Creationism Refuted - Don't Laugh At the Bible's Authors, They Were Only Doing Their Best!

NGC 3285B (137 million lightyears from Earth)

NGC 3285B

A spiral galaxy with a disc made up of several swirling arms. Patchy blue clouds of gas are speckled over the disc, where stars are forming and lighting up the gas around them. The core of the galaxy is large and shines brightly gold, while the spiral arms are a paler and faint reddish colour. Neighbouring galaxies - from small, elongated spots to larger swirling spirals - can be seen across the black background.

Swirling spiral in Hydra | ESA/Hubble

Take a grain of rice and hold it between your thumb and forefinger at arm’s length while looking up at the night sky. The patch of sky hidden behind that tiny grain of rice probably contains thousands of galaxies—each with around half a trillion stars. Some of these stars are ancient, nearing the end of their tens-of-millions-of-years lifespans; others are just beginning to form from clouds of gas and debris left behind by older stars that exploded as supernovae.

What lies behind that grain of rice is a tiny fragment of a dynamic, evolving, ever-changing, and expanding universe. A universe of which our ancient prophets were completely unaware as they crafted imaginative descriptions of its origins—descriptions written just a few thousand years ago that portrayed it as a small, unchanging cosmos, with a flat Earth at the centre covered by a dome.

But let’s not be too hard on them. As they stood in their Canaanite pastures, the Earth must indeed have looked flat and small, and the sky would have seemed like the roof of a great tent, adorned with tiny lights and with the sun and moon suspended from it. To them, the Earth appeared fixed and immobile while the dome overhead turned slowly, or perhaps invisible spirits moved the lights across the heavens each night. They didn’t know where the sun went after sunset and imagined the moon might hide in a deep valley during the day.

Creationism Refuted - How Geophysics Could Have Influenced Human Development - 31,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aurors in the skies above Europe could have been breathtaking, terrifying or both for ancient humans.

Weird space weather seems to have influenced human behavior on Earth 41,000 years ago – our unusual scientific collaboration explores how

In that long stretch of Earth’s history before it was supposedly "created," according to creationist mythology—a span covering 99.9975% of the planet’s existence—a remarkable geophysical event occurred. Around 41,000 years ago, during a time when modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans coexisted in Eurasia, a major disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field likely influenced human behaviour and may have hastened the disappearance of the Neanderthals.

This event, known as the Laschamps Excursion, was not a typical magnetic pole reversal, which Earth undergoes roughly every 100,000 years. Instead, the planet's magnetic field entered a chaotic state, weakening dramatically to around 10% of its usual strength and breaking into multiple, unstable poles.

Earth’s magnetic field normally shields the surface from ionising radiation by deflecting much of it towards the poles. With that protective barrier severely weakened, the planet would have been exposed to much stronger levels of ultraviolet radiation. The usual deflection of charged particles also produces the auroras, which during this period would have appeared across much of the night sky, including at lower latitudes—perhaps even near the equator—due to the multiple and shifting magnetic poles.

Although the Laschamps Excursion lasted only a few years, the environmental changes it triggered may explain behavioural shifts visible in the archaeological record. This is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan; Agnit Mukhopadhyay, Research Scholar at the University of Alberta and Research Affiliate at Michigan; and Sanja Panovska, a Research Scientist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. Together with their colleagues, they have published their findings—open access—in Science Advances.

Incidentally, the archaeological evidence discussed here should not exist at all if the biblical flood narrative were true. Such a flood would have obliterated or buried this material beneath a chaotic layer of silt, destroying the stratified layers of sediment by which these finds are reliably dated—dating that is wholly inconsistent with the timeline of human history as derived from biblical mythology. Moreover, the Laschamps Excursion undermines any creationist claim that the Earth was created and fine-tuned especially for human life. If something as fundamental as magnetic polarity—and the UV protection it affords—can fail naturally due to processes in Earth’s core, then the idea of a specially designed planet collapses under its own absurdity.

The article from The Conversation is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence and has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Creationism Refuted - What Dinosaur Teeth Tell Us About Life 150 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Original skull of the Giraffatitan from Tanzania.

Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, MB.R.2223

For details, see below.

