and carefully. The leading ‘progressive creationist’ Hugh Ross has long opposed the plain teaching of Genesis, i.e. creation in six normal days about 6000 years ago, and a global flood. His whole approach is to interpret the infallible Word of God to fit in with the theories of fallible men who teach billions of years. However, the creation is cursed (Genesis 3:17–19, Romans 8:20–22) and man’s heart is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9) and the thinking of a godless man is ‘futile’ (Romans 1:21), while Scripture itself is ‘God-breathed’ (2 Timothy 3:15–17). So a biblical Christian should not re-interpret the perfect, unfallen Word of God according to fallible theories of sinful humans about a world we know to be cursed. Further, truth is certainly not decided by majority vote, despite Ross’s continual appeals, because the majority has often been wrong (cf. Romans 3:4, Matthew 7:13–14). In the case of Dr Ross, there are even more reasons to be sceptical, because he has many times said things that are doubtful or just plain wrong. Unfortunately, many Christians are misled by the confident ‘smooth authority’ with which such demonstrably false claims are made. In a recent article,1 as well as in his debate with Kent Hovind on the John Ankerberg Show aired in October 2000, Ross demonstrated this common pattern in his ministry by making statements that were clearly wrong, not just a matter of interpretation. Ken Ham and I, on the webcast of 9 Nov 2000, pointed out a number of these errors. Ross responded in a radio broadcast on 11 Nov, correctly realising, as the announcer said, that his ‘competence and credibility’ was on the line here. He clearly and unequivocally denied being in error, and clearly portrayed our’s commentary as false and misleading. He also offered seemingly persuasive reasons to trust his credibility. In other words, the issue is not some slip or two (anyone can make mistakes, ourselves included) but the issue has crystallized into one of basic trustworthiness and reliability: either we are misleading people wholesale, or Ross is. Now, Ross is begging Ken Ham and other biblical creationists to ‘speak face to face’ with him, whereas previously we had allegedly been ‘talking past one another, rather than to one another’ (Ross’s Nov 11 broadcast). However, it’s hardly fair to say that we had been ‘talking past him’, when we have directly responded to his major books like Creation and Time (by stocking Mark Van Bebber and Paul Taylor’s point-by-point rebuttal in their book Creation and Time: A report on the Progressive Creationist book by Hugh Ross, above right) and The Genesis Question (see my Exposé of NavPress’s new Hugh Ross book: The Genesis Question). Conversely, Ross has ‘talked past’ us, because he has shown little interest in responding to what we actually say. For example, in The Genesis Question, Ross:
This is a grave issue, not because of our personal reputations, but because it ultimately involves the integrity and authority of Scripture. If we are correct in our repeated assessment, people are being misled not only by a mistaken position (‘progressive creationism’), but also by unacceptable tactics used to justify that position. Here I outline four clear errors Ross proclaimed during the Hovind debate or his later broadcast, and show why his attempted rebuttal to these errors is fallacious. It is also helpful to note his typical rhetorical techniques so people will beware of them in the future. Parallax and quasarsTo set the scene, in the debate with Hovind, Ross raised the old ‘distant starlight’ canard, and claimed that the distance to a quasar had been measured up to 6 billion light years (ly). Hovind queried whether Ross could be so sure that the distances should be proclaimed so dogmatically.What’s important to note is that there is no way of getting around the fact that the distances to many heavenly bodies are much greater than 6000 ly. In fact, although there are some anomalies in using red shifts as an indicator of distance (see Galaxy-Quasar ‘Connection’ Defies Explanation), vast distances are indisputable, otherwise the huge number of stars in a tiny volume would fry us! So I advise creationists not to quibble too much about measurement uncertainties, and instead use another way of explaining how light could arrive from distant stars. Preferably, creationists should study this chapter (5) of The Creation Answers Book, How can we see distant stars in a young Universe? It’s fair to point out that Hovind never said that the distances were not real, and agreed ‘they probably are’. And he correctly pointed out that a light year is a measurement of distance only—the distance light can travel through a vacuum in a year (9.5 x 1012 km)—not a measure of time. It requires a number of assumptions to claim that large distances mean a great age of the universe. In this case, Hovind’s query resulted in Ross showing that he makes mistakes on simple matters even in his own professed field of expertise. Yet Ross regularly speaks ‘authoritatively’ on issues such as genetics, anthropology and Hebrew, in which, we would claim, he also makes massive misstatements of fact.
