Ophiolite said:
Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist and Christian apologist. His assessment that the odds of life arising naturally are essentially zero, supports his belief in a Creator. One wonders to what extent his religious beliefs might impact upon his calculations.
He has written or contributed to a score of books and I am not clear in which one he lays out the 147 requirements for life. Without access to those 147 requirements it is impossible to address them, but we might be reasonably suspicious of how he has been able to assign specific and reliable numbers to each of the 147 requirments, when such specificity has eluded most experts across the number of fields they are likely to cover.
I'm not sure why a Christian faith would impact one's research into this area, though, Ophiolite. I don't know of a single Christian academic and apologist (though, I think some do exist ...they're just not respected ones from what I would surmise) who believes the Christian God necessarily
only "created" humans on Earth. All of the top Christian academic apologists see no contradiction between Christianity and life having been created/developed elsewhere in the universe. And that's also the position of the world's most renowned academic Christian apologist, William Lane Craig.
But supposing it were true that there was a possible bias, it's not to say that one cannot be objective still. We do this all the time in other areas of life. In America, at least, racial bias is a very common unconscious bias. Numerous psychology, social psychology, and FMRI studies show that people have unconscious racial biases. Yet, we're able to keep them in check by first acknowledging that we have or may have these biases. Then we can actively ask ourselves questions like: "Would I think of this or that in the same way if the subject were of my own ethnicity/racial background or that of the dominant group?" Admittedly, it can be tough to always identify potential situations where our biases arise. But I think once you get into the mindset that we do often have them and actively try to combat them and attempt to be objective, then it's possible to control for them - all the more so when your work is in science, where results can often be easily proven/disproven.
By the eway, the 147 conditions figure is found in his book
Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men.
He also discusses that figure in this video interview on the same book:
There are some examples of specific conditions too...though he doesn't list all 147...which would take a long time and probably get boring too!
It's around the 7 minute 50 second mark that he talks about this. Let me know what you think. Could be fun to discuss.
