Here's the copy of the message I sent to Hugh Ross's Reasons To Believe
organization (on 5 Nov 1999), as promised in my last post.
Hello,
I'm writing to point out a significant error I've noticed in one of Hugh
Ross's articles on the RTB web site. I'm sure Dr Ross would not want an
erroneous argument to remain under his name for any longer than necessary,
so I hope you will correct it soon.
The article in question is "The Creation Sequence: A Matter of Perspective"
(http://www.reasons.org/resources/skeptics/creatseq.html). Dr Ross argues
that Genesis is very specific about the order of 11 prehistorical events,
from the beginning of the universe up to the appearance of mankind. He then
states that the probability of Moses (the putative author of Genesis)
guessing the correct order was only 1 in 11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1
(approximately 40 million), and concludes that, since Moses actually got the
order right, he must therefore have been divinely inspired.
Dr Ross's argument presupposes that Moses could not have known any part of
the creation sequence other than by divine inspiration. However, much of the
sequence would have been obvious even to a person of Moses's time:
- You need the physical universe before you can have anything else.
- You need light, water and continents before you can have plants on the
continents.
- You need plants before you can have animals (they need something to eat).
- You need a transparent atmosphere before you can have flying creatures.
- And of course Moses would leave the most important (mankind) to last.
Furthermore, Moses does not specify the sequence of the following events on
Dr Ross's list, which all occur in the same verse, so Dr Ross is wrong to
treat them as separate items in his calculation:
"7. production of small sea animals
8. creation of sea mammals (nephesh)
9. creation of birds (more nephesh, perhaps simultaneously with #8)".
Given the above, the only sequences open to Moses were (using Dr Ross's
event numbers):
1
2, 3 & 4 in some order order (6 possible permutations)
5 & 6 in either order (2 permutations)
(7-9) & 10 in either order (2 permutations)
11
That gives only 6x2x2=24 possible permuations in total. So Moses' chance of
guessing right (if it was a guess) was not 1 in 40 million, but 1 in 24.
I think there are further issues which reduce the number of possible
permuations even further, but those are not as clear as the ones above, so I
won't mention them here. It's possible to quibble over the precise number of
permuatations which are possible, but, however you look at it, the number is
several orders of magnitude lower than the 40 million claimed by Dr Ross.
This seriously undermines the article's claim that this is evidence of
Moses' divine inspiration.
I look forward to receiving a reply from you.
Richard Wein <tich@primex.co.uk>
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