What Dinosaur Teeth Reveal About Life 150 Million Years Ago | Leibniz Institute

Some 150 million years before the mythical events of ‘Creation Week’—give or take a few thousand years—our distant ancestors were small, nocturnal, rodent-like mammals eking out an existence in a world dominated by colossal reptiles. Among these dominant life forms were the dinosaurs, thriving in a variety of ecosystems and feeding on plants or other animals, depending on their species.

As they ate, they unwittingly left behind a record of their diet etched into the microscopic wear patterns on the enamel of their teeth. Today, with the help of sophisticated analytical techniques, palaeontologists can read these patterns like a diary of prehistoric meals. And with each new discovery, such as the one published by a team led by Dr Daniela E. Winkler of Kiel University, the yawning gap between ancient mythology and modern science widens ever further. Their findings provide yet another decisive refutation of the simplistic narrative crafted by Bronze Age storytellers—later compiled into what some still insist is the inerrant word of an omniscient creator.

This latest blow to creationist pseudoscience comes in the form of an open-access paper, Dental microwear texture analysis reveals behavioural, ecological and habitat signals in Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur faunas, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The team focused on the teeth of sauropods—long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Diplodocus — from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation in North America and the Lusitanian Basin in Portugal. Using a method called Dental Microwear Texture Analysis (DMTA), they examined the microscopic wear patterns caused by feeding, revealing a fascinating spectrum of dietary strategies and environmental adaptations among different species.

What they found demolishes the notion of sauropods as a homogenous group of giant leaf-munchers. Instead, the microwear textures show distinct differences in feeding behaviour, likely linked to differences in available vegetation and habitat. For example, Camarasaurus appears to have consumed tougher, more fibrous plant material—perhaps conifers—while others such as Diplodocus may have specialised in softer vegetation like ferns or aquatic plants. These variations not only suggest niche partitioning, where species avoid direct competition by diversifying their diets, but also point to distinct ecological zones across the ancient landscapes they inhabited.

Even more telling is the comparison between North American and European sauropods. Despite being closely related, the differences in their dental microwear suggest adaptations to different environmental pressures and available flora, implying behavioural flexibility and evolutionary divergence shaped by their respective habitats.

Such complexity and diversity, preserved for over 150 million years in the microscopic textures of fossilised teeth, are a world away from the simplistic narratives of static 'kinds' created in a single week. Instead, we see a dynamic, evolving biosphere responding to ecological challenges—exactly what we’d expect in a world governed by natural selection and deep time.

Refuting Creationism - Party Time In Iran 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week' - And The Flood Missed The Evidence

Samples of ancient boar teeth unearthed at the archaeological site of Asiab in the Zagros Mountains.

Credit: Nic Vevers/ANU

Regional ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios were estimated using data from the Georoc database³⁷ and measurements of modern plants from Ali Kosh²⁹ and interpolated to the wider region using the underlying lithology (following Barakat et al.⁸⁷).

Vaiglova, P., Kierdorf, H., Witzel, C. et al. (2025)

‘Ultimate dinner party guests’: Dispersed communities attending feast in ancient Iran gifted boars sourced from distant lands | Australian National University

A thousand years before Earth was supposedly created—according to the Bronze Age myths that creationists regard as literal history—people were already feasting in the Zagros Mountains, at a site now known as Asiab in modern-day Iran. Then, in what must have been a strangely selective miracle, around 4,300 years ago—when, according to the same myths, a global flood wiped out all life on Earth—the remains of these ancient feasts remained completely untouched. Like countless other archaeological sites, Asiab shows no trace of the thick silt layer that such a cataclysmic flood would inevitably have left behind.

Long before the advent of agriculture, when humans still lived in scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, people gathered at Asiab for a communal feast. The exact reason—whether religious ceremony, marriage, funeral, or some form of tribal leadership event—can only be guessed at. But what is clear is that guests travelled long distances over mountainous terrain, bringing with them the carcasses of wild boar. These animals, dangerous to hunt and not commonly pursued by hunter-gatherers in the region, appear to have held special significance. Their presence suggests that hunting and transporting them was a display of prowess or status, perhaps reserved for prestigious guests.

This conclusion comes from a team of palaeontologists who examined the microscopic wear and isotopic signatures on the teeth of wild boar recovered from the site. (For more on how this technique works, see the AI information side panel.)

