There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.
Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.
To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.
People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.
This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.
Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Top: Multiple views of MLP-3000-1, the newly discovered Paranthropus partial left mandible and molar crown. Bottom: MLP-3000-1 in side-by-side comparison with mandible fossils from other species — Australopithecus afarensis (A.L. 266-1), Paranthropus aethiopicus (OMO-57/4-1968-41 and OMO-18-1967-18), and early Homo (LD 350-1).
Alemseged Research Group
Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.
Research published two days ago in Nature by a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged will dismay and delight creationists in about equal measure — especially those who manage to rationalise a fossil dating from about 2.6 million years before they believe Earth and everything on it was created — because it shows that scientists were wrong about something.
It is the news that the jawbone of an archaic hominin, Paranthropus, has been found in Ethiopia some 200 miles further north than the previously believed northern limit of these hominins.
Normally, to a binary-thinking creationist, science being wrong about even the most minor and unimportant detail is “proof” that science is wrong about everything. This childish belief probably stems from them having a single source-book which has been deemed to be inerrant, so even the slightest falsehood in it renders that claim untenable. They assume it is the same with science: that what scientists believe comes from supposedly inerrant textbooks written by “prophets” such as Charles Darwin, serving as the source-books from which all scientists get their information. So, if scientists are ever wrong, all the books from the science libraries of the world can be thrown in the waste bin, leaving creationism’s book of “inerrant” origin myths as the winner.
What they find hard to comprehend, apparently, is that scientific knowledge is cumulative, with current thinking always provisional, pending further confirmation or in need of revision in the light of new information, and that facts are neutral in any dispute, so can be objective referees. They fail to realise that because science works this way, scientists from all over the world will eventually converge on a single answer. Religions, by contrast, because they are not based on evidence but on the tenuous thread of interpretation of an ancient book which itself presents no evidence for its claims, continue to diversify into ever smaller sects, each claiming to have the one true answer but having no evidence to referee the dispute.
But of course, in the best scientific tradition, this jawbone simply adds richness to the hominin evolutionary story and raises the possibility that Paranthropus, like Australopithecus and Homo, was present in the Afar region of Ethiopia. And that opens up the intriguing possibility — given the propensity of hominins to diverge and then hybridise — that modern Homo sapiens could have some Paranthropus ancestry.
Paranthropus^ the “robust” hominins.
Paranthropus is an extinct genus of hominins that lived in eastern and southern Africa between about 2.7 and 1.2 million years ago. It is best known for its so-called “robust” anatomy — not in the sense of being especially large or powerful overall, but because of its massively built jaws, large molar teeth, thick enamel, and prominent cheekbones. Many species also had a sagittal crest (a ridge along the top of the skull) for the attachment of powerful chewing muscles.
These hominins were specialised for processing tough, fibrous, or gritty foods such as roots, tubers, sedges, and possibly hard seeds. Stable-isotope and microwear studies show that different species exploited different diets, but all appear adapted for heavy chewing.
Despite their imposing jaws, Paranthropus species had relatively small brains (roughly 400–550 cm³), similar to or only slightly larger than those of Australopithecus.
Where Paranthropus sits in the hominin family tree
Paranthropus is generally regarded as a specialised side-branch of the hominin lineage rather than a direct ancestor of modern humans. Most palaeoanthropologists think it diverged from an australopithecine-like ancestor sometime after about 3 million years ago, around the same time that the genus Homo was emerging.
In simplified terms:
An australopithecine ancestor gave rise to at least two major lineages:
one leading to Homo (eventually Homo sapiens),
another leading to the robust, chewing-adapted Paranthropus.
This makes Paranthropus a cousin lineage rather than a direct ancestor of modern humans.
However, the family tree is not a neat, branching diagram. The early hominin record shows multiple contemporaneous species living side by side, sometimes in the same regions. Genetic evidence from later hominins (such as Neanderthals and Denisovans) shows that hybridisation between hominin lineages did occur. Although no ancient DNA has yet been recovered from Paranthropus fossils, the possibility that early hominin species occasionally interbred cannot be ruled out.
Why Paranthropus matters
The existence of Paranthropus shows that human evolution was not a straight line from “ape” to “human”, but a bushy, experimental process with multiple lineages trying different ecological strategies. While the robust hominins ultimately went extinct, they represent a successful and long-lived adaptation that coexisted with early members of the genus Homo for over a million years.
Their story underlines a central point of evolutionary biology: most evolutionary experiments fail — not because they were “badly designed”, but because changing environments favour some adaptations over others.
