Refuting Creationism - More On The Oldest Cave Art From 41,200 Years Before Creation Week

The oldest known cave art

Leang Karampuang in the Maros-Pangkep karst,
South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Found in a cave in Indonesia, we can now show the world’s oldest figurative art is 51,200 years old

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about the oldest known cave art, in Indonesia from 41,200 years before Creationists believe the Universe existed. As expected, this news has been completely ignored by creationists, presumably through fear of having to consider the terrifying prospect of being wrong and so not as important as they like to think they are.

Here then is an article about the discovery from The Conversation by four of the authors of the paper in Nature from Australian Universities - Adhi Oktaviana, PhD Candidate in Archaeology, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor in Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University.

Their article is reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Alphons Mucha - Slav Patriot, Mystic and Art Nouveau Master

After the Battle of Grunwald

Alphons Mucha (1924)

The Celebration of Svantovit on Rügen (1912)

Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau: 100 years after its creation, his work is still a balm for a world in upheaval

Some readers might have been surprised to see me posting an article about an acknowledged mystic who saw a close relationship between Slav nationalism and religion, but to me Alphons Mucha is very much like the Irish patriots who identified Catholicism with Irish nationalism, not because they believed in Papal authority and the divine right of priests to meddle in national affairs but because Catholicism was a part of the identity of the Celtic Irish. So, Mucha saw the struggle for Slav self-determination as closely tied to the struggles against Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and later Germanic Protestantism.

Like Irish History, Slav history too can be seen as an illustration of how religion poisons everything, as the Czech people seem to have realised, since they are now second only to France in the proportion of the population who openly self-identify as Atheists.

So, it's interesting to read the following article by Will Visconti, a member of the teaching staff in the Department of Art History, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, introducing an exhibition of Alphons Macha's work in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. I've reproduced it here under a Creative Commons license as a sort of sequel to my earlier article om Mucha's Slav Epic. The article is reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - People Were Creating Art On Rocks in Australia 5,000 years Before 'Creation Week'!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

New analysis unlocks the hidden meaning of 15,000-year-old rock art in Arnhem Land

What the authors of Genesis didn't know was that, not only is Earth a spheroid, but there are people living on the land masses on the far side of it; people moreover who had lived there for about 40,000 years and had been leaving a record in the form of drawings and paintings on rocks for about 10,000 years. Had they done so, they would have written about a spheroid earth that was at least 40,000 years old instead of a flat one that was only about 7,000 years old when they wrote about it being magicked out of nothing at the same time as the sun and stars.

One of my favourite quotes that, for some reason, theologians rarely talk about, is by the 'father of modern theology, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who was canonized for his 'divinely-inspired' wisdom, on the 'controversy' of the shape of Earth:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.

It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [My emphasis]

Source: De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes,
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.

So, from reading the faulty accounts in the Bible, the hapless St Augustine concluded that there couldn't be people living in the 'Antipodes' because there wouldn't have been enough time for the m to get there if they were descended from 'that one first man' (Adam). Perhaps he forgot that we are all allegedly descended from Noah, not Adam, so there would have been even less time for people to get to the 'Antipodes'!

But People got to the 'Antipodes' thousands of years even before Adam was supposedly magicked into existence, let alone when Noah lived. So, by St Augustin's logic either Earth is lot older than even he thought from reading his Bible, or there never was a 'first man'. Either way, it is clear that the 'Father of Modern Theology' was misled by the Bible, which has turned out to be neither history nor science!

It's mistakes like that that tell us not only was Genesis not written by an omniscience creator but that the authors were parochial and ignorant in the extreme. They thought two of each species of all known animals, who all lived a few days walk from Noah's house, could fit on a wooden boat, that a local flood covered the entire flat Earth and the magic man who made it all lived just about the dome over it all, straight up from where everyone lived.

Creationism in Crisis - Neanderthals Were Creating Art in Caves in France, At Least 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Finger markings on the wall of La Roche-Cotard cave in the Loire Valley, France

Fig 12. The Circular Panel.

Marquet J-C, Freiesleben TH, Thomsen KJ, Murray AS, Calligaro M, Macaire J-J, et al. (2023)

Neanderthals were the world’s first artists | University of Basel

It's shaping up to be another of those terrible weeks for the creation cult, as yet more scientific papers are published that show just how much of Earth's history happened in that vast period of time before 'Creation Week' - the 7 days about 10,000 years ago that creationists believe the Universe, Earth, and all living things were created by magic out of nothing.

