Refuting Creationism - Earth - Fine-Tuned for Disaters

Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea over 43 million years ago | Heriot-Watt University

According to new findings reported in a paper in Nature Communications, a mere 43 million years before creationists believe their god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East and fine-tuned it for (human) life, an event occurred which, had it happened today, would have been an almost unimaginable global catastrophe.

A 160-metre-wide asteroid or comet struck what is now the southern North Sea, about 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, creating Silverpit crater — a 3 km-wide impact crater surrounded by a 20 km zone of concentric faults. The resulting tsunami, exceeding 100 metres in height, would have swamped the coastal regions bordering the North Sea: the Low Countries (the Netherlands and Belgium), northern France, Denmark, Norway, and much of eastern England and Scotland.

If such an impact were to occur today, it would devastate major population centres and send massive tidal waves surging up major European rivers such as the Rhine and Thames. The death toll would be in the tens of millions, and the resulting economic and infrastructural collapse would almost certainly tip Europe and the UK into terminal decline.

Just 23 million years earlier, another impact event at Chicxulub crater, on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, had exterminated 75 % of all species, including all but the avian dinosaurs. This catastrophe plunged the world into a prolonged global winter, radically reshaping the trajectory of life on Earth and enabling mammals and birds to supplant reptiles as the dominant vertebrate groups.

And all this, on a planet in a universe which creationists insist — in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — was created perfect for human life by a benevolent god who wanted the best possible world for his “special creation”. That comforting narrative seems curiously blind to the frequent natural disasters inherent to a tectonically active planet orbiting in a cosmic shooting gallery of drifting rocks and icy bodies.

The origins of the Silverpit Crater have been debated since its discovery in 2002. Early hypotheses suggested that movement of subsurface salt or volcanic collapse of the seabed might explain its structure. Now, a research team led by Dr Uisdean Nicholson, a sedimentologist at Heriot-Watt University, together with Dr Tom Dunkley Jones of University of Birmingham, believe they have finally settled the debate: the crater was formed by the impact of an extraterrestrial body.

What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis? - Prempting Creationist Misrepresentations

What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis? - Universe Today

One of the oldest and most persistent tactics in creationist and intelligent design (ID) rhetoric is to invoke vast “improbabilities” to suggest that life could not have arisen naturally. The argument usually goes something like this: the odds of complex life emerging by chance are astronomically low, therefore it must have been designed. This is a textbook example of a false dichotomy — and it often rests on simplistic, outdated models of how abiogenesis is understood. A recent preprint by Robert G. Endres, reported by Universe Today, has already begun to circulate in ID circles as supposed “evidence” of just such improbability. But when read carefully, the paper does something very different: it provides a mathematical framework for understanding how life could arise, where the real constraints lie, and why the old “pure chance” caricature of abiogenesis is scientifically untenable.

In the abstract to his paper in arXiv, Enders says:

Abstract
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity. Using estimates grounded in modern computational models, we evaluate the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under plausible prebiotic conditions. Our results highlight the formidable entropic and informational barriers to forming a viable protocell within the available window of Earth’s early history. While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia—originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel—remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics.

Because we can guarantee that this article will be misrepresented by creationists who will make claims not supported by the paper, I asked ChatGPT for an objective evaluation of the article in Universe Today and Endres arXiv paper:

The following article looks suspiciously like a creationist argument based on notional improbabilities* Can you produce an objective evaluation of it, please.
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/what-were-the-chances-of-abiogenesis

Here is an objective evaluation of the article “What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis?” (by Mark Thompson, published on Universe Today) and the underlying pre-print paper by Robert G. Endres (arXiv:2507.18545). I’ll identify what the article does well, where it is weaker, and how one might interpret it in light of your interest (refuting creationism / intelligent-design arguments).

Refuting Creationism - How Social Norms Evolve - No God(s) Required

Fig. 3: Behavior-specific and situation-specific global everyday norms.

A A color-coded matrix illustrating the global appropriateness ratings (averaged over 71 societies) of fifteen behaviors in each of ten situations. B Scatter plot illustrating appropriateness ratings of fifteen specific behaviors aggregated across various situations (centered on the mean across behaviors) and their strong negative association with the sum of behavior-specific concerns about vulgarity and inconsiderateness. The index ‘b’ indicates that measures refer to behaviors. C Scatter plot illustrating appropriateness ratings of 15 behaviors in ten specific situations (n = 150 situated behaviors, centered on the mean across situations for each behavior) and their strong negative association with the sum of situation-specific concerns about inconsiderateness and lacking sense. The index ‘xb’ indicates that measures refer to situated behaviors. Gray shading indicates 95% confidence intervals.