The international team, led by Dr Petra Vaiglova of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), has just published their findings open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Creationism In Crisis - Neanderthals With Different Cullinary Styles - 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

Specialty of the house: Neanderthals at two nearby caves butchered the same prey in different ways, suggesting local food traditions

Cut-marks on a bone found at Amud.

Image by the authors, supplied by Anaëlle Jallon.

More embarrassment for creationists comes in the form of new evidence that Neanderthals were butchering and cooking meat in two caves in what is now Israel. Not only did this occur some 40,000 to 50,000 years before creationists believe the Earth was created, but it also shows that Neanderthal culture had diversified into distinct culinary traditions—even among populations inhabiting neighbouring areas.

The most damning evidence against creationist claims is, of course, the very existence of such archaeological remains. According to the biblical narrative of a global, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, this evidence simply should not exist. Such a cataclysm would have erased any trace of it—or at best buried it beneath thick layers of chaotic silt, jumbled together with fossils of plants and animals from distant land masses in no coherent stratigraphic order.

The evidence for Neanderthal cultural diversity comes from researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who studied remains in the nearby caves of Amud and Kebara, located just 70 km apart.

What they found was a marked difference in how the two Neanderthal groups butchered their prey, including whether they processed the carcasses at the kill site or transported them back to their caves for preparation. There also appear to be differences in how the meat was cooked.

The researchers’ findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Creationism Refuted - A Flint Arrowhead Embeded In A Human Rib Is Hurting Creationism

Flint arrowhead embedded in a human rib, found at the Roc de les Orenetes site (Queralbs, Ripollès).

Credit: Maria D. Guillén
/ IPHES-CERCA

Archaeological excavation work in June at the Roc de les Orenetes site (Queralbs, Ripollès).

IPHES-CERCA

Arrowhead embedded in a human rib reveals prehistoric violence in the Pyrenees over 4,000 years ago

Around the time creationists claim Earth was undergoing a global flood — a mass genocide by drowning, supposedly enacted by a deity - a belief based solely on the origin myths of a Bronze Age Middle Eastern pastoralist tribe — people in the Pyrenees were engaged in violent conflict, using bows and arrows. Unlike biblical mythology, this insight is grounded in tangible evidence: a human rib bone with a flint arrowhead still embedded in it. Remarkably, the injury had healed before the individual died, suggesting they survived the attack for some time. The rib was found in a mass grave at Roc de les Orenetes (Queralbs, Girona), alongside the remains of several others, many of whom showed signs of trauma from blunt or sharp weapons, particularly to the head and upper body.

The timing of this violence — dated to between 4,100 and 4,500 years ago — is problematic for biblical literalists. If the Genesis flood had truly occurred as described, these remains should either have been destroyed or buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt, mixed with the remains of animals and plants not native to the region. Alternatively, one must believe that just a few years after a supposed global reset that reduced humanity to eight survivors, their descendants had multiplied sufficiently to form warring groups in the mountains of what is now northern Spain.

And yet, these individuals show no sign of having heard of Noah, his family, or the god who allegedly saved them. There’s no indication of the monotheistic religion supposedly preserved aboard the ark. If the flood story were true, the moral lesson it was intended to deliver seems to have been forgotten almost immediately, everywhere except among a small group in the Canaanite hills.

This discovery joins a growing list of archaeological findings that contradict the flood narrative. Far from showing a global cataclysm, the archaeological record reveals continuous human habitation before, during, and after the time the flood is supposed to have occurred—with no signs of interruption, no replacement by a Near Eastern culture, and no characteristic flood-deposited sediment layer.

It’s almost as if the global flood never happened. Not only is there no geological or archaeological evidence supporting it, but what evidence we do have consistently contradicts it. This find from the Pyrenees is yet another example.

Refuting Creationism - What a Tiny Part Of The Universe Looked Like 150,000 Before 'Creation Week' - Hubble Space Telescope

NGC 1786

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Monelli
Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

A cluster of stars in space. It’s bright in the centre, where the stars are densely packed together in the cluster’s core, and grows dimmer and more diffuse out to the edges, as the stars give way to the dark background of space. A few orange stars are spread across the cluster, but most are pale, bluish-white points of light. Three large stars with cross-shaped spikes around them lie between us and the cluster

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Monelli
Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

Digging up a galactic time capsule | ESA/Hubble

The ESA/Hubble photograph of the week offers a glimpse into a vast and ancient universe—one that starkly contrasts with the primitive cosmology described in the Bible. The image captures a globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located some 160,000 light-years from Earth. What we’re seeing, then, is a snapshot of this cluster as it was 160,000 years ago—long before the writers of the Bible imagined their god creating a small, flat Earth with a dome over it, to which the sun, moon, and stars were affixed, somewhere in the vicinity of the Canaanite hills.