The first of these is a mere 40,000 years before 'Creation Week' when hominins - probably Neanderthals - were making marks on a cave wall in La Roche-Cotard in the Loire Valley, France, in what may be some of the earliest examples of human art.

The La Roche-Cotard cave remained sealed by mud and soil sediments from the Loire for over 50,000 years (i.e., about 10,000 years before Homo sapiens appeared in Europe) until rediscovered in 1974 by French archaeologist Jean-Claude Marquet.

The markings have now been dated by an international team from France, Denmark Switzerland, Portugal and Hungary, which included Jean-Claude Marquet of Université de Tours, Tours, France and archaeologist Dorota Wojtczak from University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.

They have published their findings open access in PLOS ONE. Its significance is explained in a University of Basle news release by Christian Heuss:

Creationism in Crisis - Cave Art in Borneo From 35,000 Years Before Earth Existed (According to Creationists)

Gua Sireh, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

Gua Sireh, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

This cave on Borneo has been used for 20,000 years – and we’ve now dated rock art showing colonial resistance 400 years ago

According to creationists, about 8-10,000 years ago a god made of nothing made everything in the Universe out of nothing using nothing more than magic words. It also created humans and all the other animals a few days later. Then, in a fit of anger because its creation hadn't turned out the way it had designed it, it killed almost all of it in a genocidal flood, reducing the human population of Earth to just 8 related people.

While all that was happening, there were people using a large cave in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, in Malaysia from 35-43,000 years before Earth existed and up until and including European colonisation about 400 years ago. These people left a record of their existence and cultural history in the form of drawings on the cave wall. There is no record of a genocidal flood, and nothing about a god creating other people about 10,000 years ago.
But, according to creationists, just a few thousand years ago the island of Borneo was repopulated by people from the Middle East, who, although all descended from 8 related individuals of Middle Eastern origin, mysteriously adopted the same artistic style as the antediluvian population, forgot all about the genocidal flood and the god who caused it, invented their own gods and continued as though nothing unusual had happened.

That is the sort of mental gymnastics a creationist needs to perform to avoid the dreadful prospect of wondering if they could be wrong.

First, a little about the caves in Sarawak and the art and artifacts found in them:

Creationism in Crisis - Modern Humans Are Not The First To Appreciate Art

How we discovered that Neanderthals could make art

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman

Morten Jacobsen (CC BY 2.5)

Creationist superstition says that human beings were made somehow differently to all the other animals, although they can never say how, exactly. Some believe only humans have an unproven and undefined magic entity living inside their body, called a 'soul', but other animals don't have this magic ingredient; others argue that animals also have this magic ingredient. They disagree endlessly on this point simply because they have no facts by which to determine the truth. If the 'soul' was detectable, the issue could be resolved easily and quickly. As it is, all they have is dogma.

But whatever their view of who has a magic soul and who doesn't, high on their list of abilities that humans have that other animals allegedly don't have will be aesthetic appreciation of art, music, love, etc. Some attribute this to the magic soul thing, others are happy to regard it as part of some unique aspect of human psychology, neuro-physiology, and/or genetics, so, of course, any evidence that another species has aesthetic appreciation is a major embarrassment for them.

However, with regard to artistic appreciation, there is now strong evidence that our cousin species, Neanderthals, could make artistic or symbolic designs, so, since we are related through a common ancestor - probably Homo heidelbergensis or Homo erectus, if indeed they were different species, it is highly likely that at least the potential for making symbolic drawings was present in that ancestor.

How do we know Neanderthals could make art?

In this article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Dr Chris Standish, Postdoctoral Fellow of Archaeology, and Professor Alistair Pike, Professor of Archaeological Sciences, both of Southampton University, Hampshire, UK, present the evidence.

The article is reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here:

How we discovered that Neanderthals could make art

Neanderthal art.

Credit: P. Saura

Chris Standish, University of Southampton and Alistair Pike, University of Southampton

What makes us human? A lot of people would argue it is the ability of our species to engage in complex behaviour such as using language, creating art and being moral. But when and how did we first become “human” in this sense? While skeletal remains can reveal when our ancestors first became “anatomically modern”, it is much harder for scientists to decipher when the human lineage became “behaviourally modern”.