Eriksson, K., Strimling, P., Vartanova, I. et al.(2025).

Global study reveals similarities and differences between everyday norms - Mälardalen University

An important new study, led by researchers from Mälardalen University (MDU, Sweden) and the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS), in collaboration with over 100 researchers worldwide, sheds light on how social norms vary across cultures yet share fundamental commonalities.

As someone who has travelled extensively in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, Kuwait, Oman, India, and the USA, I can personally attest to cultural differences that extend far beyond language. Everyday activities such as driving, for instance, reveal how deeply embedded these norms are. It can take several days to adapt to local expectations, and even then, you may still be greeted with an indignant horn or an icy stare for something entirely unremarkable in your own country.

Creationists often claim that morality is a divine gift — that without their god, we would have no concept of right and wrong. As an atheist, I grow weary of being told that I “hate God” because I supposedly “want to sin”, or that I lack a moral compass. Such accusations typically reveal more about the accuser than the accused. Many fundamentalists who level these charges online seem less concerned with moral reasoning than with projecting their own supposed moral superiority. The stench of hypocrisy is rarely far away when piety becomes a performance.

Ever since Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” — a unit of cultural inheritance analogous to a gene — in The Selfish Gene, we have had a clear framework for understanding how cultural traits evolve. Memes form complex structures known as “memplexes”, and some of these can behave parasitically, using their hosts to ensure their own propagation.

Just as evolving organisms form clades with shared major features but differing details, human cultures share foundational moral principles — prohibitions against needless killing, reciprocal respect (“treat others as you would want to be treated”), and the protection of children, among others. What varies are the details, both across time and geography.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Thrived Until Disaster Struck - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Small primitive mammals live alongside a Triceratops, pre-extinction. A softshell turtle climbs up a log, unaware that its freshwater surroundings will shelter it from the asteroid.

Illustration © Henry Sharpe.

Dinosaurs were on the up before asteroid downfall | News | The University of Edinburgh

This, the second paper, published in 2022 that utterly refutes creationism on several different levels, reports evidence that particularly undermines their claim that an omnibenevolent god created a world fine-tuned for life.

This belief arises from a deeply ignorant, rose-tinted view of the world — one that conveniently ignores history and habitually attributes anything bad to something else: sin, free will, or other theological constructs that, by their own narrative, could only have applied after some supposed “fall”.

In reality, even a superficial understanding of Earth’s history — 99.9975 % of which took place before creationism’s legendary “Creation Week” — reveals that the planet is anything but fine-tuned for life. Life on Earth has repeatedly been subjected to mass extinctions triggered by geological and cosmological catastrophes that wreaked havoc on the environment, often at a pace too rapid for most species to adapt.

One of the most famous of these events was the meteor impact in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, 66 million years ago. This strike plunged the planet into a “nuclear winter” as atmospheric dust blotted out the Sun. Within weeks, almost all large species were exterminated, leaving only the avian dinosaurs — likely shielded by insulating feathers — and early mammals, protected by their insulating fur.

But as this recent paper shows, the dinosaurs were thriving in a healthy, biodiverse environment in which they were the dominant species right up until the moment the meteor struck. Had they shared the creationists’ mindset, they might well have concluded that Earth was “fine-tuned” for them too.

The evidence for this comes from an international team of palaeontologists and ecologists, including researchers from University of Oulu (Finland), Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Washington (Seattle, USA), University College London (UK), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (USA), and University of Edinburgh (UK).

Creationism Refuted - Now It's A Transitional Dinosaur - Khankhuuluu The Dragon Prince

An artist's impression of Khankhuuluu mongoliensis

Masato Hattori

An artist's impression of the newly discovered dinosaur

Julius Csotonyi

Paleontologists from the University of Calgary identify closest-known ancestor to Tyrannosaurs | EurekAlert!

Two new papers announced today will have creationists scratching their heads as they try to decide which technique for dismissing them will meet with the most approval from their fellow cultists.

The first, in Nature, concerns yet another of those supposedly non-existent transitional fossils which, because Charles Darwin predicted they would be found, must be dismissed at all costs. It comes in the form of an 86-million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Mongolia that is intermediate between the small, fleet-footed predatory dinosaurs and the larger apex predators — the tyrannosaurs.