At the time, the light we’re now seeing began its journey across space, early humans in Africa were evolving the skills and traits that would eventually allow them to leave the continent and colonise new territories. According to [a recent study](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1768), there had been earlier migration attempts northward, but these failed to establish lasting populations for reasons still debated by researchers.

What this photograph shows us—quite literally—is a universe that predates the biblical account of creation by well over 150,000 years, and a cosmos that bears no resemblance to the geocentric, dome-covered world described in Genesis. While we can’t know exactly how our early ancestors viewed the night sky, their understanding was likely not very different from that of the later Bronze Age storytellers who wrote the biblical texts. Both were constrained by limited technology, and neither had any inkling of galaxies, light-years, or cosmic timescales.

Refuting Creationism - What Our Prophets Never Told Us

The Cat's Paw Nebula in all its glory, as revealed by the JWST on its third anniversary of science operations.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

This is a zoomed-in portion of the JWST's Cat's Paw image. It shows a cavity surrounded by filaments and clumps of gas and dust. The cavity has been hollowed out by a hot young star which lights its surroundings up in blue.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Celebrate the JWST's Third Anniversary With This Stunning Image - Universe Today

To celebrate its third anniversary, astronomers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region.

This is what they saw. Compare it to the description of the universe in the Bible - a small flat planet with a dome over it at the center, with the sun and moon attached to the dome and stars stuck to its underside, able to be shaken lose in earthquakes.

Here is what the late great Carl Sagan had to say about how religions view the universe:

Creationism Refuted - Wooden Tools - From 290,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of wooden tools in use

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

A wooden tool is excavated from the site in China.

Photo: Bo Li.

2025 | Oldest wooden artefacts ever found in East Asia reveal plant-based diet of ancient humans - University of Wollongong – UOW

The childish notion of creationism took another battering today with the announcement that an international team of researchers, including University of Wollongong archaeologist Professor Bo Li, has unearthed a set of wooden tools in south-west China dating to approximately 300,000 years ago. That places them a full 290,000 years before creationists believe the Earth was formed, situating their manufacture and use within the 99.9975% of Earth’s history that occurred before the so-called ‘Creation Week’.

This date significantly predates the appearance of anatomically modern humans outside Africa. The exact identity of the archaic hominins who made and used these tools is uncertain — possibly early Denisovans, Homo heidelbergensis, or perhaps H. erectus. What we can say with confidence is that these hominins stand in stark contradiction to the Bronze Age origin myths recorded in the Bible, which many creationists insist are literal historical accounts.

The usual creationist response to such findings is to reject them outright as fabrications, the result of flawed methodology, or deliberate deception. However, the dating of these artefacts relies on a technique refined by Professor Li called electron spin resonance (ESR), which measures the time elapsed since the artefacts were buried. (See the side panel for further details.)

Refuting Creationism - The Mass Extinction 252 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Dr Zhen Xu on fieldwork in China.

Image credit: Zhen Xu

Pre-extinction tropical rainforest seed fern, Gigantopteris, (giant leaves)

Dr Zhen Xu.

New fossils reveal climate tipping point in most famous mass extinction | University of Leeds

Creationists claim that Earth is only a few thousand years old and that it was created perfectly and finely tuned for life—brought into existence without ancestors, from nothing, by means of supernatural command. Their evidence for this extraordinary claim rests on the beliefs of Bronze Age pastoralists who imagined Earth as small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. These ancient myths were eventually written down, bound up in a book later declared by people with a vested interest, to be divinely inspired and historically accurate.

Science, by contrast, presents a very different picture. Far from being a perfect and finely tuned haven for life, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile planet. Life persists here not because conditions are universally benign, but because a small number of organisms have evolved to thrive within narrow environmental niches. Throughout Earth’s long history, global conditions have periodically tipped into extremes so severe that they triggered mass extinction events. Unlike creationist claims, these conclusions are supported by tangible, testable evidence.

