Rosa Rubicondior: How Do We know The Bible Is Wrong? - We Look At The Real-World Evidence, Of Course!

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing | ESA/Hubble

A paper in Nature Communications by an international research team of astronomers led by Professor Francesco R. Ferraro of the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy, reveals a universe utterly at odds with the description of it in the Bible. It should be a simple matter to compare this real universe with the one described in the Bible and draw the obvious conclusion from the glaring differences — but not, it seems, for creationists.

The connection between opinion and evidence appears to be lost on creationists who are determined to cling to patently wrong beliefs, despite the evidence, as though evidence has no right to intrude on their thought processes. In this worldview, truth is unrelated to real-world evidence and must comply with a creationist’s beliefs.

Let’s take a couple of simple examples and apply creationist “logic”.

Firstly: you need to cross a road. How do you know it’s safe before you step off the kerb?

You look at the evidence — how busy is the road? Are there any vehicles approaching, especially on your side? If there are, the evidence tells you that you can’t safely cross and need to wait.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence as unwanted and unwelcome and conclude that the road is safe to cross because you want it to be, and reality is obliged to comply.

What do you think your chances of surviving for long would be using that methodology?

Secondly: you’re waiting at a bus stop to catch a bus. How do you know the bus has arrived?

You can see the bus, of course. It has stopped in front of you and the doors have opened. Other passengers may be getting on or off, so you get on the bus and take your seat.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence and assume the bus must have arrived because you want it to have done so, so you step off the pavement and imagine you’re getting on a bus.

You now look pretty foolish and might even step into the path of the real bus you’ve been waiting for. What you almost certainly won’t do is get on the bus — because it isn’t there.

In both examples, only evidence reveals the real world, and creationist faith may let you down very badly, simply because creationist faith has no relationship to the real world. It reflects only blind imagination and wishful thinking, coupled with the absurd belief that the real world is obliged to comply with personal preferences. Evidence, on the other hand, is the real world, and a rational person allows evidence to determine their beliefs.

So now a third example: how do you know you can rely on the information in the Bible? You compare it with real-world evidence, of course, just as you would when crossing the road or catching a bus.

And if you do that, what do you find?

You find a description of the universe that bears no resemblance to the real universe — just as your faith in a safe and empty road bears no relationship to a real road, or your imaginary bus bears no relationship to a real bus. In other words, the real-world evidence is so far removed from the description in the Bible that the Bible is plainly, obviously, and irrefutably wrong. As such, it is utterly unreliable as a source of factual information about the universe.

What we see in the Bible is a description of a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it. We see a demon-haunted world that is just a few thousand years old and runs on magic. It has talking snakes and donkeys; it endorses slavery and misogyny, autocratic government and peremptory justice with no right of appeal, and a draconian penal system in which the penalty of choice is death for even minor transgressions. It describes virgin birth and promotes blood sacrifice as absolving people of responsibility for their wrongs.

And doubt itself is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty, as though the worst thing the authors could imagine was people questioning their claims.

With that in mind, let’s look at the real-world evidence as revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in conjunction with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and compare it with the Bible’s description of the universe:

First the Bible:

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, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Now the latest photographs of a tiny fragment of the real universe:

A side-by-side visual of two globular clusters: NGC 3201 (left) and Messier 70 (right). The star cluster on the right is visibly compact in shape, as the stars near the centre of the object appear very close together. Contrastingly, the star cluster on the left is less compact, as the stars are more spread apart from one another in the field.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing
Some stars appear to defy time itself. Nestled within ancient star clusters, they shine bluer and brighter than their neighbours, looking far younger than their true age. Known as blue straggler stars, these stellar oddities have puzzled astronomers for more than 70 years. Now, new results using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are finally revealing how these “forever young” stars come to be and why they thrive in quieter cosmic neighbourhoods.
Blue straggler stars stand out in old star clusters because they appear hotter, more massive and younger than stars that should all have formed billions of years ago. Their very existence contradicts standard theories of stellar ageing, prompting decades of debate over whether they are created through violent stellar collisions or through more subtle interactions between pairs of stars. A new study provides some of the clearest evidence yet that blue stragglers owe their youthful appearance not to collisions, but to life in close stellar partnerships, and to the environments that allow those partnerships to survive.

An international research team analysed ultraviolet Hubble observations of 48 globular clusters in the Milky Way, assembling the largest and most complete catalogue of blue straggler stars ever produced. The sample includes more than 3000 of these enigmatic objects. Their host clusters span the entire range of possible environmental conditions, from very loose to very dense systems (as illustrated in Image A). This vast dataset allowed astronomers to investigate the long-suspected links between blue straggler stars and their surroundings.

Rather than finding more blue stragglers in the most crowded, collision-prone clusters, the team was surprised to discover the opposite: dense environments host fewer blue stragglers. Instead, these stars are most common in low-density clusters, where stars have more space and where fragile binary systems are more likely to survive.

