Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Beyond The Comprehension Of The Bible's Authors

The smouldering heart of a celestial cigar | ESA/Hubble

Location of the Cigar Nebula (M82).

Here we have yet another image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by the European Space Agency—not to belittle the Bible’s account of creation in Genesis, though that happens automatically. The biblical description reflects the view of a pre-scientific people who imagined a flat Earth under a solid dome, with stars as tiny lights stuck to it and the Sun and Moon moving across the sky like lamps hung for our benefit. It reads exactly like the report of someone told to look up and describe what they see without any understanding of what lies beyond.

Modern astronomy shows us something utterly different. The universe is not a small stage with a few lights above it, but a vast, dynamic cosmos shaped by natural processes. Stars are born, live, and die in titanic cycles of creation and destruction; galaxies collide and merge; black holes sculpt their surroundings with unimaginable power.

This particular image, ESA’s Picture of the Week, captures the so-called Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82), a starburst galaxy just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Here we see the turbulent heart of a galaxy where new stars are forming in great swathes, driving winds of gas and dust thousands of light-years into space.

The contrast could not be greater: a childlike tale of a sky-dome with a few lights versus the grandeur of a living universe billions of years old and on a scale our ancestors could never have imagined. Contrast the Bible's description with that of ESA's description of the image:

Biblical Cosmology vs* Reality. The Bible’s description (Genesis and elsewhere):

Flat Earth on foundations – “He set the earth on its foundations, it can never be moved” (Psalm 104:5).
Solid dome sky (firmament) – “God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament” (Genesis 1:7).
Sun and Moon as lamps – “God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night” (Genesis 1:16).
Stars as small lights – also in Genesis 1:16, “He made the stars also” — a casual afterthought, as if they were pinpricks on the dome.
Waters above the sky – the floodgates of heaven could be opened to let rain fall (Genesis 7:11).

The scientific reality:

Earth is a planet orbiting the Sun, itself one star among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, filled with billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.
Stars are massive nuclear furnaces, not tiny dots of light; many are vastly larger than our Sun.
The Earth is not fixed — it spins on its axis and orbits the Sun while the entire solar system orbits the galaxy.

What lurks behind the dense, dusty clouds of this galactic neighbour? There lies the star-powered heart of the galaxy Messier 82 (M82), also known as the Cigar Galaxy. Located just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (The Great Bear), the Cigar Galaxy is considered a nearby galaxy. As this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week shows in great detail, it’s home to brilliant stars whose light is shaded by sculptural clouds, clumps and streaks of dust and gas.

It’s no surprise that the Cigar Galaxy is so packed with stars, obscured though they might be by the distinctive clouds pictured here. Forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way, the Cigar Galaxy is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. The intense starburst period that grips this galaxy has given rise to super star clusters in the galaxy’s heart. Each of these super star clusters contains hundreds of thousands of stars and is more luminous than a typical star cluster. Researchers used Hubble to home in on these massive clusters and reveal how they form and evolve.

Hubble’s views of the Cigar Galaxy have been featured before, both as a previous Picture of the Week in 2012 and as an image released in celebration of Hubble’s 16th birthday. The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has also turned toward the Cigar Galaxy, producing infrared images in 2024 and earlier this year.

This image features something not seen in previously released Hubble images of the galaxy: data from the High Resolution Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The High Resolution Channel is one of three sub-instruments of ACS, which was installed in 2002. In five years of operation, the High Resolution Channel returned fantastically detailed observations of crowded, starry environments like the centres of starburst galaxies. An electronics fault in 2007 unfortunately left the High Resolution Channel disabled.

What the Hubble images show us, time after time, is that the universe is infinitely grander, older, and more complex than anything imagined by the anonymous authors of Genesis. Their account reflects a tribal people’s attempt to make sense of the sky with no tools beyond naked-eye observation and folklore.

By contrast, modern astronomy reveals a cosmos in constant motion, driven by natural processes that require no supernatural hand. Galaxies collide, stars are born and die, and elements forged in their cores seed future worlds — including the one we inhabit. This vision is not diminished by science; it is made immeasurably greater.

To insist that the Genesis story is literal truth is to cling to a child’s sketch when the full reality is available in breathtaking detail. It shrinks the universe to a few lamps on a dome and reduces human curiosity to obedience. The real universe is far more inspiring: a vast, evolving cosmos in which we are part of the story, not the centre of it.

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