One such event—known as the Great Dying—occurred around 252 million years ago, relatively recent in the planet’s \~4.5 billion-year history. This catastrophe, the most severe extinction event known, was likely triggered by intense volcanic activity that caused a rapid and sustained rise in global temperatures. The resulting climate shift led to the collapse of tropical forests, which in turn reduced the planet’s capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon, driving further warming. This cascade of ecological breakdown led to the loss of most marine species and widespread collapse of terrestrial ecosystems.

The outcome was a planetary heatwave that lasted for approximately five million years.

New evidence for the role of rainforest collapse in both the onset and the recovery from the Great Dying has been presented by an international team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Leeds and the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper published in Nature Communications and summarised in a news release from the University of Leeds.

Refuting Creationism - The Universe Is Much Grander Than Our Prophets Ever Guessed.

This image combines 678 separate images taken by NSF-DOE's Vera C. Rubin Observatory over just over seven hours of observing. Combining multiple images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that make up the Trifid Nebula (upper right) and the Lagoon Nebula, which are several thousand light-years from Earth.

© NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory Unveils First Sky Images Taken with World's Largest Camera | CNRS

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.

Just imagine, there are adults alive today who believe that is the best available description of the universe, far surpassing for detail and accuracy anything that modern science, with all its sophisticated equipment can produce!

Compare it with what science is showing us it is really like and ask yourself whether a real creator god could have got it so badly wrong when describing its own creation.

Refuting Creationism - How Dogs Spread Across The Americas - Then Survived The Legendary Biblical Global Flood

Chihuahua dog in Mexico.

Credit: Urvashi9, Getty Images

Figure 1. Distribution of archaeological samples analysed in this study.

Manin, Aurélie, et al (2025)

Ancient DNA reveals new clues about the incredible journey of dogs in the Americas | University of Oxford

According to the Bible, all living things outside Noah’s Ark were destroyed once Noah, his family, and his chosen animals were safely sealed inside (Genesis 7:4). This supposedly happened around 4,000 years ago, according to the biblical narrative — which creationists firmly believe to be inerrant history.

The snag is, the evidence simply doesn’t support that timeline—or a global flood involving mass extinction by drowning. Not only would such a flood have left a distinctive global deposit of sediment, containing a chaotic mix of ancient and modern animal and plant species from disconnected continents, but it would also have erased all archaeological traces of earlier civilisations and palaeontological evidence of past life. In effect, it would have reset the clocks of both archaeology and palaeontology to start around 4,000 years ago.

Unfortunately for biblical literalists, that’s not what we see. The predicted tell-tale layer of silt is conspicuously absent. Instead, both archaeology and palaeontology reveal a pattern of uninterrupted occupation of the planet by animals and humans stretching back tens of thousands—and, in the case of animal and plant species, hundreds of millions—of years. For anatomically modern humans, there is a consistent archaeological record documenting their spread across all land masses (except Antarctica), during which they domesticated animals such as dogs, which migrated alongside them.

One example of this pattern — the migration of domestic dogs with humans into the Americas between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago — has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, by an international team of scientists led by Dr Aurélie Manin from the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. They have shown that all South American dogs prior to the arrival of Europeans, trace their ancestry back to a single female. One strain — the Mexican Chihuahua - still shows evidence of that ancestry.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Scientifically-Illiterate People

A new study broadens the horizon of knowledge about how matter behaves under extreme conditions and helps to solve some great unknowns about the origin of the universe.

Deciphering the behaviour of heavy particles in the hottest matter in the universe - Current events - University of Barcelona

The Bible contains no scientific insights or understanding beyond what would have been known to Bronze Age pastoralists—what Christopher Hitchens aptly described as the "fearful infancy of our species." Their knowledge was naturally constrained by the absence of scientific instruments, a lack of understanding of the planet's history, and a worldview shaped by tribal dogma and magical thinking.

Had the Bible truly been written or inspired by the deity it describes — as a vital message to humanity from the creator of the universe — one might reasonably expect it to contain some revelations unknown to its time. Yet it offers nothing by way of evidence to support such a claim. There is no mention of germ theory, no understanding of cells or cellular life, no grasp of atoms, electricity, or metabolic processes like photosynthesis and respiration. All living things are described as strictly male or female, with no recognition of genetics, hermaphroditism or parthenogenesis — except for a single, supposedly miraculous human birth of a genetically impossible male child. In short, the text contains nothing that was not already known or assumed until the development of tools like the microscope and telescope, and much of it was clearly and demonstrably wrong.