The usual creationist response is to declare that these intermediate fossils are “not transitional; they are fully formed, created species.” Of course, that doesn’t explain why species that are intermediate between ancestral and descendant species show a mosaic of features from both. Presumably, given their parody of evolution — in which evolution is imagined as a single event where one species suddenly turns into another — they expect an intermediate to be half one and half the other: the equivalent of the “crocoduck” or a chimpanzee with a human head. In reality, this discovery shows exactly what we would expect from the fossil record of tyrannosaur evolution 86 million years ago.

It's also important to creationism that the so-called 'missing link' stays missing. It is only ever referred to in the singular and refers to some supposed link between apes and humans, and it is definitely not one of the many archaic African hominins. But of course, every fossil is the 'link' or transitional form between its parents and its offspring because evolution is a process, not the parody event of creationism, evolving species form a continuum, and this discovery from Mongolia is no exception.

How Science Works - Biologists Might Need To Rethink A Detail Of Evolutionary Biology

Details of the surface of two sheet-like colonies of the ‘Berenicea’ type: (A) In Hyporosopora dilatata, the colony surface is relatively flat, save for the slightly convex zooids and faint growth lines (Upper Callovian or Lower Oxfordian, Oxford Clay; Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire); and (B) Well-defined transverse ridges cross the colony surface in Rugosopora enstonensis (Bathonian, Hampen Marly Beds; Enstone, Oxfordshire). Scale bars are 500µm.

Source: Bryozoans in the British Jurassic

New Study Reveals Berenicea Zooid Size Reduction Over 200 Million Years Contradicts Cope's Rule----Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery that a group of organisms has, contrary to “Cope’s Rule,” undergone a steady reduction in body size over the past 200 million years is a useful reminder of how science works — and why religion so often falters.

A cornerstone of the scientific method is its willingness to acknowledge error. Real intellectual strength lies not in clinging to discredited beliefs as though doing so were a test of character, but in facing up to mistakes, learning from them, and changing one’s mind. That is how knowledge advances.

Religion, by contrast, remains shackled to the dogmas of its ancient founders. To alter those fundamental beliefs is, in effect, to abandon the religion itself. This is why, while science has sent probes into deep space and placed human beings on the Moon, faith — despite lofty claims of being able to “move mountains” — has yet to lift so much as a feather a millimetre off the ground.

The new finding was just reported in the journal Palaeontology by Associate Professor MA Junye of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and collaborators. They found that Berenicea, a genus of cyclostome bryozoans, has experienced a continuous reduction in zooid size over the past 200 million years. This runs counter to “Cope’s Rule,” which describes a tendency for body size to increase during the evolution of many lineages.

Cope’s Rule was formulated by the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897). There are, of course, well-known exceptions — such as the “island effect,” where animals isolated on small islands often evolve into miniature versions of their mainland relatives — but these are localised adaptations to particular environments. Cope’s Rule, by contrast, applies to long-term, broad-scale evolutionary trends.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Abiogenesis News - Scientists Create Geothermal Vents In A Lab - And they Make Precursors For Life

A venting black smoker emits jets of particle-laden fluids. The particles are predominantly very fine-grained sulfide minerals formed when the hot hydrothermal fluids mix with near-freezing seawater. These minerals solidify as they cool, forming chimney-like structures. “Black smokers” are chimneys formed from deposits of iron sulfide, which is black. “White smokers” are chimneys formed from deposits of barium, calcium, and silicon, which are white.

Source: National Ocean Service.

Underwater thermal vents may have given rise to the first molecular precursors of life

A favourite disingenuous creationist tactic is to keep challenging science to achieve something that seems impossible—such as replicating the conditions of a deep ocean thermal vent to demonstrate that this could have been where life began. The trap is then to either gloat over science’s failure or to shift the goalposts and proclaim that any success merely proves that intelligence is required to create life.

So, we can almost guarantee that the news that a team of scientists at Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) in São Paulo, Brazil, have replicated not the thermal vents themselves but the chemical reactions believed to have occurred within them—and shown that these reactions do indeed produce the precursors of living systems—will be presented by creationists as supposed proof of the role of intelligence in the process.

The fallacy, of course, is that a laboratory experiment merely establishes the conditions under which natural forces can operate. By contrast, intelligent design advocates insist that an intelligent entity, working to a plan, must actively direct those natural forces to make chemistry and physics do something they supposedly couldn’t do on their own. Such is the intellectual dishonesty of many creationists that this distinction is either too subtle for them to grasp—or they deliberately ignore it.

Refuting Creationism - Waving Goodbye To Childish Superstitions

The Milky Way.

