Rosa Rubicondior: How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People

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.(Gen 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. (Gen 1: 16-17)

Journey to the centre of a galaxy cluster | ESA/Hubble

This analogy needs careful handling because creationists are adept at ignoring the point of an argument and attacking a caricature of it instead. So, to be clear from the outset, this is not a claim about what the Bible says. It is a simple thought experiment about how we test claims against reality.

Suppose someone wrote a book in which he claimed to give an accurate description of the Bible. In it, he said the Bible consisted of only four books, two in the Old Testament and two in the New Testament; that it had only 120 pages; and that the entire story was about Adam and Eve and their sons, Noah and Moses.

How would we test those claims?

The answer is hardly complicated. We would get a Bible and compare the claims with the book itself. In other words, we would test the description against the reality it claimed to describe. And once we had done so, only two serious conclusions would be available: either the author was deliberately lying in order to deceive his readers, or he was so ignorant of the facts that he simply invented them. What we could not sensibly conclude is that the Bible was wrong for failing to match his description of it.

That, in its simplest form, is how science works. A claim is tested against reality. We begin with the assumption — the null hypothesis — that there is no meaningful difference between the claim and the facts. We then look. If the evidence shows a real difference between the claim and the observable facts, the claim has failed the test. It is not reality that must be adjusted to rescue the claim; it is the claim that must be rejected or revised.

This may sound like a “Janet and John” explanation of basic science, but it is remarkable how consistently creationists get even this wrong. They have a book which, when read literally, makes claims about the age, origin and structure of the universe. With modern science, it is a straightforward matter to compare those claims with the real universe. When we do that, we find that the description and the reality are not merely different, but radically, irreconcilably different.

Yet instead of concluding that the ancient description is wrong, creationists conclude that the evidence must be wrong. The facts are not judged against reality; reality is judged against the prior demand that the Bible must be right. This is not science. It is wishful thinking dressed up as certainty.

In effect, creationists believe their beliefs trump the evidence.

So what claims does the Bible make about the age and structure of the universe, and how do those claims compare with observable reality?

To be fair, the Bible gives no explicit numerical age for the universe. The familiar young-Earth figure of about 6,000 years comes from calculations based on biblical genealogies, most famously by the 17th-century Archbishop James Ussher, who placed creation in 4004 BCE. Modern young-Earth creationists often stretch this to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years, not because evidence requires it, but because the older figure is now too obviously absurd to defend with a straight face.

The Bible is more explicit, however, about the structure of the universe as understood by its ancient authors. It describes a world in which the Earth lies beneath a firmament, or dome, which separates the waters below from the waters above. The sun, moon and stars are described as lights set in this firmament to illuminate the Earth. Elsewhere, the stars are treated not as distant suns and galaxies, but as objects that can fall from heaven and be trampled underfoot. This is the cosmology of a small, human-centred world, not the universe revealed by astronomy. (Genesis 1:6-10; Genesis 1:16-17; Daniel 8:10)

So how does that ancient description compare with what we find when we actually look? Take, for example, this tiny fragment of the sky visible to the Hubble Space Telescope:

Image Description: A large spiral galaxy. It is seen tilted at an angle, so that it is foreshortened and appears very wide. Its tightly-wound, blue spiral arms swirl out from its glowing centre, spreading apart at the tips. They are followed by strands and clumps of dark red dust, and spotted with pink dots where stars are forming in clouds of gas. The galaxy is surrounded by a slight glow and lies on a dark background.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker and the MAUVE-HST Team.

The focus of today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month is an active spiral galaxy on a journey lasting hundreds of millions of years. The galaxy Messier 88 (M88), which is also known as NGC 4501, is located about 63 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair).

M88 is an active galaxy, which means that its centre harbours a supermassive black hole that is snacking on gas and dust. This black hole is estimated to be around 100 million times as massive as the Sun, and it appears to be powering outflows of gas from the galaxy’s centre.

Around this black hole is a population of old, reddish stars that give M88 its warmly glowing heart. Spreading out from the centre are several tightly wound, symmetrical spiral arms, each outlined by sparkling pink and blue star clusters and knotted clouds of dust. We see M88 from an angle so that it appears elongated, and its spiral arms delicately fan out before it.