The Bible’s authors were storytellers, not scientists. Their goal was not to challenge the cultural assumptions of their time but to frame them within a compelling narrative.

Because religions are not founded on tested hypotheses or objective facts but rather on the best guesses of uninformed people, any alignment with modern scientific understanding is coincidental, not predictive. For example, the biblical phrase *"Let there be light"* is sometimes interpreted as metaphorically reflecting the early high-energy state of the universe following the Big Bang. But there is no indication that the authors understood photons, particle physics, or the quantum nature of space-time. Nor did they suggest that the universe originated nearly 14 billion years ago in a quantum fluctuation of a non-zero energy field.

Recent discoveries illustrate just how far modern science has advanced beyond anything conceivable to ancient authors. For instance, an international team of scientists has recently found evidence suggesting the existence of heavy particles during the universe's first microseconds—particles that influenced the behaviour of other matter. This discovery, utterly incomprehensible to a Bronze Age worldview, is detailed in a peer-reviewed article published in Physics Reports.

Creationism Refuted - Something From Nothing - Let There Be Light!

Normalised ellipticity across the transverse plane for the Gaussian scenario.

Illustration of photon-photon scattering in the laboratory. Two green petawatt lasers beams collide at the focus with a third red beam to polarise the quantum vacuum. This allows a fourth blue laser beam to be generated, with a unique direction and colour, which conserves momentum and energy.

Credit: Zixin (Lily) Zhang

Oxford physicists recreate extreme quantum vacuum effects | University of Oxford Department of Physics

As Sam Harris once remarked, “When religions are right, they are right by accident.” His point highlights the lack of empirical grounding in religious claims, which are typically non-falsifiable and therefore beyond the scope of scientific validation.

Ironically, this may mean that the authors of Genesis were accidentally correct in one of their most iconic assertions: that the universe began with the creation of light (Genesis 1:3). While the biblical writers lacked any scientific understanding, modern physics now suggests that under extreme quantum conditions, something akin to this could indeed occur — light arising from an apparent vacuum.

This is an area where creationists normally tie themselves up in knots, claiming on the one hand that you can't get something out of nothing because it contravenes the laws of thermodynamics and on the other hand that a god made of nothing created the universe out of nothing with some magic words.

The truth, of course, is rather more rational and subject to scientific analysis and testing.

Researchers at the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford have successfully simulated a remarkable prediction of quantum electrodynamics: the spontaneous emergence of photons from empty space. Their work, published in Communications Physics, demonstrates how light can be generated from the quantum vacuum — a phenomenon that, until now, had only existed as a theoretical possibility.

Refuting Creationism - A Technologically Advanced Civilisation in the Philippines - 25,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

A map of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and the Sunda region as it appeared roughly 25,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age, with locations of archaeological sites surveyed by the Mindoro Archaeology Project.

Base Map: www.gebco.net, 2014

A map of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and the Sunda region as it appeared roughly 25,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age, with locations of archaeological sites surveyed by the Mindoro Archaeology Project. The sites yielded artifacts with remarkably similar characteristics despite separation by thousands of kilometers and deep waters that are almost impossible to cross without sufficiently advanced seafaring knowledge and technology.

Base Map: www.gebco.net, 2014.

Philippine islands had technologically advanced maritime culture 35,000 years ago | News | Ateneo de Manila University

It’s shaping up to be another difficult week for creationists. Hot on the heels of news that humans were fighting and killing in northern Italy 7,000 years before the alleged ‘Creation Week’ and ‘The Fall’—events which biblical literalists claim introduced death into the world—comes fresh evidence of a sophisticated maritime culture flourishing in what is now the Philippines 18,000 years before that.

Another significant challenge for the creationist narrative is that, like the skeletal remains found in Italy, this archaeological evidence in the Philippines was not obliterated by the supposed global flood—an essential element of young Earth creationism for which there is no credible supporting evidence.