One of the key traits of behavioural modernity is the capacity to use, interpret and respond to symbols. We know that Homo sapiens have been doing this for at least 80,000 years. But its predecessor in parts of Eurasia, the Neanderthal, a human ancestor that became extinct around 40,000 years ago, has traditionally been regarded as uncultured and behaviourally inferior. Now our new study, published in Science, has challenged this view by showing that Neanderthals were able to create cave art.

The earliest examples of symbolic behaviour in African Homo sapiens populations include the use of mineral pigments and shell beads – presumably for body adornment and expressions of identity.

However, evidence for such behaviour by other human species is far more contentious. There are some tantalising clues that Neanderthals in Europe also used body ornamentation around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. But scientists have so far argued that this must have been inspired by the modern humans who had just arrived there – we know that humans and Neanderthals interacted and even interbred.

Wall in Maltravieso Cave showing three hand stencils (centre right, centre top and top left).

Credit: H. Collado

Cave art is seen as a more sophisticated example of symbolic behaviour than body ornamentation, and has traditionally been thought of as a defining characteristic of Homo sapiens. In fact, most researchers believe that the cave art found in Europe and dating back over 40,000 years must have been painted by modern humans, even though Neanderthals were around at this time.

Dating cave art

Unfortunately, we have a poor understanding of the origins of cave art, primarily due to difficulties in accurately dating it. Archaeologists typically rely on radiocarbon dating when trying to date events from our past, but this requires the sample to contain organic material.

Calcium carbonate crust overlying pigment in La Pasiega.

Credit: J. Zilhão

Cave art, however, is often produced from mineral-based pigments which contain no organics, meaning radiocarbon dating isn’t possible. Even when when it is – such as when a charcoal-based pigment has been used – it suffers from issues of contamination which can lead to inaccurate dates. It is also a destructive technique, as the sample of pigment has to be taken from the art itself.

Uranium-thorium dating of carbonate minerals is often a better option. This well-established geochronological technique measures the natural decay of trace amounts of uranium to date the mineralisation of recent geological formations such as stalagmites and stalactites – collectively known as “speleothems”. Tiny speleothem formations are often found on top of cave paintings, making it possible to use this technique to constrain the age of cave art without impacting on the art itself.

A new era

We used uranium-thorium dating to investigate cave art from three previously discovered sites in Spain. In La Pasiega, northern Spain, we showed that a red linear motif is older than 64,800 years. In Ardales, southern Spain, various red painted stalagmite formations date to different episodes of painting, including one between 45,300 and 48,700 years ago, and another before 65,500 years ago. In Maltravieso in western central Spain, we showed a red hand stencil is older than 66,700 years.

Ladder shape in red painted in the La Pasiega cave.

Credit: C.D Standish, A.W.G. Pike and D.L. Hoffmann

These results demonstrate that cave art was being created in all three sites at least 20,000 years prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens in western Europe. They show for the first time that Neanderthals did produce cave art, and that is was not a one off event. It was created in caves across the full breadth of Spain, and at Ardales it occurred at multiple times over at least an 18,000-year period. Excitingly, the types of paintings produced (red lines, dots and hand stencils) are also found in caves elsewhere in Europe so it would not be surprising if some of these were made by Neanderthals, too.

Drawing of the ladder symbol painted on the walls.

Credit: Breuil et al. (1913)

We don’t know the exact meaning of the paintings, such as the ladder shape, but we do know they must have been important to Neanderthals. Some of them were painted in pitch black areas deep in the caves – requiring the preparation of a light source as well as the pigment. The locations appear deliberately selected, the ceilings of low overhangs or impressive stalagmite formations. These must have been meaningful symbols in meaningful places.

Our results are tremendously significant, both for our understanding of Neanderthals and for the emergence of behavioural complexity in the human lineage. Neanderthals undoubtedly had the capacity for symbolic behaviour, much like contemporaneous modern human populations residing in Africa.

To understand how behavioural modernity arose, we now need to shift our focus back to periods when Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interacted and to the period of their last common ancestor. The most likely candidate for this ancestor is Homo heidelbergensis, which lived over half a million years ago.