The discovery of the jawbone and what it means for our understanding of the history of the hominins is explained in a University of Chicago news item:
New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early homininsA partial lower jaw discovered in Afar, Ethiopia expands the known geographic distribution of Paranthropus northward by 1000 km, revealing the genus to be more widespread and adaptively versatile than previously thought.
In a new paper published in Nature, a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged reports the discovery of the first Paranthropus specimen from the Afar region of Ethiopia, 1000 km north of the genus’ previous northernmost occurrence. This finding offers significant new information about when and where Paranthropus existed, its adaptation to diverse environmental conditions, and how it may have interacted with other ancient relatives of modern humans including our genus Homo.
If we are to understand our own evolutionary trajectory as a genus and species, we need to understand the environmental, ecological, and competitive factors that shaped our evolution. This discovery is so much more than a simple snapshot of Paranthropus’ occurrence: It sheds fresh light on the driving forces behind the evolution of the genus.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged, lead author
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.
Alemseged sifts through unidentified fossil fragments in the field to find parts of a Paranthropus specimen.
Alemseged Research Group.
Paranthropus previously “missing” among hominins in the Afar and northeast Africa.
Since the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged around 7 million years ago, human ancestors went through a dramatic evolutionary process that ultimately led to the emergence of Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago.
We strive to understand who we are and how we became to be human, and that has implications for how we behave and how we are going to impact the environment around us, and how that, in turn, is going to impact us.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
In the fossil record, the human lineage is represented by over 15 hominin species that generally fit into four groups:
Facultative bipeds, e.g. Ardipithecus — Occasionally bipedal but mostly living in trees and walking on all four limbs.
Habitual bipeds: Australopithecus — Retained arboreality to some degree but mostly practiced upright walking and experimented with stone tools.
Obligate bipeds: Homo— The genus to which modern humans belong, characterized by a larger brain, sophisticated tools and obligate bipedalism.
Robust hominins: Paranthropus (also known as robust australopithecines) — Habitually bipedal like Australopithecus but distinguished by extremely large molars capped by thick enamel and facial and muscular configurations that suggest a powerful chewing apparatus.
Hundreds of fossils representing over a dozen species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and Homo had been found in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, so the apparent absence of Paranthropus was conspicuous and puzzling to paleoanthropologists, many of whom had concluded the genus simply never ventured that far north. While some experts suggested that dietary specialization restricted Paranthropus to southern regions, others hypothesized that this could have been the result of Paranthropus’ inability to compete with the more versatile Homo, [however] neither was the case: Paranthropus was as widespread and versatile as Homo and the new find shows that its absence in the Afar was an artifact of the fossil record.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged demonstrates how fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen fit together.
Alemseged Research Group.
Rethinking hominin biogeography, adaptation, and competition.
The 2.6-million-year-old partial jaw reported in Nature comes from the Mille-Logya research area in the Afar and is one of the oldest Paranthropus specimens unearthed to date. After recovering as many fragments as possible from the field site, the team brought them back to Chicago to analyze internal anatomy and morphology with powerful micro-CT scanning.
It’s a remarkable nexus: an ultra-modern technology being applied to a 2.6-million-year-old fossil to tell a story that is common to us all.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
This new find shows that Paranthropus was as widespread and versatile as Homo and was not necessarily outcompeted by Homo.
Paranthropus was previously nicknamed the “nutcracker” genus, highlighting the very large molars, thick enamel, and heavy jaws and reflecting assumptions that this chewing apparatus caused Paranthropus to occupy a highly specialized and narrower dietary niche. But the new Paranthropus from Afar reveals that starting from its earliest origins, Paranthropus was widespread, versatile, and able to crack more than just nuts.
The new discovery gives us insight into the competitive edges that each group had, the type of diet they were consuming, the type of muscular and skeletal adaptations that they had, whether they were using stone tools or not — all parts of their adaptation and behavior that we are trying to figure out. Discoveries like this really trigger interesting questions in terms of reviewing, revising, and then coming up with new hypotheses as to what the key differences were between the main hominin groups.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.
Abstract
The Afar depression in northeastern Ethiopia contains a rich palaeontological and archaeological record, which documents 6 million years of human evolution. Abundant faunal evidence links evolutionary patterns with palaeoenvironmental change as a principal underlying force1. Many of the earlier hominin taxa recognized today are found in the Afar, but Paranthropus has been conspicuously absent from the region. Here we report on the discovery, in the Mille-Logya research area, of a partial mandible that we attribute to Paranthropus, dated to between 2.5 and 2.9 million years ago and found in a well-understood chronological and faunal context. The find is among the oldest fossils attributable to Paranthropus and indicates that this genus, from its earliest known appearance, had a greater geographic distribution than previously documented2. Often seen as a dietary specialist feeding on tough food, the range of diverse habitats with which eastern African Paranthropus can now be associated shows that this suggested adaptive niche did not restrict its ability to disperse as widely as species of Australopithecus and early Homo. The discovery of Paranthropus in the Afar emphasizes how little is known about hominin evolution in eastern Africa during the crucial period between 3 and 2.5 million years ago, when this genus and the Homo lineage presumably emerged.