This is a typical Ross tactic—argument from authority. But this presupposes two things:
But there is no need to be intimidated by this. Not only is science limited when dealing with the past, so can never be a threat to the Bible, no matter what any ‘paper’ claims, but also Ross doesn’t understand the science of the paper anyway, as will be shown. Some extracts from the dialog follow:
Later on, Ross referred to the technique as ‘high school trig’. Interestingly, just before hearing this debate, I had read a paper submitted to the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal by astronomer Dr Danny Faulkner, where he discusses Ross’s recent article4 and says: ‘Hugh Ross has demonstrated once again that he either did not carefully read the articles that he referenced or did not understand their content.’ In the article, Ross seemed to be making the blunder that parallax was used to determine the distance to 3C 279. But while strongly implied by Ross, it wasn’t stated directly. However, the above statements in the debate with Hovind show that Ross really did state it directly, so Dr Faulkner cannot possibly be accused of misrepresenting him. Trigonometric parallax
The distance to the star can be worked out from what Ross correctly calls ‘high school trig’. The tangent of the angle θ is defined by the Earth-Sun radius (150 million km or 1 astronomical unit (AU)) divided by the Sun-star distance. So the star’s distance (d) is worked out from the parallax angle θ by dividing 1 AU by tanθ — (d = 150x106 km/ tanθ). In fact, the angles involved are tiny even for the closest stars, so the diagram could not be drawn to scale. For the tiny angle of 1 second of arc (symbol 1″ — defined by 1° = 60′ (minutes) = 3600″ ), the distance is called a parsec (from parallax second, symbol ps) = 30 x 1012 km = 3.26 ly. The closest star (apart from the Sun) is Proxima Centauri, with a parallax of 0.76″ . Because there is a limit to how small an angle we can measure, this method is good only for stars up to about 600 ly. Also, because at tiny angles, the tangent of an angle is almost linearly proportional to the angle (or equal to the angle in radians), astronomers usually use the ‘small angle approximation’ d = 1/p where d is the distance in parsecs and p is the angle in arc seconds. The point is, if Ross had actually performed the ‘high school trig’, he would have found that an angle of a ten thousandth of an arc-second (10-4″) couldn’t possibly measure any distances over 33,000 ly! This is almost 1/200,000th the distance to the quasar! To measure the distance to 3C 279, we would need the precision to measure an angle of 5.53 x 10-10″! Even the much closer NGC 4258 has a trigonometric parallax of 1.39x10-7″, which is too small to be detected. So Ross has clearly not understood what the paper5 claimed. Dr Faulkner points out that the paper on 3C 2795 uses the phrase ‘direct distance measurements’, and Ross misunderstood it in his claim:
However, Dr Faulkner explains:
There is no way that the method used in the paper is just ‘high school trig’—this could only apply to the diagram above—so it’s clear that Ross didn’t understand what was going on, or if he did at the time, he gave no indication. After I pointed out this mathematical blunder in the webcast with Ken Ham on 9 Nov 2000, Ross responded on his 11 Nov. program. His comments and my responses follow:
Here we have another ‘argument from authority’ by Ross. Two points:
That’s exactly what we did—in fact, it was the astronomy Ph.D. and Professor (at a secular US university) Dr Danny Faulkner who brought this to our attention, and we had the correct information to hand when we presented the 9 Nov webcast.
We did!