It is perhaps also now time that we move beyond a focus on what makes Homo sapiens and Neanderthals different. Modern humans may have “replaced” Neanderthals, but it is becoming increasingly clear that Neanderthals had similar cognitive and behavioural abilities – they were, in fact, equally “human”.
Chris Standish, Postdoctoral Fellow of Archaeology, University of Southampton and Alistair Pike, Professor of Archaeological Sciences, University of Southampton

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Refuting Creationism - Modern Humans Were Not the Only Aesthetic Species

Flowstone formation in the Sala de las Estrellas at Cueva de Ardales (Malaga, Andalusia), with the traces of red pigment.

© João Zilhão, ICREA

Neanderthals indeed painted Andalusia’s Cueva de Ardales | CNRS

One of the evidence-free claims Creationism is forced into by virtue of dogma, is that modern humans are unique in several ways that sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, as some sort of special creation; namely, sentience and self-awareness, aesthetic appreciation, and a sense of moral obligation.

However, the notion that we alone have self-awareness and are thus the only sentient species has long been discounted by animal behaviourists by demonstrating self-awareness and even complex puzzle-solving behaviour in many other, even non-mammalian, species such as octopuses, bees and several birds. But there has been an on-going debate in anthropology about exactly when aesthetic appreciation (or in lay terms, artistic appreciation and symbolism) first arose in the hominins. Until now, there were precious little evidence that anyone other than modern humans ever used symbolism and colour in any deliberate, representational way.

Now, however, a team of international scientists, including researchers from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have shown that red ochre pigments on stalactites in a cave in Andalucia, Spain, were taken there and applied deliberately on multiple occasions, at a time when only Neanderthals were present in Europe. As though, over a period of several thousand years, the site had special significance and needed regular restoration, indicating a long oral tradition lasting for a very long time.

The press release from CNRC explains:

More Bad News for Creationists - Australia's Oldest Rock Painting is 17,000 Years Old!

Traditional owner, Ian Waina, recording the estimated 17,300 year old painting of a kangaroo found in a hard-to-access rock cluster in the northeast Kimberley region.

Image: Peter Veth,
Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation

Australia's oldest rock painting is a kangaroo | Melbourne University News

A group of rock art experts from the Universities of Melbourne and \Western Australia and the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation have dated a rock painting of a kangaroo to between 17,500 and 17,100 years old.

The painting is typical of the artistic style from what has become known as the 'Irregular Infill Animal' or 'Naturalistic' period, chara cterised by life-like and life-sized drawings and paintings, but this is the oldest so far dated.

Bad News For Creationists - A Rock Painting Older than Earth and From Before 'The Flood'

Sulawesi warty pig. The world's oldest known painting.
Leang Tedongnge cave, Sulawesi, Indonesia

Source

World’s oldest cave art discovered in Indonesia – Griffith News

A team of archaeologists led by Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, have discovered what is believed to be the oldest know paining.

Not only has it been dated to way before YECs believe the Universe was magicked into existence, but way before they believe everything was destroyed by a global flood! It must be getting harder and harder to cling to YECism as the evidence against it continues to pile up. It can only be maintained by ignorance of this evidence or by advanced techniques for coping with the cognitive dissonance of holding beliefs that are at complete variance with reality.

The red painting of a Sulawesi warty pig, which is endemic to the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, with two negative images of hands (signatures?) was probably part of a scene with two other pigs, only fragments of which now remain. It has been dated to at least 45,500 years old.

It is believed to have been painted by Homo sapiens, rather than some archaeic hominin species such as Denisovans or Homo erectus.

The team, which included members of Indonesia’s leading archaeological research centre, Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (ARKENAS), published their finding yesterday in Science Advances.

Holy Bodgers! Hilarious Art Restorations in Spain

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s original work (left) and two attempts at restoring a copy of it.

Photograph: Cedida por Coleccionista/Europa Press 2020
Source: The Guardian

Another botched artwork restoration leaves Spain in stitches | Barry Duke

And now a little bit of light relief from the accounts of covidiot religiots helping to spread the Covid-19 virus and turn places of worship into major Covid-19 hotspots.

Another Spanish restorer has managed to create mirth amongst the increasingly irreligious Spanish.

Following the 'success' of the hilarious restoration by octogenarian Cecilia Gimenez, of the Ecce Homo fresco in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church near Zaragoza, which turned Jesus into what looked like a monkey, an art collector employed a furniture restorer to restore his copy of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s, 1687 painting of the Virgin Mary, entitled The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerable. The result left Mary looking more like Jezebel. Mercifully, Murillo made a number of copies of this major work.