For creationists, then, this discovery is a double embarrassment. On the one hand, it further extends the fossil record of hominins into yet another inconvenient corner of deep time and geography, while on the other it neatly illustrates how science actually works: hypotheses are refined, boundaries are adjusted, and understanding improves as new evidence comes in. What it does *not* do is undermine the entire enterprise of palaeoanthropology or cast doubt on the reality of human evolution, despite the fevered hopes of those who imagine that any minor correction is a fatal blow to all of science.
Notably, the authors themselves show no difficulty whatsoever in fitting this new find into an evolutionary framework. There is no hand-wringing, no talk of “crisis” or “collapse” of evolutionary theory, and no appeal to supernatural intervention to plug a supposed gap. Instead, the jawbone is treated exactly as it should be: as a new data point that enriches our picture of early hominin diversity, biogeography, and ecological flexibility. It refines our understanding of where Paranthropus lived, how widely it ranged, and how complex the early hominin landscape really was.
In other words, this is not a problem for evolution at all — it is a routine success story for it. The fossil record continues to grow, predictions continue to be borne out, and the messy, branching, occasionally hybridising reality of human evolution becomes ever clearer. What remains conspicuously absent, as ever, is any comparable explanatory framework from creationism — only a set of immovable dogmas that must be defended by denial, distortion, or special pleading whenever the evidence refuses to cooperate.
Once again, the facts turn out to be neutral referees in the dispute. And once again, they come down firmly on the side of an evidence-based, evolutionary account of our origins rather than on a handful of ancient origin myths that cannot be updated, tested, or corrected when they are shown to be wrong.
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You might expect an intelligently designed system, created by an omnibenevolent designer, to work just as effectively for everybody and not badly for some and only just adequately for others. And yet, as so often with creationism, the facts are not at all what the theory predicts. In science this would be called falsification, but for creationists it is just another inconvenient fact to be ignored or blamed on ‘the Fall’ — or even on the victim.
According to a paper just published in Cell Press Blue, the reason some people suffer more from a cold caused by a rhinovirus is not so much because of differences in the virus, but because their bodies react differently. Some take control and prevent the spread of viruses to adjacent cells of the mucous membrane lining the nasal passages, whereas other people’s bodies fail to prevent the virus spreading.
The paper is by a team at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA, led by Associate Professor Dr Ellen F. Foxman, PhD.
By growing organoids in vitro and infecting them with rhinoviruses, the team were able to show that whether the infection spreads depends on how quickly the infected cells are able to mount an interferon response. A good response limits the infection to just a few cells and the cold does not develop beyond a ‘sniffle’. Where the response is weak, the infection spreads and, in cases where the victim has an underlying respiratory condition such as asthma or COPD, the cold can develop into a serious illness.
Why the interferon response differs between individuals is not known with any certainty, but it could be due to a number of factors, including genetics. However, it is known that in patients with pre-existing respiratory conditions, the interferon response is inhibited.
That, of course, begs the question for ID creationists: why a system supposedly designed to protect us gets downgraded when it is most needed, and, if the difference is due to underlying genetics, why some people got better genes in this respect than others. Under the ID creationist paradigm, genes that produce any given output are deemed to hold ‘complex specified genetic information’ and, as such, are evidence for intelligent design.
Leaving aside the question of why any omnibenevolent designer would design viruses to make us sick and then design an immune response to prevent them doing so, we are left with the question of why this immune system does not always work very well and why some people have a worse version than others. If an omnibenevolent designer can design an effective immune system, why did it not give it to everyone? Does it actually want those people to suffer more from the viruses it supposedly designed?
The evolutionary explanation is, of course, straightforward, with none of the theological conundrums that plague creationism. Evolution does not seek out perfection and has no interest in equity. In the environment of an evolutionary arms race with viruses, the results are inevitably suboptimal and unevenly distributed throughout the population unless there is particularly strong selection pressure to drive the ‘best’ solution to fixation. It is also in the survival interests of viruses to tone down their victim’s responses, thereby reducing that selection pressure. The resulting trade-off and compromise is what we see today in the different responses to the same virus.
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 ageingSome 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.
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.
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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