[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome back.

You're watching the 700 Club.

This day before the election, we urge you to vote.

Your vote is going to be crucial, absolutely crucial.

In some of these states, it may be 100 votes,

it may be 1,000 votes, it may be 10 votes that

could determine the election.

And so your vote is absolutely important.

So whatever you're doing, it's not

as important as the fact you've got to cast your ballot.

OK, now, is a faith in God and a belief in the Bible

compatible with true science?

Well, we have a gentleman with us who says the answer is yes.

He's one of the top astrophysicists and scientists

in our nation and in the world, and he's

written a book called The Improbable Planet.

And his name is Hugh Ross and he's with us right now.

But look at this at first.

REPORTER: Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist

who has traveled the world sharing

his scientific discoveries that connect science and religion.

Through his organization, Reasons to Believe, Dr. Ross,

along with a team of scholars present

clear scientific evidence that supports a biblical God.

In his new book, "Improbable Planet," Dr. Ross

shares his testable and reliable biblical creation

model that points to a purpose-filled universe.

I want to tell you something.

I'm the chancellor of Regent University,

and I wanted, after I had met Dr. Hugh Ross,

to do something on-- I thought it was cosmogony,

and he said it ought to be cosmology,

but hey, we're talking about the cosmos.

And I wanted to make sure that our divinity school, which

is one of the largest in the nation,

we have about 1,000 students.

And I wanted every one of them to have

a course in what this man is teaching, and his associates.

So his book is called "The Improbable Planet,"

and it's a great pleasure to welcome

a dear friend and a distinguished scientist, Dr.

Hugh Ross.

Hugh, good to have you back with us.

Thank you.

You've made these incredible statements.

This book is fabulous.

It's like a devotional.

I can't tell you, I can't say enough good things about it.

It'll move your heart like nothing you ever read.

And is it available now?

People can buy it?

Oh, yes.

Yes.

OK.

Been out for six weeks now.

Six weeks.

Is it selling well, I hope?

Very well, yes.

All right, well let's have more of them.

All right.

It's called "The Improbable Planet,"

and it's available on Amazon and so forth.

OK, you have said we are in a universe.

What is the place of this earth in the universe?

Where does it sit in relation to everything else?

Well, it's on the surface of the universe.

Everything's on the surface of the universe,

but we're kind of on the edge of a super-cluster of galaxies,

we're on the edge of the Virgo super-cluster of galaxies,

and that is the one place where advanced life is possible.

Anywhere else, it wouldn't be the case.

Literally, the entire universe must exist.

It must be exactly the size that it is, the mass that it is,

and the age that it is to make possible advanced life.

The whole universe exists to make planet Earth possible.

How many planets like our star, our sun.

What did you say, a billion trillion?

50 billion trillion stars.

PAT ROBERTSON: Wait a minute, 50 billion trillion?

Yeah, give or take a few.

[LAUGHTER]

50 billion-- and this tiny-- it's a teeny tiny little

planet.

But all the rest of it exists so this planet and--

HUGH ROSS: If you want one planet Earth,

you need the universe to be exactly as it is.

PAT ROBERTSON: Why?

If you make the universe less massive--

PAT ROBERTSON: Yes.

The only elements you get are hydrogen and helium.

PAT ROBERTSON: Yes.

Make it slightly more massive, all the elements

are heavier than iron.

In both cases, you're missing the carbon, oxygen,

and nitrogen that's essential for life.

So the mass of the universe determines the chemistry

of the universe.

PAT ROBERTSON: But Hugh, you got to have all this mass?

All this mass in order to get the elements

you need for life, yes.

And I understand there was something

that scientists believe, called the Big Bang,

that there was an incredibly dense moment of a little bit

of matter, and it exploded, and out of that came the universe.

Is that the way it was?

That is the way it is.

But it must be incredibly fine tuned.

It's not a chaotic explosion.

It is the most fine tuned thing we

can measure in all of science.

It's such-- and I write about this in the book,

how the fine tuning of the universe

exceeds the best examples of what we human beings can design

and fine tune by greater than a factor of 10 trillion trillion

trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion

trillion trillion times.

Stop it-- come on!

In other words--

You're not just saying that?

I'm not just saying.

It's something we can measure.

Basically the God that created the universe

must be at least that many times more intelligent,

more knowledgeable, creative, and powerful than us

human beings.

PAT ROBERTSON: Is there any possibility this came just

from a spontaneous explosion, it had to have a creator, right?

It had to have a creator.

PAT ROBERTSON: Why?

And it has to be the creator God of the Bible.