ESA - Gaia discovers our galaxy’s great wave

Astronomers, using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Gaia space telescope, have discovered a vast wave passing through the Milky Way Galaxy, spreading out from the centre like ripples in a pond but with a wave length of about 13,000 light-years. The origins of this wave are still a matter for speculation and will require further data before they can be determined.

With evidence such as this, only a creationist eager to prove that they’re too tough to be persuaded by mere facts could believe that the description of the universe in Genesis is a complete and accurate account of reality, far surpassing in accuracy and reliability anything that science can produce. And only someone desperate to believe it could imagine that the description in Genesis is some sort of metaphor or allegory with a deeper meaning, rather than a hopelessly bad guess made by ignorant Bronze Age storytellers.

How our knowledge of the Milky Way has improved over time is a measure of the extraordinary progress cosmology has made in just over a century. When Albert Einstein was writing his papers on relativity, it was widely assumed that the Milky Way *was* the universe. Then, about a hundred years ago, astronomers discovered that the galaxy rotates around a centre, and in the 1950s it was found to be warped. Meanwhile, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies and that the universe is vastly larger than previously imagined — and still expanding. Now, we can detect the motions of stars within the galaxy that reveal this ripple spreading outwards.

Meanwhile, Bible literalists are stuck with an understanding that has not advanced since the Bronze Age, based on a book which says Earth is fixed and immobile at the centre of everything, and that the stars are tiny lights attached to a dome over the world. Until around 600 years ago, the Church vigorously persecuted anyone who argued otherwise, desperate to preserve its power based on the claim that its holy book was the inerrant word of God. It was not until 1992 that the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo Galilei was right — 41 years after it had accepted the evidence for the Big Bang. Such is the muddle that religious dogma based on ancient, evidence-free superstitions creates.

The news of the wave spreading across the Milky Way comes in the form of a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and a news release from ESA.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.

Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”

A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.

This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.

And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.

An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.

After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.

Refuting Evolution - Allopatric Evolution, Just as The Theory of Evolution Predicts

(a) Chamaecyparis obtusa in Japan

(b) C. obtusa var. formosana in Taiwan

Map of the South China Sea showing the Ryuku Arc between Taiwan and Kyushu

Google Maps

Natural Japanese and Taiwanese Hinoki Cypresses Genetically Differentiated 1 Million Years Ago | Research News - University of Tsukuba

Japanese plant geneticists, led by scientists from University of Tsukuba, have shown that the Japanese and Taiwanese Hinoki cypresses began to diverge around one million years ago, following the destruction of a land bridge that once connected Taiwan to the Japanese archipelago.

This is a textbook example of allopatric speciation, in which an isolated population diverges from its parent population through a combination of founder effects, genetic drift, and natural selection in response to different environmental pressures.

The now-vanished land bridge once linked Taiwan to the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Its remnants form the Ryukyu Arc — a chain of small islands marking the south-eastern boundary of the South China Sea.

Faced with such clear evidence of speciation, creationists typically resort to a familiar tactic: redefining evolution into a straw man. They insist that “evolution” means one species turning in a single event into something utterly unrelated — for instance, that these cypresses should transform into daisies, cabbages, mammals, or birds. If such an absurd event ever occurred, it would in fact falsify evolutionary theory and throw the entire fields of biology and taxonomy into chaos. This is the standard creationist tactic on social media: misrepresent science, then demand that science defend the misrepresentation, and claim victory when it doesn’t.

The reality remains, however, that the divergence of these related species of cypress — and the fact that this divergence can be correlated precisely with geological change — stands as powerful evidence for Darwinian evolution. Charles Darwin knew nothing of genes, alleles, or genetic drift, yet his description of descent with modification through inherited traits is elegantly confirmed here by modern genetics and biogeography. The genus Chamaecyparis — commonly known as the false cypresses — is an evolutionarily interesting group of conifers in the cypress family Cupressaceae. Their distribution and divergence provide a good illustration of how geological change, climate oscillations, and geographic isolation have shaped the evolution of temperate conifers.

Unintelligent Design - How Wheat Could Have Been Designed To Give Tripple The Yield

A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD

News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.

This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?

How Science Works - And Why Religion Fails

Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia: Unipd develops new model to understand the origins of the Universe

Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Unlike religion, science does not claim to know exactly how the universe began. What we do know, however, is that at the moment when time (t) = 0, both time and space came into existence. This means that in the conventional sense of time, there was no ‘before’, because ‘before’ presupposes the existence of time. Questions about what existed before the Big Bang are therefore meaningless, even though our intuition insists that there must have been something.

