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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