There's many other gods and religions of the world,

but the universe we measure testifies

that it's the God of the Bible.

PAT ROBERTSON: You mentioned a few of those life elements.

What else is this improbable planet we live on?

Well, there's a chapter in the book where I talk about how we

have anomalous elements, which means that the 92 elements we

see on the earth-- for one, we have all 92, which is rare.

But when you look at the abundance of those elements

compared to what we see on other rocky bodies,

are extremely anomalous.

So for example, we have 340 times as much uranium,

630 times as much thorium.

We are the thorium and uranium champions of the universe.

PAT ROBERTSON: With this one planet?

This one planet.

Of all the other planets?

So the fact that we're extremely rich in uranium

and thorium explains why we've got the plate tectonics, which

allows our small planet to have oceans

and continents on its surface.

And that allows nutrients to be recycled

so advanced life is possible.

Without that, at best you could have bacteria and only

be able to exist for a short period of time.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, you know, the unbelievers just

are yearning to find life someplace else.

But does yours scientific inquiry

indicate there's anything else like this earth, any place

else in the universe?

Everywhere we look, we see hostility for advanced life.

We don't see a galaxy that's a candidate besides our Milky Way

galaxy.

We don't see a star that's sufficiently like our sun

that it could be a candidate in which a planet could orbit

and which advanced life exists.

PAT ROBERTSON: I remember you said

that you wrote about this galaxy of ours being

hidden in a spiral nebula where there's less chaos than others.

Could you tell us about that?

HUGH ROSS: Well, we live in a spiral galaxy with extremely

symmetrical spiral arms.

OK.

The galaxy is exactly the right mass for advanced life,

not too big, not too small, more dominated by dark matter

than other galaxies, and has very few spurs and feathers.

There's literally 200 different features of our Milky Way

galaxy that must be fine tuned to make advanced life possible

here on earth.

The Milky Way galaxy is part of this spiral nebula,

is that right?

The Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy--

It is a spiral.

--that's part of the local group.

PAT ROBERTSON: Oh, OK,

And which is a small cluster of galaxies.

Yeah, there is design even in our cluster of galaxies.

We don't see another galaxy cluster like ours,

and so now we've discovered-- I mean,

literally, this book arises from a Bible study

I did, [INAUDIBLE] Devotional, used that word yourself.

Five years ago, I did a devotional study

where I went through the entire Bible

and looked at all the major texts on creation,

over 1,500 of them.

What I noticed is they all linked

the doctrine of tradition to the doctrine of redemption.

And I also found passages that say

that God begins His works of redemption

before He creates anything, which implies that everything

that God creates is for the purpose of redeeming billions

of human beings.

Then I did a three-year search of the scientific literature

to see if that's really the case.

And this book basically tells a story

of how every event in the history of the universe, earth,

and earth's life, and every component of the universe,

Earth, and Earth's life, plays a critical role

in making possible the redemption of billions

of human beings in just thousands of years.

And so in the book I kind of take you

through a chronology of the history of all of creation,

and basically show every bit of it

as for the purpose of redemption.

PAT ROBERTSON: What does it look like the destiny of mankind--

I mean, here we are again, this planet, you see it out in space

and it's just a tiny little pin drop.

Just a little dot.

Yes, but if it were any bigger or any smaller,

it would be a problem.

PAT ROBERTSON: OK.

If we had different planets in our solar system,

there'd be a problem.

Every one of the 10 planets that originally formed

our solar system, there's eight now,

but all 10 must be fine tuned exactly the way

they are to make advanced life possible here on earth.

So come Thanksgiving, our family is going

to be thanking God for Neptune.

We're going to be thanking God for Venus.

Why Neptune?

What does Neptune do for us?

Well, the four gas giants that remain,

there were five to start with.

One got kicked out.

Four remain.

But it's that configuration of the five, and now the four,

that makes possible the configuration

of the rocky planets, Earth, Mars, Venus, et cetera.

And unless those eight planets are configured exactly the way

they are, you're going to get mean motion resonances which

make the system unstable for advanced life.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I understand

Jupiter is so big that it sucks in all these asteroids and--

Yeah, it protects us from an asteroid and comet collisions.

But you need Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to complement it.

PAT ROBERTSON: Why?

Well, it takes the four working together

to give us the ideal showering of comets and asteroids.

Now, we need some of these asteroids and comments

to collide with the earth.

For example, Earth would have been

bone dry if it wasn't for the delivery of water

from comets earlier in its history.

We hit Mars and we spun off the moon, was that a conclusion

between these two planets?

