Pros: High quality from cover to cover, both in form and content.
Cons: Editor's use of occasional "nonsexist language" mars the readability. Inferior Bible version quoted.
The Bottom Line: A good display book: Looks great, easy to read, would keep the casual reader engrossed, and has references to explore further. Covers both science and religion.
topreviewerman's Full Review: Hugh Ross - Why the Universe Is the Way It Is
If you're looking for a display book to set out to entertain your guests, you could do a lot worse than Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is. To start with, it has one of the most striking covers I've ever seen. Author and title are embossed in a professional layout with the WHY in the title punctuated by a color picture of a nebula in the shape of a question mark.
It's a rather small book for the material it covers (218 pages), but then the reader is less likely to be intimidated that way. It's divided into two distinct parts. The first part covers science as it relates to why the universe is the way it is, and the second part covers the religious aspect. The chapters are further subdivided into short sections of one or two pages each, and it ends with appendices and an associated web site which isn't current, last I looked, but this one works: http://www.reasons.org/dr-hugh-ross.html . The material goes one step beyond Ben Stein's pseudo-documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in exploring the why, not the how of an intelligently designed universe. I would think that this book would tend to open up dialog as it directly confronts the God question, not leaving it in the background as Stein's does.
I have a degree in engineering and am comfortable reading long technical works if the material interests me, but this one is quite at the layman's level. (There are references in notes for anyone who really wants to get technical.) Each chapter starts with an automobile analogy where Dr. Ross mentions a co-worker or someone by name, the type of car he or she drives, and the "why" of its design or function, relating that to the universe. He sort of brings it down to human terms much like Forrest Gump's "Life is like a bowl of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." While Forrest dealt with the What, Dr. Ross deals with the Why, the universe being like an automobile.
It would be like me relating the coming "New Creation" to a radio show on automobiles I was listening to. The speaker said there were usually three reasons why people get a new car: Just needing a new style, a new look; Wasn't meeting their needs; and/or Cost of repairs overwhelming them. Then I relate that to the new universe God is going to create for his redeemed people. First of all, it's more God's style to have one with only good in it, no more of those pesky questions: If God is all powerful, why did he allow …? That's the philosophical issue. Next comes the scientific one. This old universe with its law of decay—2nd law of thermodynamics—just doesn't meet the needs of a people destined to live eternally. And thirdly, there's the scripture: (Heb. 1:10-12) "And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail." It just got to be too expensive to patch up that old garment, so he changes it. Expand those ideas to 218 pages, and you've got Dr. Ross's book.
There are two questions in particular I had that Dr. Ross answered well enough: isn't six days a little short for creation time? and what about the dinosaur bones? The Hebrew word for day can mean a twenty-four hour period, or just the daylight portion of it, or a part of that time, or an indeterminate long period of time. Genesis was using this last definition. The first day, when God made light on the raw Earth referred to the opaque atmosphere becoming translucent, and the periodic "days" of creation go on from there. To build up a biomass able to sustain intelligent civilization required some of these "days" and a bit of recycling, as per (Psalm 104:24-25, 29-31) "O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. … Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth. The glory of the LORD shall endure for ever: the LORD shall rejoice in his works." We have the Bible referring to both mass extinctions (see desslok's review of 2008, "The Day the Earth Stood Still"), and regeneration as in the Cambrian explosion Dr. Ross mentions in "Why the Universe Is the Way It Is." This happens over those long "days" to build up the biomass needed for civilized man. Many details are gone over, from the mass of the universe to its rate of expansion to Earth's cozy little niche in it. Of curious note is the author's calculation of the probability of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I heard on the radio where some physics students in Boston used the same approach to find the likelihood of there being girlfriends for themselves. They took the population of Boston and divided it in two to get the number of females, then they took that portion of them who were college educated, within ten years of their own ages, and unmarried, and they arrived at a number of, I think, 12,500 which wasn't that many in a city that large. Meanwhile, a female professor had them try it for her, but she was more particular. She wanted him to make more money than she did and to be taller than her—and she was tall for a woman. They did the calculation and found there wasn't anybody for her. Me, I signed up for a matching service, to find my perfect match, suited to my personality, but after they kept sending me leads for these "wild women," I asked for my money back. I felt I didn't have to pay money to find wild women. They're all over the place. They grow like weeds.