This work shows that the environment plays a relevant role in the life of stars. Blue straggler stars are intimately connected to the evolution of binary systems, but their survival depends on the conditions in which they live. Low-density environments provide the best habitat for binaries and their by-products, allowing some stars to appear younger than expected.

Professor Francesco R. Ferraro, lead author
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”
Alma Mater Studiorum Universita‘ di Bologna
Bologna, Italy.

The team found that blue stragglers are closely linked to binary star systems, in which two stars orbit one another. In such systems, one star can siphon material from its partner or merge with it entirely, gaining fresh fuel and shining more brightly and blue (effectively resetting its stellar clock).

However, these observations show that denser environments host less binaries, suggesting that in densely packed clusters, frequent close encounters between stars can break binaries apart before they have time to produce a blue straggler. In calmer environments, binaries survive and blue stragglers flourish.

Crowded star clusters are not a friendly place for stellar partnerships. Where space is tight, binaries can be more easily destroyed, and the stars lose their chance to stay young.

Enrico Vesperin, co-author
Department of Astronomy
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN, USA.

This discovery marks the first time that such clear and opposite-to-expectation relationships have been observed between blue straggler populations and their environments. It confirms that blue stragglers are a direct by-product of binary evolution and highlights how strongly a star’s surroundings can influence its life story.

This work gives us a new way to understand how stars evolve over billions of years. It shows that even star lives are shaped by their environment, much like living systems on Earth.

Barbara Lanzoni, co-author
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”
Alma Mater Studiorum Universita‘ di Bologna
Bologna, Italy.

By resolving individual stars in crowded clusters and observing them in ultraviolet light, Hubble was uniquely suited to uncovering this long-hidden pattern. The findings not only solve a long-standing astronomical mystery, but also open new paths for understanding how stars interact, age and sometimes find ways to start anew.

Publication:
Ferraro, F.R., Lanzoni, B., Vesperini, E. et al.
A binary-related origin mediated by environmental conditions for blue straggler stars. Nat Commun 17, 768 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68159-5

Abstract
Blue stragglers are anomalously massive core hydrogen-burning stars that, according to the theory of single star evolution, should not exist. They are suspected to form in mass-enhancement processes, involving binary evolution or stellar collisions. In dynamically active systems like globular clusters, the number of blue stragglers originated by collisions is expected to increase with the local density and the rate of stellar encounters. Here we analyze more than 3000 blue stragglers in 48 Galactic globular clusters with different structures, finding that their number normalized to the sampled luminosity anti-correlates (instead of correlating) with the central density, collision rate, and dynamical age of the parent cluster. Similar trends are also found for the cluster binary fraction. Once inserted in the context of the current knowledge of the BSS phenomenon, these correlations indicate that low-density regions (possibly because of a higher binary production/survival rate) are the natural habitat of both BSSs and binary systems, and the observed BSSs mostly have a binary-related origin mediated by the environmental conditions.

Ferraro, F.R., Lanzoni, B., Vesperini, E. et al.
A binary-related origin mediated by environmental conditions for blue straggler stars. Nat Commun 17, 768 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68159-5

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

What Professor Ferraro and his colleagues reveal is not some marginal technical curiosity, but yet another piece of overwhelming evidence that the universe bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one described in the Bible. The universe is vast beyond comprehension, ancient beyond any biblical timescale, and governed by consistent physical laws that operate without reference to angels, demons, magic, or divine interventions. This is not an inconvenient detail that can be patched over with a little theological hand-waving. It is a fundamental incompatibility.

That incompatibility creates an insoluble problem for the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. If the Bible were genuinely the product of a creator god who also created the universe, then its description of that universe would at least be recognisably accurate. It would not portray a flat Earth capped by a solid dome, a young cosmos running on miracles, or a world in which celestial bodies exist merely as lights hung in the sky for human benefit. A god capable of creating galaxies, stars, black holes, and the large-scale structure of the universe would not inspire a text that gets the most basic features of reality so comprehensively wrong.

Creationists like to pretend that these are merely “poetic” or “metaphorical” flourishes, but that excuse collapses as soon as the text is treated consistently. The biblical authors were not offering subtle allegories about cosmology; they were describing the world as they understood it, using the best ideas available to Bronze-Age pastoral societies. Those ideas were wrong then, and they are indefensible now. What modern astronomy exposes is not the mysterious wisdom of a divine mind, but the very human limitations of ancient writers who knew nothing about galaxies, stellar evolution, deep time, or the true scale of the cosmos.

Evidence does not negotiate with belief. It does not care what people want to be true, what they were raised to believe, or what a religious tradition demands they accept. Evidence simply describes the real world as it is. And every new observation from modern astronomy, including those reported in this paper, pushes the Bible further from the realm of plausibility as a divinely inspired source of truth about the universe.

So creationists face the same choice they do when crossing a road or waiting for a bus: either allow evidence to determine their beliefs, or continue pretending that reality is obliged to conform to their faith. One of those approaches keeps you anchored in the real world. The other leaves you clinging to a demonstrably false picture of the universe, authored not by a creator god, but by ancient humans who were doing their best with the limited knowledge of their time — and getting it badly wrong.

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