There was a planet called Thea that collided with the earth

very early in Earth's history that led

to the formation of the moon.

And without the moon, we wouldn't be here.

PAT ROBERTSON: Why, because--

Well, the fact that we have a tiny planet orbited

by a single gigantic moon that's not too far

away stabilizes the tilt of our rotation axis.

The other seven planets, they do this.

PAT ROBERTSON: All the time?

Yeah, whereas ours is nice and stable,

which gives us a climate.

We get four seasons and it's a stable climate.

And what I write about in the book,

we need extreme climate stability

in order for billions of humans to live in the planet one time.

And that stability has only existed in the last 9,000

years.

PAT ROBERTSON: The last 9,000, so that's

when mankind as we know it, homo sapiens,

really began to flower on the earth?

Well, God created human beings during the last ice age.

And we now have evidence that they

were trying to launch agricultural industry,

but because the temperature was jumping up and down by 24

degrees Fahrenheit, they were unable to sustain

large-scale agriculture.

And what it took was seven different cycles

of Earth's orbit and rotation to bring

about this period of extreme climate stability,

starting 9,000 years ago, and that's

what enabled us to have large-scale agriculture so we

could grow enough food to feed billions of human beings.

PAT ROBERTSON: What do you think this planet can sustain?

Do we know?

Period of extreme climate stability

can be sustained for a maximum of maybe 1,400 more years,

and it could be as little as 100.

PAT ROBERTSON: And that's it?

That's it.

So it's going to end, but the story

I concluded at the end of the chapter,

we're really close to fulfilling the Great Commission.

And the promise we have in Romans

is the moment that Great Commission is fulfilled,

God's going to replace the current creation with a brand

new creation.

And so I'm hoping as people read the book,

Christians who read the book will be motivated.

Hey, we can get this job done quickly.

PAT ROBERTSON: We'll end with a fervent heat, is that--

The universe will disappear with a fervent heat.

It'll be rolled up like a scroll.

There's actually a model in cosmology

that is consistent with that.

But the whole point is, God created this universe as a tool

to eliminate evil and suffering.

Now once that's achieved, we have the promise

of a brand new creation.

I am so thrilled.

You know, I talk to Hugh and my spirit just takes off.

I am not all that emotional, but this book,

"The Improbable Planet," you need to get a copy.

Now the thing that is important, I want to mention is,

that you, God bless you, have agreed

to help us at Regent University have a course in this.

And I want every single theological student--

we've got 1,000 divinity students

and hopefully it'll go to 2,000 or 3,000.

I want every one of them to take this course in cosmology.

What are we going to teach them?

Well, God gave us two revelations,

the book of nature, and the book of scripture.

We're commanded to study both.

Because the book of nature is a way

we can bring unbelievers to the book of scripture.

And what I describe in this book,

"Improbable Planet," this redemptive key

gives us a new way, a more efficient way of interpreting

the book of nature.

I'm speaking to secular scientists saying,

this is a better way to advance scientific research.

Interpret the book of nature in the context of redemption,

and we're going to make much faster scientific progress.

PAT ROBERTSON: You know, there's been a little struggle,

and I don't want to put down any of our brethren,

but the idea of the old earth and the young earth

and so forth, that this earth is only 6,000 years old and so

forth, because of adding up Usher's

dating in the Bible, what do you say about all that?

Well, we stress integration at Reasons to Believe.

It's not enough to try to interpret

the Bible from one book.

It's 66 books.

So we need to read the Bible both literally

and consistently.

So before drawing a conclusion, what are all 66 books saying.

Likewise with science, you need to look

at all the scientific disciplines

before you draw a conclusion.

Because what God reveals is truth, and nothing but truth.

It can't contradict.

And you see a contradiction, you know you've

made a mistake in integrating.

PAT ROBERTSON: So with the Big Bang, it looks like 14--

13.79 billion years ago.

PAT ROBERTSON: 13.97, 14 billion years, OK.

And there's not 6,000 years with that.

That's what all the geology--

Well, humanity is recent, but the earth and the universe

have been here for a long time.

This book tells the story of how God

used the whole age of the earth, the age of the universe

to open up this tiny window in which billions of us

can be redeemed, not in millions of years,

but only thousands of years.

PAT ROBERTSON: The Great Commission.

What a wonderfut-- listen, "The Impossible Planet,"

you need it.

Dr. Hugh Ross is here, and let me tell you,

Regent University is so blessed that they

can have a man of his caliber to assist

in teaching young people, young ministers, the truth of what's

going on in our world.

That's all the time we've got, but Hugh, God bless you, man.

You're an inspiration.

Thank you.