Stone Age Cave Painters Recorded A New Species!

Grotte de Niaux (Niaux cave in Ariège, France)

Photo credit: via University of Adelaide

Early cave art and ancient DNA record the origin of European bison | Nature Communications.

Black painting of bison (putative European bison, or wisent) at Grotte de Niaux (Niaux cave in Ariège, France), dated to the Magdalenian period (~17,000 years ago).

Photo credit: via University of Adelaide (under Creative Commons licence)

For a creationist claim, the assertion that no new species have been seen to evolve takes some beating for its sheer denial of the readily available data. Now geneticists working at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, have shown that even the Stone Age painters of the caves such as Lascaux Cave, France, captured one such event in their art. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Communications.

Turin Shroud Forgery Shows Changing Fashions in Art.

Shroud of Turin depicts Y-shaped crucifixion - life - 02 April 2014 - New Scientist

The 14th-century medieval forgery known as the Shroud of Turin, which some Christians still insist was the shroud used to wrap the body of Jesus in following his legendary crucifixion, may show how perceptions of crucifixion and how it was depicted in art changed over time.

Carbon dating has shown that the flax used to make the linen cloth grew in the late 13th or early 14th century, not long before the shroud made it's first public appearance in France. This evidence confirms the evidence from the image itself that the shroud is a medieval European forgery. Strangely, the claim that it is the genuine shroud of Jesus never explains how the linen travelled back in time some 1400 years to 1st-century Palestine and then came forward again to 14th-century France, but such details are of little consequence to people who are desperate for evidence or to a church which habitually tries to trick people with fakes and phoney tales of miracles.

The image on it appears to have been a crude attempt to reproduce a body around which the shroud was wrapped and to make the body look like it had been crucified by painting some 'blood' on the arms. The artist appears to have either been unaware that wrapping a cloth around an object does not reproduce a three-dimensional image of the object, or he/she tried to reproduce an image that many people would assume such a process would produce.

If the forger had thought about it at all, it must have been something of a dilemma to either reproduce a realistic image as produced by wrapping it round the body, that no-one would recognise as the figure of a man unless projected onto a cylindrical mirror, or to produce something laughably unrealistic to an unbiased observer but that uncritical people would recognise as a human figure and allow confirmation bias and an eagerness to be fooled to gloss over the errors. The latter psychological process is the one normally used by religions to fool people with similar 'miracles'.

From the Gorleston Psalter, c.1320-30

Now a study has shown that the forger either deliberately or by chance, reproduced a pattern of blood flow on the left forearm which would be expected if the crucified body depicted had been crucified not in the traditional cruciform position, with arms outstretched, but in a 'Y' shaped position with arms raised above the head. This may well reflect the changing perception of how crucifixions were carried out, and might be because the forgery, like many of his contemporary 14th-century artists, depicted it as a 'Y', like Rubens did less than two hundred years later but unlike the more traditional poses depicted by more contemporary artists.

It could be that the artist just decided to draw the rivulets of blood parallel to the arms for artistic reasons.

Matteo Borrini, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

We can see how the forger was influenced by other artistic and cultural traditions and assumptions of his/her time in the depiction of Jesus as a European in the same pose used for the effigies of important people on their tombs. The hands, which are too small for the size of the face - a common mistake in early art - are discretely folded over the genitalia - something that would have been difficult to maintain whilst wrapping a body in a shroud and something that would not have been regarded as important since there was no expectation that anyone would see the body naked again. But obviously, if you're going to put an image of Jesus on display you don't want to show his naughty bits because that would be disrespectful and you can't use the traditional artistic device of a loincloth because bodies aren't normally buried in them.

'via Blog this'

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Farewell To Picasso's Child With A Dove

BBC News - Picasso's £50m Child With A Dove set to leave UK:

Sad that Picasso's Child With a Dove is to leave the UK, but what is even sadder is that this pivotal painting in Picasso's development and such an iconic painting has been bought by a private collector, which means it could disappear from public view to spend many years languishing in a bank vault.

Child With a Dove was one of the first paintings to fire my imagination and interest in art when, as child of about nine, we had a poster of it at my primary school in about 1955. We had to try to copy it. I believe it was an attempt as art education. My painting was singled out for special praise because the head mistress thought I have done the hands very nicely, which I felt a bit of a fraud about because I found that to be the hardest part to copy.

