Bible Blunders - How Bronze Age Goat-Herders Described The Universe - And How It Really Is

N79, a star-forming region in the Large Megallanic Cloud

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-18

Galactic Genesis: Webb Space Telescope Reveals Massive Star-Forming Complex

If you asked any 6-year-old to draw a picture of what they thought the world with the sky, sun, moon and stars would look like if you could stand outside it, chances are they would come up with something not massively different to the way it is described in Genesis:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good …

Genesis 1:6-10

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.

Genesis 1:16-18

And it gets even more laughable when you read in Daniel:

Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven. And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. DANI And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.

Daniel 8:8-10

And it doesn't get any better in the New Testament, where the authors also though Jesus would believe the stars would fall to Earth when they broke loose.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.

Matthew 24:29
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.

Mark 13:25
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

Revelation 6:13

Right up to the final book in the Bible, the authors believed the stars were stuck to a dome over Earth and could shake lose, and when they did, they fell to Earth. Their cosmology hadn't progressed since the Bronze Age.

And yet, despite the stunning images of tiny fragments of a vast cosmos, with its trillions of trillions of stars in trillions of galaxies and vast nebulae, millions of light-years across, as revealed by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and before it, the Hubble telescope, there are still grown adults who think the childish description of the Universe and Earth's place in it in the Bible is more accurate and reliable than anything modern science, with its electricity, computers, radio and television, telephony, space-travel and satellite navigation systems, can describe.

This image of a region of the Large Megallanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, known as N79, was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, using its Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). Visible light is readily absorbed by such dense clouds of dust, but long-wave infrared light goes through more easily. So the infrared view of MIRI allows astronomers to peer deep into this star-forming region.

It shows young stellar bodies that are still cocooned in their natal womb of gas and dust. These so-called "protostars" haven't yet gathered enough material from this envelope to become massive enough to fuse hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines what a star is.

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