Again, Dr Faulkner has read both Ross’s papers and the source papers that Ross misunderstood. Clearly, Ross likes to brandish papers as weapons, but without understanding them. Dr Faulkner points out that the paper on 3C 279 uses the phrase ‘direct distance measurements’, and Ross misunderstood it. And regardless of whether we had read the papers or not, we were objecting to Ross’s descriptions in his article, and even more in his debate with Hovind, that gave the wrong impression. Ross’s cheap attempts to score points against Hovind by dismissively saying that anyone knowing high school trig would agree with him serve only to reinforce this impression in the minds of anyone hearing the debate. It’s hard to imagine how anyone hearing this debate could think he meant anything but the procedure in that diagram. In fact, even on his 11 Nov broadcast, Ross still wrongly persists in calling it ‘trig parallax’:
Later on in the Nov 11 broadcast, Ross showed that he did at last get the right idea of what the method really measured, but one must wonder why he didn’t explain it properly the first time. There are two possibilities:
Ross also tried a cheap shot on this 11 Nov broadcast, which actually rebounds on him:
As shown above, I wasn’t ‘conceding’ anything, but rather plugging the number into the formula to show that Ross couldn’t be right. And as I’ve said, CMI agrees that there are stars a lot further out still, but point out that many light years don’t necessarily mean many years—see again How can we see distant stars in a young Universe? More importantly, Ross says ‘the method is valid’ in the context of both the quasar distance (which as shown is not trig parallax) and my calculation (which could only have been based on the triangulation diagram above). So it’s clear that he’s still confusing the two distinct methods, at least in the way he talks about them. One of our concerns is that often distinctions like this are blurred to Ross’s listeners in ways which are highly misleading, and it is hard to keep on being charitable by assuming that such blurring is accidental. Hebrew verb blunderHugh Ross often gives the impression that he’s familiar with Hebrew, although (in a famous ‘experiment’ by Dr Russ Humphreys) he didn’t even know how to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in that language, and often makes elementary mistakes—all this is documented in my this section of my Exposé of The Genesis Question. But in his debate with Hovind, Ross claimed that he had the backing of many Hebrew scholars, and in his 11 Nov broadcast, Ross claimed: ‘we do have Hebrew scholars with Th.D.s and Ph.D.s. that volunteer for us and check all of our resources.’This is yet another argument from authority. Who are these authorities, and what exactly do they say? But in any case, the Hebrew is against him. This can be shown by reading commentaries from before the time when ‘long age’ views became popular—e.g. see Q&A: Genesis under ‘Church Fathers and Reformers’. But when the uniformitarians like Hutton and Lyell claimed to have proved millions of years, some evangelical commentators felt the need to re-interpret Genesis to fit. On the other hand, liberals and neo-orthodox theologians like James Barr have always been far more open that Genesis really means what it says, because they deny biblical inspiration anyway. Leading theologian Douglas Kelly, in his book Creation and Change (right), cites a number of exegetes over the centuries that prove this point. Even the evangelical Hebrew scholars who deny six literal days admit that the text does seem to teach this, but they won’t believe it because it conflicts with ‘science’. And none of them argue in the bizarre way Ross does. Also, we should be skeptical of his claim that he has all these Hebrew scholars who are helping him, because they didn’t tell Hugh Ross about the obvious blunders that have gone into print. For example, getting the singular and plural back to front in the Hebrew when discussing behemoth in The Genesis Question—see further elaboration below about how he refuses to concede even this with any grace. And in his debate with Hovind, he made a clear error:
Here, Ross once again tries to intimidate his opponent by sounding very learned in the Hebrew. And once again, it is pure bluff (and was no isolated slip of the tongue, because repeated the claim several times). But it’s a simple question of fact, not interpretation, that the verb is imperfect, not perfect, as claimed. For non-Hebrew experts, this can be found by checking such Bible software programs like the Logos Tense/Voice/Mood add-on module (TVM), or J.J. Owens, Analytical Key to the Old Testament, vol. 1 (Baker, 1990). The type of verb can be determined by the precise form of the word. A Hebrew lexicon will give the 3rd person masculine singular qal perfect form, asah, as its basic entry. Apart from this, the perfect form is usually identified by a suffix, while the imperfect form is identified by a prefix. For example, the 3rd person masculine singular qal imperfect of asah is ya’aseh. When the waw-consecutive is attached, it becomes wayya’as. The phrase in Genesis 1:16 is wayya’as elohim—‘and then God made …’, a waw-consecutive qal imperfect (also known as a preterite). So Ross’s argument collapses because he was totally wrong about the verb. Although it is waw-consecutive, the context makes it clear that it marks the beginning of an elaboration of the event just mentioned (‘And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky …”’ v. 14) rather than a subsequent and, therefore, different event. Also, this context means that it cannot be interpreted to say: ‘God had made the sun, moon and stars at an unspecified time in the past and the atmosphere just cleared so they appeared’, despite the claims of Ross and the ostensibly ‘neutral’ moderator Ankerberg. In my webcast with Ken Ham on 9 Nov, I pointed out this obvious blunder of confusing perfect and imperfect verbs, and that it should make people skeptical of Ross’s Hebrew claims. Ross tried to respond on his 11 Nov broadcast, and here is the dialogue—as you will see, not only is there not a quick retraction of this error, but he attempts to bluff his way through:
Who is John Ray? He has not published in the leading evangelical theological journals like Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Westminster Theological Journal, Bibliotheca Sacra, The Master’s Seminary Journal or Trinity Journal. In any case, if what Ross says is true, i.e. John Ray agreed that Genesis 1:16: ‘God made the sun, moon, and stars’ is qal perfect,, then he also is incompetent in Hebrew grammar. Wayya’as is a waw-consecutive qal imperfect, regardless of what Ross or his so-called Hebrew experts say. So yes, we also charge John Ray with error, because that is exactly what it is.
Why must we be mis-reading or confusing the point? Because we have shown that Ross is just plain wrong and therefore can’t be relied upon when dealing with the meaning of the original Hebrew? Ross offers no grammatical defense, just denial. No. Hugh Ross is mis-reading and confusing the point—or just plain lying!
This is just more pulling wool over people’s eyes. I wasn’t even talking about universe expansion. Rather, the only thing I could possibly have been referring to is the only place in Scripture he mentioned perfect and imperfect verbs on the Ankerberg show, and several times. That is, ‘In the sixteenth verse where it says so God made the sun, moon, and stars, it’s in the qal perfect form’. I made even made it perfectly clear in the broadcast which passage I was discussing. He refused to admit that he’s wrong, talked about a totally unrelated area, and once more appealed to authority. Even worse, what Ross says about the above is also wrong about participles and ongoing expansion. This follows on from Ross’s claim in his debate with Hovind, that the Bible actually teaches the big bang and an expanding universe, so this deserves a section by itself … Does the Bible teach the big bang?Ross claimed in the Hovind debate:Ross: … because 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 (?) participle form, this continual stretching out. First, even if these passages are teaching an expanding universe (which creationists don’t necessarily dispute), they say nothing about expanding from a singularity as required by the big bang (see some problems with the big bang in Q&A: Astronomy/astrophysics). Second, Ross is correct to claim that the verb ‘stretched’ is a participle in the Hebrew in places like Isaiah 42:5 and 51:13 in the context of ‘stretched out the heavens’, but his statement is a good example of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ His knowledge doesn’t go beyond what can be gleaned from, say, Tense-Voice-Mood on Logos Bible Software. But readers should beware of thinking that such tools tell us all we need to know about Hebrew grammar. The fact that major Bible translations have ‘stretched’ should have alerted Ross to the fact that his deduction was faulty. Bible translators have studied more advanced Hebrew grammar, and they realize that Hebrew participles only refer to continuous action when they are used adverbially. In Isaiah 42:5 and the other passages, the participles are used as verbal adjectives (i.e. adjectivally, not adverbially)—they describe a verbal action of the noun ‘The LORD God’. The participle functioning as an adjective expresses by itself neither time nor aspect, and thus can signify, according to context, he who stretched, will stretch, is