But what I saw in the painting was something which has stayed with me. I saw a child lovingly holding peace close to his/her breast (the child is actually, and I think deliberately androgynous) and treasuring it above all else, as symbolised by the forgotten toy ball on the ground. I saw it as anti-war and a tribute to the innocence of childhood.

The slaughter of World War II was then still fresh in many people's minds, including my father's who survived Dunkirk. The poor physical and mental wrecks of World War I still hobbled about on crippled feet from the trenches of Normandy, some with crippled lungs from gas and crippled minds from the horrors they endured as young men when those who could endure it no longer had summary execution for cowardice to look forward to. I remember too well when the new names from World War II were added to the war memorials which sprang up only a generation earlier in every town, village and hamlet. Child With a Dove told us we needed to hold onto our childish idealism if our generation was not to repeat the mistakes of earlier ones. Nothing is more precious than peace. Peace needs to be held gently but firmly, kept close and loved above all else. If we care more for peace than we care for toys we can make a better world.

I think Child With a Dove also influenced my political development.

Picasso was just 19 years old when he painted Child With a Dove in Paris in 1901. It represents a transition from his Impressionist style to his 'blue period' when he was probably in a sombre and reflective, even depressed mood following the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. His blue period is characterised with experimental paintings in a Post-Impressionist but still highly figurative style depicting 'the human condition'. Child With a Dove may represent Picasso's own farewell to the naive innocence of an Andalusia childhood. The child is distinctly Andalusian in appearance. Many Andalucian people can trace a North African Berber ancestry from a time when 'al-Andalus' was the Arabic name for Spain and Andalusia was a collection of Islamic Emirates.

Pablo Picasso never seems to have forgotten that childhood love of peace and was an inveterate peace-monger, depicting as he did the horrors of war with Guernica, and later on returning to the dove motif when he designed the poster for the 1949 Paris Peace Congresss. He named his fourth child, born the day before the 1949 Peace Congress, Paloma (Dove).

Addressing the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield, England Picasso said, "I stand for life against death; for peace against war". Almost fifty years earlier he had said that with Child With a Dove. I hope future generation get to see it too.

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Sparring With Creationists

Stag at Sharkeys (George Bellows, 1909)

One of the most frustrating things about 'debating' with religious fundamentalists and Creationists is that they don't know when they've lost. In all probability this is because they either genuinely didn't follow the debate and failed to realise that your answer destroyed their logic or didn't understand its relevance, or even that they don't understand the rules of debate and the logical principles underpinning it.

It could also be because they simply can't allow themselves to believe that their argument has been refuted because it was such an essential ingredient in their delusion that they know better than science from their position of ignorance.

It puts me in mind of a 1909 painting by George Bellows called Stag At Sharkey's. This painting represent a departure in American art when French Impressionism and the American Hudson River School, which tended to glorify the American West, were both rejected in favour of the realism to be found in the growing urban slums. It was called the Ashcan School because it dealt with life with all it's grime and ugliness and found something noble therein which the artist could depict using techniques formerly used to depict beauty and romanticism, and so show them to be beautiful and valid in their own terms. The Ashcan School, or "The Eight" later became know as "Apostles of Ugliness", so, for all it's brutal ugliness, which is rather the point of the painting, Stag at Sharkey's is an important painting in the history of Western Art.

Stag at Sharkey's depicts a prize fight reminiscent of a 'debate' with a Creationist where they assume the idea of debate is to score points anyway possible with no concern for honesty and truth. Punches below the belt and gouging are okay so long as it gets them out of the corner or off the ropes. For example, lying about something you said a few moments ago, name-calling, threats and insults or deliberately misquoting or misrepresenting something you just said.

Their tactics more resemble a street brawl or a playground scrap while you are trying to get across some logical point, explain a scientific process, correct a false assertion or bring them back to the point they are running away from, or simply explain that they are wrong and where they can go to prove it for themselves. In all probability they haven't even understood the rules and, even if they have, they've assumed they don't apply to them because, being religious they are entitled to special privileges and exemptions.

But the worst part is when you have defeated all their 'points', answered all their 'unanswerable' questions, shown their basic assumptions to be invalid and based on disinformation, or explained how their questions merely highlight their ignorance and that that is not actually what science says, and they simply hit the reset button and ask a question you answered a few moments ago denying having seen your answer, they simply do not understand, or refuse to accept, that they have lost.