Religion, by contrast, has claimed to know how the universe began ever since creation myths were first invented in the Bronze Age or earlier — and those claims have remained unchanged. The problem is that they substitute genuine explanations with “God did it!” — a statement that explains nothing, is untestable, unfalsifiable, and devoid of any predictive power. It provides comfort only to those who are content not to know the details and unconcerned with truth.

This highlights another crucial difference between science and religion as tools for understanding reality: science continuously updates its knowledge and understanding. It never settles on convenient certainties, no matter how emotionally satisfying they may be, nor does it declare the search for answers to be over.

For many years, the consensus in cosmology has been that the initial few microseconds of the Big Bang involved a period of hyperinflation — a rapid expansion driven by a massive increase in space. Now, however, a team of researchers from Spain and Italy has revived a model first proposed by Albert Einstein and the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, known as De Sitter space. Using this framework, they argue that gravity alone can explain the first few microseconds of space-time. Their new theory has been published, open access, in Physical Review Research.

One key advantage of this explanation over the inflationary model is its relative simplicity. It also, unlike the 'inflation' model, doesn't need elements that have never been observed, but relies solely on gravity and quantum mechanics. Applying Occam's razor, the simpler explanation with fewer elements or 'entities', is more likely to be correct.

How Science Works - Revising Our Knowledge Of Plant Dispersal

Plants colonising volcanic tepha on Surtsey

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

Plants colonising lava field on Surtsey island.

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

New study overturns long-held assumptions about how plants spread to islands | EurekAlert!

Plants that successfully leave more offspring are those with traits that allow their seeds to spread widely. That usually involves two key factors: tolerance or adaptability to new environments, and an effective way of reaching them. Over time, evolution has produced a variety of dispersal strategies—seeds can float on the wind, stick to animals, or pass through birds and end up deposited somewhere new.

Crossing the sea, though, adds another layer of difficulty. Seeds must survive what amounts to a small ocean voyage. For a long time, scientists assumed birds were the main way plants made these crossings. The idea was straightforward: birds eat fruit, fly to new islands, and excrete the seeds.

But new evidence has challenged that view. A recent open-access paper in Ecology Letters examines how plants have colonised Surtsey, the volcanic island that emerged off Iceland in 1963. This unique setting has allowed researchers to watch ecological colonisation unfold in real time.

Their findings were unexpected: most of the 78 vascular plant species that established themselves on the island weren’t fruit-bearing plants spread by birds, but grasses. While birds like geese and gulls did contribute to dispersal, most of the colonising species lacked the traits typically linked with long-distance dispersal.

Bible Refuted - A Possible Explanation for the Origin of the Implausible Exodus Myth

A view across the Amarna excavations at the South Tombs Cemetery in 2010, facing southeast.

Gwil Owen and the Amarna Project

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

Fig. 1. Map of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean (modified from Cohen and Westbrook 2000, xii).

Gretchen R. Dabbs & Anna Stevens (2025)

Mortality Crisis at Akhetaten? Amarna and the Bioarchaeology of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean Epidemic | American Journal of Archaeology: Vol 129, No 4

This paper in American Journal of Archaeology is tentative support for a theory that I find fascinating because it offers an explanation for the implausible Exodus myth in the Bible. The theory is that the myth is an exaggerated retelling of the expulsion or voluntary exile, of the Ahtenist sect from Egypt, complete with a 'royal' leader in the form of 'Moses' (an Egyptian name) - a retelling that grew over time and incorporated multiple miracles and the origins of the 'Law', with each telling until a small band became a mass exodus from which an entire new nation was built.

The exodus of Hebrew slaves from Egypt has too many inconsistencies for it to be real history - for example, the claim is that "600,000 men on foot" (Exodus 12:37), complete with their women, children and livestock, fled from Egypt into Sinai. That would mean some 2-3 million people - more than the then entire population of Egypt, plus livestock - far more than could be supplied with food and water in Sinai. There is also no archaeological evidence of such a large population ever living in Sinai for 40 years. It is inconceivable that they would leave no trace, not even the graves of those who died.

Then there is the story of 600, (horsedrawn) chariots (Exodus 14:7) pursuing them into the Red Sea, right after all the livestock, including, explicitly, all the horses, were killed in one of the plagues (Exodus 9:3-6).

Then there is the small geo-political problem that the story of crossing the Red Sea into Sinai 'from Egypt; ignores the fact that at that time Egypt not only controlled Sinai but its political and military control extended into Canaan, so the Israelites were leaving Egypt into... Egypt.