The discoveries in the Philippines were made by scientists from Ateneo de Manila University, in collaboration with international experts and institutions. Their research reveals early human migration, technological innovation, and long-distance intercultural connections dating back more than 35,000 years. The findings have been published in Archaeological Research in Asia, and are also explained in a news release from Ateneo de Manila University.

Refuting Creationism - Human Conflict And Death - 7,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Illustration depicting intergroup violence and conflict during the Stone Age.
Shanxi Provincial Museum, Taiyuan.

Gary Todd/Public domain

Three projectile impact marks found on Tagliente 1’s left femur.

Credit: Sparacello VS et al., Scientific Reports (2025)

17,000-year-old skeleton reveals earliest evidence of Stone Age ambush and human conflict | Archaeology News Online Magazine

Towards the end of that immensely long pre-Creation Week period of Earth’s history — when 99.9975% of everything had already happened before creationists believe their god made a small, flat Earth with a dome over it in the Middle East, as described in the Bible — humans were already fighting battles in what is now northern Italy. To be precise, this occurred around 7,000 years before 'Creation Week'.

This conclusion comes from the analysis of a 17,000-year-old skeleton belonging to a man aged between 22 and 30, bearing unmistakable injuries caused by flint-tipped projectiles—likely arrows or spears. The skeleton, discovered in 1973 at the Riparo Tagliente rock shelter in the Lessini Mountains of northeastern Italy, only recently revealed its violent past thanks to modern forensic techniques.

The findings, led by bioarchaeologist Vitale Sparacello of the University of Cagliari, were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Refuting Creationism - More Than the Bible's Authors Could Ever Have Imagined

The Milky Way hovers in the clear skies over the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, with graduate student Nicole Firestone in silhouette. Astrophysicist Eric Gawiser and his group conduct many studies using its facilities.

Nicole Firestone

Looking Deeply Into the Universe’s Past, Scientists Detect Bursts of New Stars | Rutgers University

Back in the Bronze Age — a period Christopher Hitchens once described as "the fearful infancy of our species" — people gazed up at the sky and imagined a dome over a small, flat Earth. In the absence of scientific knowledge, they filled the gaps in their understanding with stories that reflected their assumptions about how the world worked: a small, teleological world governed by invisible agents or spirits who made things happen. These stories were eventually written down in ancient texts and, over time, compiled into a book that was later declared to be the holy word of an omnipotent, omniscient god.

One such story recounts how this god spoke magic words that caused the entire universe — including that small, flat planet with a dome overhead — to spring forth out of nothing just a few thousand years ago. This same god then populated the Earth with a handful of species and two fully formed humans, all without ancestry, who supposedly gave rise to the entire diversity of life and the global human population within the last 6,000 to 10,000 years.

Curiously, despite how wildly this tale diverges from what we now know about the formation of the universe and the evolutionary history of life on Earth — from a common ancestor through divergence and speciation — some people continue to insist that the version crafted by scientifically illiterate Bronze Age storytellers is correct, and that the evidence painstakingly uncovered by generations of scientists must somehow be mistaken, or even the false claims of sinister conspirators.

They dismiss even the most robust, verifiable evidence — such as recent findings on the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way, home to our own planet, which formed roughly 3–4 billion years after the Big Bang. That event, the beginning of space and time, is thought to have arisen from a quantum fluctuation in a non-zero energy field.

This evidence of how galaxies formed in the 'Cosmic Noon' was recently published in an open-access paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, authored by a team of astrophysicists led by Professor Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.

Our Galaxy - The Milky Way - Like You've Never Seen It Before

“Boot Arch Perseids”
Alabama Hills, CA, USA

Credit: Mike Abramyan
2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year
Daniel Zafra Portill

17 dazzling images from Milky Way Photographer of the Year 2025 awards | Popular Science

Stars died and because they died, you live. You are made by stars out of stardust and in a very real sense; because you are made of the same stuff the Universe is made of and are a part of it, there is something even more wonderful about you. Through you, though not just through you, and maybe not just here on this small planet, the Universe has gained self–awareness and can begin to understand itself.

Through you it can stand on the surface of this beautiful little jewel in the cosmos, can look up in awe at itself and think "Wow!"

Rosa Rubicondior - What Make You So Special? From the Big Bang To You, page 152

“Diamond Beach Emerald Sky”
Great Ocean Road, Australia

Credit: Brent Martin / 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year Daniel Zafra Portill

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