stretching—either once, many times or continuously. In the context of the verses Ross cites, the participle doesn’t mean what Ross claims, so it is wrong to twist the text to support a currently popular secular theory that explicitly denies other parts of Scripture. Behemoth bunglingOn the radio broadcast with Ken Ham, I said:I really must be skeptical of this claim of all these Hebrew scholars who are helping him, because these … Hebrew scholars couldn’t tell Hugh Ross the difference between a perfect and imperfect verb, and he gets singular and plural back to front in the Hebrew in discussing behemoth. … I would have thought a real Hebrew scholar would have been able to point out these really obvious blunders, and yet they’ve been allowed to go to print, and without any problem. The qal perfect/imperfect was explained above, while the singular and plural confusion about behemoth was discussed in my Exposé of The Genesis Question:
I didn’t need to spell this out in the webcast, because listeners were referred to this Exposé. And Ross himself must have known about the article, because his assistant ‘Fuz’ (as he calls himself) Rana complained to Ken Ham about my article as a ‘waste of ministry resources’ simply because it criticised a Christian apologist’s scriptural and scientific teachings designed to support billions of years and all its corollaries.7 Note that Rana couldn’t document a single error in our Exposé, even when I challenged him to. Also, Rana was unable to explain why it’s terrible for young-Earth believers to criticise old-earthers, but it’s fine for them to ‘waste ministry resources’ doing everything they can to undermine belief in the biblical teaching of a young Earth and global Flood. For example, in Ross’s book Creation and Time (p. 162), he makes a particularly odious comparison of young-earth creationists with some heretics that the Apostle Paul anathematized in the book of Galatians:
Lately Ross has been trying to give the impression that he has always tried to treat us with courtesy, but quotes like the above shed a different light. Also, on the Hovind debate, the following dialogue occurred, clinching the fact that Ross knew of the article in question:
Of course, this is yet another appeal to authority—much easier than finding a demonstrable Hebrew error! And this is coming from someone demonstrably ignorant of even simple Hebrew. On his 11 Nov broadcast, Ross tries to get around his singular/plural blunder:
Here, Ross tried to downplay this as a ‘nit-pick’. However, this supposed argument from the Hebrew was a major plank in his effort to argue against the possibility that behemoth, that Job had seen, could be referring to a type of dinosaur. (Ross believes that dinosaurs died out many millions of years before Adam and Eve sinned and brought death and suffering into God’s ‘very good’ creation—Genesis 1:31). He also claimed it was immaterial because Behemoth was referring to a singular animal. But as can be seen in my Exposé cited above, I never doubted that the pronouns referring to behemoth were singular. Ross had also claimed that behema was the plural form, when this is the singular, and there is no way of wriggling out of this. This clearly demonstrates the Hebrew incompetence of him and his alleged experts. ConclusionThese erroneous claims by Ross should alert readers to the fact that Ross is often sloppy in his explanations or even outright mistaken. Worse, when ‘called’ on his mistakes, he will not graciously concede error but seeks to bluff his way through. In the one instance where his error was so undeniable that he had no choice but to concede, he did so grudgingly and coupled with an obvious attempt to ‘fudge’ the significance of the error, trying to turn it into an attack on his critics for alleged ‘nit-picking’. Readers should not be beguiled by his smooth talk, big words or appeals to authority, and instead should believe the clear teaching of Scripture. AcknowledgmentsI thank the following for their specialist advice: Dr Danny Faulkner (who teaches astronomy at a secular US university) and Andrew Kulikovsky (Hebrew), but responsibility if there are any errors is mine alone. EpilogueThis article generated quite a bit of feedback, to which I’ve responded in Answering some Hugh Ross supporters. Further reading
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This term (sometimes called triangulation) is always used to refer to what is explained on the diagram on the right. As the Earth orbits the Sun, the angle at which a star is observed changes slightly—this is called parallax. The parallax angle is defined in the diagram. An equivalent definition is half the angle the star subtends the entire diameter of the earth’s orbit, which can be worked out from observations half a year apart.