I think Hugh Ross has it figured that there just isn't any other life in the universe besides on Earth. Other scientists think that it may exist although it would be rare. Me, if I were to go space exploring, they'd probably have to send me through quarantine/fumigation twice when I return just to be safe. I don't necessarily agree with everything Hugh Ross writes, but mostly it sounds reasonable to me. I recommend his book but with two caveats:
Readability: Hugh Ross, PhD has authored many books and spoken on hundreds of campuses in the US and abroad. He is a competent communicator. Furthermore, he acknowledges a whole team that helped him put together the nuts and bolts of his book, "Why the Universe Is the Way It Is." It is quite well written, beyond criticism by all but the pickiest reviewer. … Except … .
Academia is a funny place. I was pushing a laundry cart past the university the other day when a front wheel came off. After ascertaining the trouble, I asked a passing student if he happened to have a cotter pin. No, he didn't. Then he asked me, "What's a cotter pin?" (I managed to fashion one from two staples.) Oh my. You would think that a consummate communicator would know what a pronoun is. It's a little word that can be substituted for big words and phrases according to long established and universally understood rules. It is not a vehicle to fight supposed sexism—except perhaps as a transient use in special circumstances. (Those staples are going to be replaced by the real thing the next time I take the cart out.)
Reading through the Acknowledgements I note it was one Patti Townley-Covert, executive editor of Reason To Believe, who "guided [Hugh Ross] through multiple drafts to enhance … the readability." I could be reading too much into a name, but generally speaking, women who employ a hyphenated last name are found towards the outer fringe of "nonsexist language" use. (See my review of the movie Appaloosa for more on the related topic of a woman's titles.) The feminists who tried to manipulate our English language for their own ends had an optimistic view that they were improving communication. An example is Rosalie Maggio, A Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage—quoted in Paul Eschholz et al, Language Awareness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977) pp. 247f—: "One of the most rewarding side effects of breaking away from traditional, biased language is a dramatic improvement in writing style. By replacing fuzzy, overgeneralized, cliché-ridden words with explicit, active words ... you can express yourself more dynamically, convincingly, and memorably." Unfortunately, our language does not lend itself to such facile manipulation.
A language is simply too big an entity to be manipulated for gains in one area without risk of suffering losses in others. As expressed by Michael T. Gibbons in his essay Interpretation, Genealogy and Human Agency, printed in Terence Ball, Idioms of Inquiry, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) p. 138: "Language is the expression of a mode of being in the world; language, in some fundamental sense, helps constitute our social life, practices, and our world. Hence, it is only through language that we come to know, reflect upon, and act upon the world. Moreover, in part because our language is shared by a community, it is always more than we can oversee; we cannot hope to command our language, to have it at our disposal." Does "nonsexist language" in fact improve readability? Let me take you through what I found in "Why the Universe Is the Way It Is," and you can be the judge whether it helped this book.
Pronouns. Let's start with one of those long established rules, from H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, (USA: Oxford University Press, 1946) p. 648: "The right shortening of the cumbersome he or she, his or her, &c., is he or him or his though the reference may be to both sexes. Whether that reluctance [to use this shortening] is less felt by the male is doubtful. Each, one, person, &c., may be answered by her instead of him & his when the reference, though formally to both sexes, is especially to the female." Bearing that in mind, let's look at Dr Ross's book, page 31, where he gives this comparison: (I add emphasis) "Shrink an average star down to the size of a grapefruit. Hold that grapefruit and ask a friend to hold another. Given the average distance between stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, can you guess where your friend would have to take her grapefruit to illustrate the distance between stars? If you, with grapefruit in hand, stood in downtown Los Angeles, she would have to travel to Peru or Siberia." This is hypothetical. One would not be able to get a grapefruit through customs to either Peru or Siberia, not without some serious baksheesh. As I'm reading this, I'm having a hard enough time visualizing galaxies, stars, me in LA, and grapefruit going out through customs, and now I have to worry about the exception to the rule, with the she construction, whether I'd be more willing to send a female friend abroad with contraband than a male friend. This does not make it more readable.
Let's take another example using another comparison Ross makes in the box on page 40: "The more an elastic band is stretched, the more energy it gains to encourage its contraction. Thus, the more someone stretches the band with his fingers, the more he feels the tension that impels the band to contract." The sentences are correct as they stand, using the pronoun he to stand for either sex. It follows the rule and fits stylistically into the narrative by shortening the thought. The feminists who want to substitute "she", I would allow them to use it here, because rubber bands are often associated with domestic kitchen scenes and hair grooming (pigtails), so it could be more associated with females than males. At any rate, I don't think it would hurt the readability. I'm not chauvinistic in my use of he. I'd allow for she here.