It is probably significant that during the entire telling of the tale of the Israelite's supposed captivity in Egypt, the pharaoh is invariably named 'Pharoh' (A Hebrew word), but never by his real name - Imhotep II, Rameses, Akhenaten, etc. It's as though the story-teller didn't know their names. This would be the equivalent of telling the Medieval history of England and only ever referring to 'King', never John, Henry IV, Edward II, etc.

Creationism Refuted - How Science Works - A Fossil Fly That Challenged Evolution.

A 150-million-year-old fossil with a singular adaptation may unlock the origin of quironomids | Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC

In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.

In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.

Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.

The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.

Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.

Creationism Refuted - Why Creationists Cling To Easily Disproven Claims - It's All About Weak People Needing To Appear Strong

Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength

Anyone who values facts as the foundation of rational opinion will quickly grow frustrated trying to reason creationists out of their infantile beliefs with information. The problem, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Social Psychology, is that creationists—like antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, flat-earthers, and those who believe Donald Trump will “make America great again”—see it as a weakness to ‘give in’ to reason. For them, it is a sign of strength to resist facts and cling defiantly to beliefs that can be easily disproven.

This reflex stems from an underlying sense of vulnerability in the face of complex information and a perception that science is attempting to manipulate them into conforming to mainstream knowledge. For such individuals, the priority is not to hold factually correct, verifiable beliefs—anyone can do that—but to assert symbolic strength by being contrary.

And what better evidence of that superior strength is there than persuading someone else to agree with you - by any means available?

Unfortunately, the full journal article is behind a paywall. However, two of the four authors have also written an accessible article in The Conversation, which is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Tracking Dinosaurs In Oxfordshire - 166 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aerial view of the trackway at Dewars Farm Quarry, Oxfordshire

Credit: Richard Butler,
University of Birmingham.

Oxford researchers return to the Jurassic Highway | University of Oxford

Members of the 2025 excavation team

One of the sauropod trackways.

Photos: Emma Nicholls.

Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.

About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.

When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.

The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.

Creationism Refuted - Hippos Lived In The Rhine - More Than 21,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Left mandible fragment of a female hippopotamus from Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim.
Between 46,000 and 48,300 years old.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived at the Upper Rhine in the same time frame as mammoths. In the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen a hippo reconstruction meets a mammoth skeleton.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived in Europe during the last ice age | University of Potsdam!

News that an international research team led by University of Potsdam and Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim, working with Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie, has produced evidence that hippos lived along the Rhine in what is now Germany some 21,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created out of nothing, will probably come as no surprise to creationists.

They are well-practised at living in a world where verifiable evidence repeatedly refutes their beliefs. Over time, they have developed all manner of convoluted mental gymnastics to cope with the resultant cognitive dissonance—secure in the arrogant conviction that their beliefs trump evidence simply because they label them “faith”.

Normal people, of course, tend to have the humility to accept that evidence is the only valid basis for an informed opinion, and that it must therefore take precedence over myths and fairy tales told to them by parents and authority figures with vested cultural interests. The real test of whether a belief is right or wrong is how well it is supported by evidence—not how cleverly the evidence can be ignored.

This discovery extends our knowledge of the extinction timeline of European hippos, previously believed to have disappeared around 115,000 years ago. The new evidence pushes that date forward dramatically, showing that they survived until about 31,000 years ago, at least in that part of Europe. It also clarifies how these European populations were related to the African hippos.

That timeline is not only inconvenient for creationists; it also highlights the parochial nature of the Bible’s authors, who clearly had no knowledge of flora and fauna beyond their narrow Middle Eastern world. Notably, the Bible makes no mention of the African megafauna—hippos, elephants, giraffes, or ostriches, for example. In fact, the latter would have posed a serious problem for their primitive taxonomy, which classified bats as “birds” simply because they could fly. One can only wonder where they might have placed the flightless ostrich.

Creationism Refuted - Time For A Bible Re-Write

A Palaeolithic handaxe with a broken distal end, discovered during the Ayvalık survey

Early humans may have walked from Türkiye to mainland Europe, new groundbreaking research suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.

The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.

This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.

The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Favoured The Naked Mole Rat

DNA repair mechanisms help explain why naked mole-rats live a long life

News that scientists have discovered what enables the naked mole-rat to live for up to 37 years — around ten times longer than relatives of a similar size — raises a troublesome question for creationists. The findings were reported recently in Science by a team of researchers from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Creationists like to flatter themselves with the notion that they are the favoured creation of their putative designer god and the ultimate expression of design perfection. So, when evidence emerges of other species surpassing humans in some way — bats with more robust immune systems, elephants and sharks being almost completely immune to cancers, peregrine falcons with far superior vision — it is typically ignored, met with incredulity, or dismissed as an ineffable mystery and part of some divine plan which in no way diminished the unique position of humans in the grand scheme.