The point of a boxing match of course is to knock your opponent out by giving them enough brain damage to ensure they can't stand up for ten seconds or more. However, this presupposes your opponent actually has a brain which can be damaged and that they are able to register the fact that they are on the canvas and have been counted out, and that that constitutes defeat.

This generally works with boxers, no matter how badly their brains have been damaged by previous fights. However, this analogy seems to break down with religious fundamentalists and Creationists who don't seem to have the necessary equipment for knowing they've even been knocked down let alone that they're on the canvas and have been counted out. Instead, like mindless automatons they continue swinging aimlessly and even proclaiming victory, seemingly oblivious of the mirth of the audience, or even the rules of the game they were in.

But, for all their brutal ugliness, there is nothing noble in fundamentalist Creationism. It doesn't represent a departure or a rejection of an old and outdated idea and the beginning of something new and exciting. It represents exactly the opposite - a desperate clinging to the past and a desperate attempt to pull us all back to something far more primitive and brutal and which was rejected by all enlightened, progressive and educated people more than a century ago. It's like comparing the primitive scrawlings of children who can barely hold a pencil with a Monet, a Picasso or a Ken Howard.

Much of it of course is genuinely childish; the product of immature minds developing in a scientifically illiterate, superstitious culture which still believes in magic and demons. A lot of it is also arrogant narcissism by those too lazy to learn, indifferent to truth and honesty but desperate to be thought of as wiser and more profound in their understanding than people who have bothered to learn and who do care about things like truth and honesty.

But there is also a sinister group of Creationists who are trying to overthrow science and especially Darwinian Evolution because they do understand it and understand only too well the threat it represents to their ambition. They intend to use religious superstition to undermine secular democracies and make a grab for power with the introduction of a primitive, brutal, Bronze-age style neo-Fascist theocracy, under their control, naturally, the artistic equivalent of a simple rock drawing and the cultural equivalent of abolishing the last 3000 years of human progress.

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Inspiring Atheists - Visual Art

Water lilies, 1906

Claude Monet

The Dance (Second Version), 1010, Henri Matisse

The things the godly say:

• Inspiration comes from religion.
• Without religion we would not have human culture, particularly the arts such as music and the visual arts.
• Only God can inspire humans to create beauty and appreciation of it is a spiritual thing, implying a non-material world of pure, beautiful thought.

That's the religious propaganda, as the exponents of superstition lay claim to something else for which they have no entitlement. I have previously shown how some of the western world's top composers were Atheists and yet produced some of the great classics of Western music, often with religious themes.

Here I'll do the same with the visual arts, one of my great passions in life:

Inspiring Atheists

One of the more condescending arguments used by sufferers from religion, and ranking alongside their claim to hold a monopoly on morality for demonstrably unjustified arrogance, is that without religion we wouldn't have great works of art, music, etc., because only religion can inspire human beings to artistic creativity.

While there can be little doubt that religious subjects were often the subject of great works of art or musical composition - the breath-taking beauty of Handel's Messiah and Van Gough's "The Sower" spring to mind. (Some might struggle to see the religion in Van Gough's works but it absolutely pervades it. Look at the painting on the right. It's one of Vincent van Gough's most profoundly religious paintings, in my opinion).

I'll maybe write a blog about Atheist artists one day. This one is about Atheist composers.

It will probably come as a surprise to religion sufferers who like to pretend their co-superstitionists have a monopoly on artistic creativity that there is an enormous list of Atheist and non-believer composers, and that many of them wrote 'religious' music. Some of them, like Elgar and Mozart lost faith in later life, so whatever religious beliefs may have inspired their earlier works, they clearly never inspired them to remain religious.

Simple Gifts

It might surprise readers of this blog and my followers on Twitter, but one of my favourite pieces of music, amongst many, is Aaron Copeland's arrangement of 'Simple Gifts', 'Variations on a Shaker Melody' from his score for Martha Graham's ballet, 'Appalachian Spring'.

As an aside: it's amusing that the title to the ballet was decided on after he wrote the score. It was taken from a poem by Hart Crane yet many people say how well it evokes the spirit of Spring in the Appalachian Mountains. This is even more amusing when you realise that the term 'Appalachian Spring' in Crane's poem referred to a water source, not the season.

Ah well! Such is the nature of human perception.