M88 is a member of the Virgo Cluster, a collection of more than a thousand galaxies held together by gravity — and therefore linked by fate. As this massive group of galaxies moves through space, the galaxies themselves are in constant motion as they orbit the cluster’s centre of gravity. M88 itself is on a long and somewhat perilous cosmic journey that will bring it to the innermost reaches of the cluster.

As is the case with any epic journey, M88 will be fundamentally changed by its trek to the centre of the Virgo Cluster, about 2 million light-years from where it is today. In 200–300 million years, M88 will make its closest approach to Messier 87, the massive elliptical galaxy that anchors the entire cluster. As it draws close to this gravitational behemoth, M88 will experience intense ram pressure stripping. Ram pressure stripping is a process through which a galaxy’s gas is swept away as it pushes through the ever-present gas between the galaxies in a cluster.

Researchers have already seen this process at work in M88. The galaxy’s swirling disc of gas is truncated, and it appears to have been compressed on the leading edge of the galaxy, piling up like snow before a plough. In fact, M88 appears to have considerably less cold gas — the raw fuel for star formation — than expected for a galaxy of its size, especially in its outer regions. This is a clear sign that M88 will be altered by its journey, which will affect its ability to form stars and alter the course of its evolution.
Astronomers observed M88 with Hubble as part of an observing programme (#18103; PI: D. Thilker) dedicated to understanding the lives of spiral galaxies in crowded environments. This programme uses Hubble’s highly capable Wide Field Camera 3, which can finely resolve individual star clusters and nebulae in galaxies tens of millions of light-years away. By studying galaxies on these scales, astronomers can understand how a journey through a cluster impacts galaxies’ evolution and ability to form new stars.

These galaxies would not have been visible to the authors of the Bible who simply assumed that what they could see was all that there was, and that magic was a rational basis for explaining the existence of objects the origin of which was not readily apparent. These distant galaxies, tens or hundreds of millions of light years away, each of which may contain several billion stars and star systems, each occupy such a tiny fragment of the night sky that they could be hidden behind a single grain of rice held at arm’s length between the thumb and forefinger. For further comparison between how the Bible describes the universe, and what we can see with modern technology, here are some recent pictures of the month from the European Space Agency/Hubble:

Name: NGC 7722
Distance: 187 million light years
Constellation: Pegasus

Name: IC 486
Distance: 380 million light years
Constellation: Gemini

Name: NGC 3137
Distance: 53 million light years
Constellation: Antlia

Name: NGC 691
Distance: 120 million light years
Constellation: Aries

And that is what happens when we test an ancient claim against reality. The Bible’s authors imagined a small, enclosed, Earth-centred cosmos because that was the world as it appeared to people with no telescopes, no spectroscopy, no orbital mechanics, no understanding of galaxies, and no way to know that the points of light in the night sky were not little lamps fixed to a dome above their heads.

There is no shame in those ancient authors not knowing what they could not possibly have known. The shame lies in pretending, thousands of years later, that their pre-scientific guesses were divine revelation and that modern astronomy must somehow be wrong because it fails to agree with them. The Hubble images do not show a firmament. They do not show stars stuck to a dome. They do not show waters above the sky, pillars holding up the heavens, or a small flat Earth at the centre of creation. They show a vast, ancient, dynamic universe in which our planet is not the centre of anything except our own local experience.

Creationists are therefore left with the same problem as the author in the thought experiment who misdescribed the Bible. Either the description is wrong, or reality is wrong. Science has no difficulty deciding between those alternatives because science is prepared to look. Creationism, by contrast, begins with the required answer and then demands that the evidence be bent, ignored or misrepresented until it appears to fit.

The images from Hubble are not merely beautiful; they are evidence. They are reality, recorded by instruments, checked by observation, and understood through physics. Against that, creationists offer Bronze Age cosmology, special pleading and the insistence that disbelief in evidence is somehow a virtue.

In any other context, mistaking an ancient mythological picture of the universe for an accurate scientific account would be dismissed as absurd. It is no less absurd because it is done in the name of religion. The universe is not obliged to conform to the imaginings of ancient priests, and when we look at it honestly, it plainly does not.

It's not the fault of the Bible's authors that they got so much of it wrong; they were doing their best with what little knowledge they had.

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