Now, to add to their woes, comes the discovery that the secret of the naked mole-rat’s extraordinary longevity may be traced to changes in just four amino acids. This alone undermines creationist claims that mutations are always harmful and incapable of generating new genetic information.

Malevolent Designer News - A Newly-Designed Way To Increase Suffering Is Having Major Success in Southern China

Chikungunya Virus Replication Cycle

BioRender Science Templates

Guangdong faces largest chikungunya outbreak on record | EurekAlert!

An open-access report in the journal Biocontaminant [PDF] describes a sudden, large increase in the number of infections with the chikungunya virus in southern China, with more than 4,000 cases in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, and over 3,600 cases in Shunde District. The initial spread of the outbreak was observed in this region and quickly escalated into a major public health concern. These cases have not only been documented in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, and Zhanjiang within Guangdong Province but have also emerged in Macao and Hong Kong.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Intelligent Design Creationism accurately describes reality — that a supernatural entity, indistinguishable from the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible, is continually intervening in living organisms to ensure they conform to a divine plan for the world, particularly for human life.

Let’s also assume that William A. Dembski, Michael J. Behe, and other “CDesign proponentsists” are correct in asserting that the presence of “irreducible complexity” and particularly “complex specified genetic information” is evidence of the work of this putative designer.

How, then, does this announcement about the increase in cases of chikungunya in southern China fit into that worldview?

Chikungunya is a virus transmitted to humans only through the bite of a female Aedes mosquito when she takes a blood meal — in much the same way that Zika, yellow fever, and malaria are transmitted. Once infected, a person develops a sudden-onset fever with painful joints and acts as a reservoir for the virus, enabling the next mosquito to pick it up and continue the chain of infection.

The recent increase in cases is believed to be due to two main factors:

• More viruses circulating in the population
• More Aedes mosquitoes, with a northward spread driven by global warming

The genetic information in the chikungunya virus genome is clearly enabling the virus population to increase in response to environmental change. If this doesn’t qualify as “complex specified information”, it’s difficult to imagine what would.

Furthermore, the feeding strategy of the Aedes mosquito is a striking example of a finely tuned process: if any part of it fails, the entire transmission cycle collapses. By Michael J. Behe’s own definition, this appears to meet the criteria for “irreducible complexity” and, within that framework, would be touted as conclusive evidence of “intelligent design”.

The inescapable conclusion, then — if we accept the Intelligent Design worldview, in which a divine intelligence is the only possible explanation for such genetic information and irreducibly complex systems — is that both the virus and the mosquito have been intelligently designed to cause human suffering. They seem to have no other purpose than to reproduce themselves and increase infection levels within the population. In other words, according to the logic of ID creationism, this virus was designed with malevolent intent.

Creationism Refuted - Inclusions In 112 Million-Year-Old Amber Show A Diverse Ancient Ecosystem

Diptera: Chironomidae

Scientists unearth a 112-million-year-old time capsule filled with ancient insects | ScienceDaily

A rich source of amber from the Genoveva quarry in the Napo Province of Ecuador is revealing information about life in a dense, tropical rainforest 112 million years ago, requiring the most convoluted of mental gymnastics for creationists to ignore or deny. This newly described deposit, part of the Hollín Formation in the Oriente Basin, represents the first Mesozoic amber deposit with preserved insects ever discovered in South America — and one of the largest known anywhere on the former Gondwanan supercontinent.

Unlike rock fossils, where finer detail is often lost through mineralisation and geological processes, amber frequently preserves plant and animal life with exquisite microscopic precision. This makes the Ecuadorian deposit, produced at a time when Gondwana was on the verge of splitting into Africa and South America, a rare and invaluable window into the humid, densely vegetated ecosystem of an equatorial rainforest during the Cretaceous Period.

Amber is the solidified resinous sap of trees — often conifers such as araucariaceans — and can originate from branches, trunks or even roots, preserving both aerial and subterranean organisms. Almost all known amber deposits come from the northern hemisphere, particularly from Eurasia and North America, so this southern hemisphere deposit provides an unprecedented opportunity to study an ancient Gondwanan ecosystem at a crucial time in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The contrast between this rich, 112-million-year-old ecosystem and the simplistic biblical creation myth is as stark as it could be. Even if we had no other fossils, the life forms trapped in this amber — representing at least five insect orders, spider silk, and an abundance of pollen and spores from ferns, cycads, conifers and early angiosperms — would comprehensively refute the notion of a young Earth created in its present form.

