Rosa Rubicondior: Bible Blunder - NASA Provides Red, White & Blue Stars For 4th July - And A Reminder That The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People

NASA's Hubble Spies Stellar Sparkler for July 4th - NASA Science

By releasing a spectacular red, white and blue image of a globular star cluster almost as old as the universe itself, NASA has inadvertently provided yet another striking demonstration that the Bible’s cosmology was invented by people who knew nothing of the real universe beyond the limits of unaided human imagination.

A point that seems to be lost on creationists is that claims made in the Bible can be checked against reality, just like any other claim. And, like any other claim, they can be rejected when they bear little or no resemblance to the evidence. To take a deliberately silly example, imagine someone claiming that the Bible has only 120 pages. Simply by opening a Bible and counting the pages, we can see quickly and easily that the claim is false. In scientific terms, the claim is a hypothesis, and it is falsified by the experiment of looking at the evidence.

Similarly, when the Bible presents a universe consisting of a small, flat world beneath a solid dome, with the sun, moon and stars functioning as lights set in or associated with that dome, we can test that claim by doing the same simple thing: looking at reality. Curiously, when creationists do this, they often apply a special standard of reasoning that would be absurd in any other context, and possibly a sign of mental incompetence if applied to everyday life. They conclude, not that the ancient claim is wrong, but that reality itself must somehow be mistaken because the claim has been placed inside a book declared, in advance and without evidence, to be inerrant “scripture”.

Imagine applying that standard when deciding whether it is safe to cross a busy road, while clinging to the belief that cars cannot exist because someone in the Bronze Age said all wheeled transport was drawn by horses!

So, let us carry out that simple scientific experiment. Let us compare the biblical claim with reality, starting with the hypothesis that the Bible is inerrant truth and therefore contains an accurate description of the universe.

On the left we have the Bible’s description of the universe after the initial act of creation. On the right we have a small fragment of the Milky Way galaxy, which is itself only one galaxy among hundreds of billions, possibly trillions, in the observable universe:

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)

Ancient stars shine in red, white and blue from a globular cluster almost as old as the universe itself in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Red, white, and blue stars glitter like a sparkler being waved on a dark night in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. NASA released this image to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary, as the agency carries forward America’s legacy of exploration.

Located in the outer halo of our Milky Way galaxy, globular cluster NGC 6426 is a spherical collection of stars bound together by their mutual gravity, one of 150 known globular clusters in our galaxy.

It's hard to imagine any two things more different than those two images of supposedly the same thing; the first drawn from the description in the Bible; the second an actual image of the star cluster photographed by scientific instruments. It's hard to imagine how any sane person can look at that and conclude that the image on the left must be the correct image of reality and the image in the right is somehow mistaken, forged or misunderstood. As Francis Collins asked in The language of God who would want to worship a 'cosmic trickster' who goes to those lengths to deceive us? Yet that is what creationists would have us believe rather than admit they are wrong.

Conclusion: Hypothesis falsified. The Bible does not contain an accurate description of the universe and therefore cannot justifiably be described as a book of inerrant truth.

Just to drive home the point that is obvious to all except creationists, here are a few more images of star clusters, each an image of billions of stars occupying a tiny fragment of the universe:

Many thousands of stars burn brightly in the globular cluster Terzan 4, part of the constellation Scorpius. The brighter blue stars in the cluster center burn hotter and die more quickly; the red stars on the outskirts are older stars that burn less hot.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen

This Hubble image of a loosely bound collections of stars reveals a portion of the open cluster Caldwell 71.

NASA, ESA, and T. von Hippel (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Some of our galaxy’s most massive, luminous stars burn 8,000 light-years away in the open cluster Trumpler 14.

NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain); Acknowledgment: N. Smith (University of Arizona)

Thousands upon thousands of stars illuminate this breathtaking image of star cluster Liller 1, imaged with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. This stellar system, located 30,000 light-years from Earth, formed stars over 11 billion years.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Ferraro

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