Let's move on to page 104. "If the universe really is 'all that is,' as Sagan, naturalists, and secular humanists claim, then what anyone does with his or her life—whether a person lives or dies, loves or hates, gains knowledge or remains ignorant—carries no ultimate significance or purpose whatsoever." Here I believe the sentence would have been more readable with the pronouns his and he substituted respectively. Do the feminists really need so desperately to emphasize that women as well as men lead insignificant lives, that they must clutter up our sentences which already make it amply clear they apply to both sexes, the masculine pronoun notwithstanding?
On to page 173: "Everyone has moments when they wish that law [of decay] would generate less deterioration." Here he wishes is more correct in the formal writing of a book. As a group, generally speaking, we don't wish for things all at the same moment, so it is clearer left in the singular.
Now page 187. "With the consent of the surrendered individual, the Holy Spirit begins the process of transforming that person's mind, heart, and character to bring that person into a deepening and widening relationship with God." Here a judicious use of his and him would be more readable than the cumbersome "that person." That's what pronouns are for.
Pages 189, 191. "If with God's help, an individual can overcome this great temptation, he or she can rest assured for all eternity. ¶"By choice the captive makes such a practice of obedience that Christ's will in his or her life becomes strong enough to overcome the tug of personal autonomy with all its illusions." I don't see the need to emphasize that women are subject to temptations. A simple he and his would have sufficed, in this reviewer's opinion.
The editor not only avoided the pronoun rule, but she used a repertoire of variations the feminists have at their disposal. If someone wants to use a nonstandard rule, it helps if she'll stick to one, not many which only further degrade readability by having us figure out afresh what is going on each time we encounter another one.
This book in particular is easy to put into perspective regarding such pronoun use, because the author gives us a chronological cosmology, on page 186, numbers 4, 5: "On Earth God created Adam, then placed him in … the Garden of Eden. ¶"In Eden God created Eve and brought her to Adam." (I've alluded to this order of creation in my review of the movie WALL-E.) In the garden, before Eve was made, if one wanted to refer to the man by a pronoun, he'd use a masculine pronoun he. If he wanted to refer to anyone there at all, it would still be he. Once Eve arrived, we'd use she when referring to her in particular, but when there was no need to single her out or emphasize her, the same old he would do when referring to anyone at all, because it's just a rule, and why would anyone bother to get all upset about it? We're in the beautiful Garden of Eden. We have better things to do than to shuffle around rules to no purpose.
Then came the temptation and the Fall, a consequence of which to the woman, mentioned on page 168, was, " … thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Ross elaborates on the next page (169), "husbands and wives struggle to sustain harmony with each other. The balance of authority and responsibility seems extremely difficult for any couple to maintain." This struggle spilled over into an awkward attempt to manipulate our language, resulting in a less readable copy of this book. I penciled in the appropriate corrections as I've outlined above. There are two more corrections I've made.
On page 44, it reads, "That may seem like a long time from a layperson'sperspective, but astronomers think otherwise." What is this? Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Give this book to a nervous student and have him read out loud, in public, "layperson's perspective." Give me a break. I changed it to "layman's." Ditto for page 188, "Not all Christian scholars, pastors, or laypeople agree that Jesus Christ will reign on the present Earth for a thousand years as a prelude to humanity's entrance into the new creation." Since we know we're talking about humanity, why need to emphasize it with laypeople? A simple laymen suffices and preserves better the flow of the text in a sequence of two-syllable words.
Next, "Why the Universe Is the Way It Is" meet "The Way Things Ought To Be," by Rush Limbaugh (New York: Pocket Books, 1992). On page 191 of Rush's book, discussing feminism, he writes, "Fortunately, many young women today have little in common with the militants of the 1970s, many of whom are now the embittered feminazis. ¶"It's almost as if America went through its own Cultural Revolution in the 1970s and early 1980s. Everything went mad for about ten years, and only now [1992] are we seeing young people who now view those years as somewhat bizarre." One of the "everythings" that "went mad" was our English language under feminist manipulation. We're starting to recover, I hope. Unfortunately, the New International Version of the Bible (NIV), you will find if you look inside its cover, was copyrighted in 1973, 1978 & 1984, the very years of that madness. That book is set in that framework, so I won't use it as it is harmful to women as I pointed out in my review of the movie Sex and The City. I've marked Dr. Ross's book accordingly by replacing his NIV quotes with quotes from the KJV, which I've listed at the end of my review in the religion section in case you want to follow suit, or just to peruse them.
Increasingly astronomers recognize that if the cosmos had not unfolded exactly as it did, humanity would not, could not, exist. Yet these researchers-...More at Christianbook.com
Ross, founder and president of Reasons to Believe, reveals the universe s design, its purposes, and God s surpassing love for his creation.More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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