Another strength of amber as a fossil medium is that it is always contemporaneous with the bioinclusions it preserves — organisms became trapped while the resin was still liquid — removing the additional uncertainties sometimes introduced when dating fossils embedded in sedimentary matrices.

Refuting Creationism - Rock Art From Arabia - 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

12,000-year-old monumental camel rock art acted as ancient 'road signs' to water sources - Griffith News

Thousands of years before creationism’s god supposedly decided to create a small, flat planet with a dome over it, centred on a tiny patch of the Middle East, humans were already leaving road signs and directions to water sources carved into rocks in what is now the Arabian desert. These carvings offer a fascinating insight into the region’s prehistoric megafauna—and, of course, all such evidence of early human activity would have been completely obliterated by the biblical genocidal flood, had such an event really occurred as described.

The rock carvings were discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and including scholars from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), University College London, Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and others. Their findings were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago.

At the time, the region that is now arid desert was made habitable by a humid period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when surface water was abundant. Stone tool manufacture from the site shows clear cultural links with Neolithic societies in the Levant—ironically, the very region where the authors of Genesis set most of their imaginative origin myths, apparently oblivious to the deeper history of the area or the existence of earlier human populations beyond their narrow horizons.

Creationism Refuted - The Cosmos Is Not Fine-Tuned For Life

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova.

W.M. Keck Observatory/
Adam Makarenko.

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas.

W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko.

Astronomers capture red supergiant’s death throes - Northwestern Now

Although now rather old news, the observation of the death of a red supergiant star in 20222 has just been reported in Science Daily, prompting me to look again at the 'fine-tuned universe' argument beloved by (usually American) creationists, and often repeated uncritically with little or no understanding of the subject.

Briefly, the argument is that the universe is so “finely tuned” that changing even a single parameter by the smallest amount would make life impossible. The superficiality of this argument is revealed by the fact that many of the same individuals also claim that radiometric dating is unreliable because radioactive decay rates were supposedly much higher in the past. Yet, if that were true, their fine-tuning claim would collapse entirely: accelerated decay would have released so much energy that not only would life have been impossible, but atoms themselves could not have formed at the time they claim their deity magically created everything.

The fine-tuning argument collapses almost immediately when creationists are asked to explain any of the supposed parameters in detail. Specifically, they cannot show the theoretical range of values that parameter could take, nor can they demonstrate how the probability of its current value was calculated without access to multiple universes where it differs. In practice, no such calculation is ever performed; instead, a vanishingly small probability is simply asserted without evidence. Yet if no other values are actually possible, then the probability of the parameter having its current value is not small at all — it is certain (i.e. 1).

Unintelligent Design - The Needless Complexity That Produces Orchids

Cremastra variabilis

Cremastra variabilis

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life | Kobe University News site

An interesting open-access paper, recently published in the journal, Functional Ecology, by two researchers from Kobe University, Japan, explains the complex, symbiotic relationship between an orchid and a wood-decomposing fungus, not only between the fungi and the adult plants that depend on the fungi to provide the orchid with nutrients, but also for the orchid seed to germinate.

This complex relationship appears to benefit the orchid because it can live in otherwise nutrient-poor conditions. However, from an intelligent design perspective, it makes no sense at all because an omnipotent, omniscient designer could have endowed the orchid with the genetic machinery to do what the fungus does.

The relationship between the seeds and the fungus is even more bizarre. The seeds, unlike those of other plants, are devoid of nutrients and therefore need the fungus to supply some. Orchid seeds are notoriously small, being almost invisible to the naked eye. Contrary to Jesus’s bizarre reputed claim in the Bible that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, orchid seeds are orders of magnitude smaller.

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Matthew 13: 31–32

The mustard seed is not only not the smallest of seeds but also doesn’t grow into a tree!

Contrary to what creationists have been conditioned to believe, one of the hallmarks of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity because the simpler a process is, the fewer opportunities there are for it to go wrong.

The converse is true for evolved organisms and processes because there is no plan or foresight in evolution, which can only build on what is already present, and natural selection prioritises utility, based solely on what is better than what preceded it. Consequently, evolved organisms are a collection of suboptimal compromises, and there is selection pressure to minimise failures with another layer of complexity.

This has led to confusion in creationist thinking, which associates complexity with intelligent design as they try to force-fit what can be observed with their need to have a role for their particular deity — especially in their own ‘design’ — giving them a sense of importance that being ‘merely’ the product of evolution doesn’t give them.