Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - What a Tiny Part Of The Universe Looked Like 150,000 Before 'Creation Week'

A cluster of stars in space. It’s bright in the centre, where the stars are densely packed together in the cluster’s core, and grows dimmer and more diffuse out to the edges, as the stars give way to the dark background of space. A few orange stars are spread across the cluster, but most are pale, bluish-white points of light. Three large stars with cross-shaped spikes around them lie between us and the cluster

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Monelli
Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

Digging up a galactic time capsule | ESA/Hubble

The ESA/Hubble photograph of the week offers a glimpse into a vast and ancient universe—one that starkly contrasts with the primitive cosmology described in the Bible. The image captures a globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located some 160,000 light-years from Earth. What we’re seeing, then, is a snapshot of this cluster as it was 160,000 years ago—long before the writers of the Bible imagined their god creating a small, flat Earth with a dome over it, to which the sun, moon, and stars were affixed, somewhere in the vicinity of the Canaanite hills.

At the time, the light we’re now seeing began its journey across space, early humans in Africa were evolving the skills and traits that would eventually allow them to leave the continent and colonise new territories. According to [a recent study](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1768), there had been earlier migration attempts northward, but these failed to establish lasting populations for reasons still debated by researchers.

What this photograph shows us—quite literally—is a universe that predates the biblical account of creation by well over 150,000 years, and a cosmos that bears no resemblance to the geocentric, dome-covered world described in Genesis. While we can’t know exactly how our early ancestors viewed the night sky, their understanding was likely not very different from that of the later Bronze Age storytellers who wrote the biblical texts. Both were constrained by limited technology, and neither had any inkling of galaxies, light-years, or cosmic timescales.

The data for this image comes from an observing programme comparing old globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies — the LMC, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy — to the globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy contains over 150 of these old, spherical collections of tightly-bound stars, which have been studied in depth — especially with Hubble Space Telescope images like this one, which show them in previously-unattainable detail. Being very stable and long-lived, they act as galactic time capsules, preserving stars from the earliest stages of a galaxy’s formation.

Astronomers once thought that the stars in a globular cluster all formed together at about the same time, but study of the old globular clusters in our galaxy has uncovered multiple populations of stars with different ages. In order to use globular clusters as historical markers, we must understand how they form and where these stars of varying ages come from. This observing programme examined old globular clusters like NGC 1786 in these external galaxies to see if they, too, contain multiple populations of stars. This research can tell us more not only about how the LMC was originally formed, but the Milky Way Galaxy, too.

What science reveals through images like this is a universe that is unimaginably vast, ancient, and complex—utterly inconsistent with the small, primitive cosmos described in Genesis. The biblical authors imagined a flat Earth with a solid dome above it, holding the sun, moon, and stars like ornaments on a ceiling. This wasn't a divine revelation; it was the best guess of people living in the ancient Near East, working with no more than unaided observation and inherited mythologies.

Far from being the words of an all-knowing creator, the Genesis account reflects the limitations of its human authors. Their understanding of the world was bounded by what could be seen with the naked eye, shaped by oral traditions and the assumptions of a pre-scientific age. They had no concept of galaxies, deep time, or the speed of light—let alone evolution, plate tectonics, or the scale of the cosmos.

Science, by contrast, builds knowledge through evidence, testing, and refinement. It has revealed a universe that operates according to discoverable laws, not arbitrary divine decrees. The picture we now have is one that makes the biblical creation story look not just inaccurate, but profoundly parochial—an artefact of its time, not a timeless truth. The wonder of it is not that the authors of Genesis got it so wrong, but that modern people, with access to irrefutable contrary information, still insist they were right.

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