Anyway, what I was intending to talk about is the beautiful simplicity in Shaker artefacts and how they came about. To me, 'Simple Gifts' somehow captures this both in its words and in the beautiful simplicity of the tune. The words and music were written by Elder Joseph Brackett (1797-1882).

The basic philosophy is that a thing made with love is a thing of beauty and needs no adornment. The beauty lies in the application of skill and the fitness of form. The lily needs no gilding. Of course, the belief that skill is a gift from God is central to this philosophy but that's not what I'm talking about here.

What I'm talking about is the idea of simplicity itself and how this came into Christianity. The truth may surprise many Christians. It came from Islam.

The Old Testament forbids the making of graven images in the second of the so-called 'Ten Commandments'. This expressly forbids the making of "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:1-17). This is normally completely ignore by even the most fundamentalist of Christians unless it suits them to condemn some image or other. However, the same proscription is found in Islam, where it is taken very seriously.

Islamic cultures tend to be free of figurative art, using only abstract designs and only occasionally plant-based designs and then in a highly stylised form. Wonderful buildings like the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (The Blue Mosque) in Istanbul and the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain are decorated entirely in abstract designs or Koranic verses.

Contrast this to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the former Byzantine Orthodox Christian Church of Saint Sophia which stands opposite the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and was decorated in images and icons of saints which were plastered over when it became a Mosque but have since been uncovered and restored as a museum.

Still today Orthodox Churches of both Greek and Russian traditions are richly adorned with icons and statues as are to a lesser extent Catholic Churches. However, there was a period when the Catholic Church became Iconoclastic and some see this as the fundamental difference between Roman and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm - the act of breaking or destroying icons - was influenced by Islam when it became the dominant force throughout the Middle East including former Christian strongholds like Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and then Constantinople.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia admits, in an article on iconoclasm on the question of Islamic influence, "It is true that, in a sense, the Khalifa at Damascus began the whole disturbance, and that the Iconoclast emperors were warmly applauded and encouraged in their campaign by their rivals at Damascus." So, influenced by Islam, the Catholic Church briefly became Iconoclastic and a movement against icons entered Western Christianity.

Later, following the Protestant Reformation, with its fundamentalist offshoots like Calvinism, this move against graven images in churches was taken to extremes, emphasising as it does a fundamental difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, so that in England and Calvinist Scotland, especially following the Parliamentarian victory in the civil war, led by the Protestant Puritan Oliver Cromwell, almost all churches were stripped bare of any adornment with even crucifixes, stone crosses and stained-glass windows being destroyed in an iconoclastic fervour.

This resulted in the stark simplicity now found in most English country churches with bare stone or plastered and white-washed walls and bare or brown wood. The same can be found in Methodist and Baptist chapels. Ornamentation is normally now only found in minster churches and cathedrals and nothing on the scale of even the smaller Catholic and Orthodox churches where, to someone like me, brought up in the austere Protestant tradition, the churches appear vulgar and almost obscenely ostentatious. To a secular humanist though, this reaction has nothing to do with blasphemy and blind obedience to the capricious whim of gods, but to the thought of the good that could have been done had the money spent on this ornamentation been spent where it could have done something useful.

And of course, this austerity and stark yet beautiful simplicity reached its most developed and purest form in the Shaker tradition of simplicity of form, in furniture and buildings and in tunes like Simple Gifts, an example of evolution of culture through cross-fertilisation.

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A Thing Of Beauty

Water Lilies

Claude Monet, 1906

Vincent Van Gogh. Wheat Field with Cypresses at the Haute Galline Near Eygalieres Saint-Rémy - June 1889

As a materialist, one of the accusations often thrown at me is that materialism cannot account for our aesthetic appreciation; of our understanding of beauty. Now, I'm no philistine. One of my enduring passions in life is art, especially impressionism, post-impressionism and modern art. I also get enormous aesthetic pleasure watching wildlife and looking at plants, even the mundane and ordinary. In fact, nothing in this world is really mundane to me. I can see beauty in a pebble, a lichen-covered wall, the roots of a tree, a spider or a beetle.

I also enjoy classical music, especially that of J. S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Elgar and Vaughn Williams, and could listen to the great classical guitarists like André Segovia, Julian Bream or John Williams all day long. Oh how I wish I could play half as well. Although not my favourite piece of classical music, I once totally converted a girl who worked for me to classical music by playing her Pachelbel's Canon in D.