Each glory is unique, depending on the composition of the planet’s atmosphere and the colours of the light from the star that illuminates it. WASP-76 (the «Sun» of WASP-76b) is a yellow and white main sequence star like our Sun, but different stars create glories with different colours and patterns.
Scientists working at the CHEOPS space telescope control centre in the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the University of Bern (UNIBE), have discovered something which should ring alarm bells in the minds of Bible literalists.
It is the discovery of a rainbow in the atmosphere of an exoplanet known to science as WASP-76b.
WASP-76b is an exoplanet discovered in 2013 and confirmed in 2016 by a team of astronomers led by Neale P. Gibson using data from the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project. It belongs to the class of exoplanets known as "hot Jupiters," which are gas giants similar in size to Jupiter but with much higher temperatures due to their close proximity to their parent stars.
Here are some key characteristics of WASP-76b:
Discovery: WASP-76b was discovered using the transit method, which involves observing the slight dimming of a star's light as an orbiting planet passes in front of it. This dimming effect is periodic and can be used to infer the presence and characteristics of the planet.
Physical Characteristics: WASP-76b is approximately 1.8 times the size of Jupiter but significantly more massive. It has a high surface temperature, estimated to be around 2,400 degrees Celsius (4,350 degrees Fahrenheit). This extreme heat is due to the planet's close orbit around its host star, WASP-76, which is located about 640 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pisces.
Atmospheric Composition: One of the most intriguing features of WASP-76b is its atmospheric composition. Observations using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile revealed the presence of iron and titanium vapor in the planet's atmosphere. This finding is significant because it provides insights into the atmospheric chemistry and physical processes occurring on hot Jupiter exoplanets.
Extreme Conditions: The extreme temperature and atmospheric conditions on WASP-76b make it an inhospitable world, unlikely to support life as we know it. Its atmosphere is thought to be dominated by high-speed winds and extreme atmospheric dynamics, which may lead to unusual weather patterns and atmospheric phenomena.
Importance for Exoplanet Research: WASP-76b is one of many exoplanets discovered in recent years that are helping astronomers better understand the diversity of planetary systems beyond our solar system. Its unique atmospheric composition and extreme conditions make it a valuable target for further study, particularly in the field of exoplanet atmospheres and planetary formation theories.
Overall, WASP-76b represents a fascinating example of the diverse range of exoplanets that exist in our galaxy and provides valuable insights into the atmospheric characteristics and physical processes occurring on these distant worlds.
The reason this should set alarm bells ringing in the minds of Bible literalists, is because they believe that 'the' rainbow was sent by the god of the Bible to show believers that he wouldn't ever inflict another genocide on the planet because, although being omniscient and perfect, he regretted the time he did it in a fit of temper and flooded the planet to a depth that covered the highest mountains.
Or so the tale goes.
Before about 4,000 years ago, obviously, sunlight wouldn't have been diffracted into its component colours by passing through raindrops, or so those who didn't understand how rainbows are formed wrote.
And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.
And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.
Genesis 9: 8-17
Apparently, God is so forgetful that he needs the rainbow to remind him not to lose self-control and commit genocide again.
But the question for creationists is, did God commit genocide on another planet too and put a rainbow there to remind him not to do it again? If not, how do rainbows form on another planet if they only appear on Earth because God puts them there?
If he did commit genocide on another planet, this means there must have been life there too, yet WASP-76b is far too hot to sustain life as we know it, being a 'hot' Jupiter-like gas giant which orbits its sun (WASP-76) closer than mercury orbits ours.
How this discovery was made is the subject of a news release by the University of Geneva:
Look in the Bible for a description of how planets are formed, and you can search all day in vain. It simply isn't there. In fact, the very concept of planets and planetary orbits isn't there.
What the Bible myth describes is a childlike guess at the formation of the universe by people who thought the entire universe was the small part of Earth they lived and herded their goats on. So, they described it as a small, flat place, floating in the sea, with a dome over it (because that's what the sky looked like to them).
Stuck to that dome were the sun and moon as lamps, and what we now know are planets, stars and far-off galaxies, they thought were lights stuck to the underside of the dome. They even guessed that there must be pillars holding up the ground and that the stars could be shaken loose from the dome by earthquakes, when they would fall to Earth and could be stamped on by a goat, albeit a big goat!
Don't believe me? Find a Bible and read Genesis 1: 1-18 and Daniel 8:10. Nowhere will you find the words planet, orbit or accretion disc.
What you get is exactly what you might expect if you brought up a child to believe in magic and magic spirits but kept them away from any sources of information about science, geography, geology or cosmology, then, at about the age of 10, asked them to describe the universe and make up a story about how it was made. What you would get is what you get if you use a creationist form of deductive logic - you just look at it and describe what you think you see.
You get the result of ignorant intuition, which is about as far removed from what is really there and how it came to be the way it is as its possible to be.
We know this because we can compare the results of that method in the Bible with the results of scientific investigation and the scientific method used to describe how planets are really formed as part of the process of forming suns and planetary systems within galaxies which are themselves a tiny part of a vast universe consisting of trillions of galaxies, each with trillions of suns and probably several trillion planets in orbits around those suns, almost none of which is visible to someone standing on the surface of Earth and 'just looking'.
The following article by Christian Ginski, a Lecturer of astronomy at the University of Galway, Ireland described what we now know of hos planets are formed and just how many there might well be in the cosmos. His article is reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Archaeologists have found what are believed to be the remains of the earliest forest so far discovered in Devonian sandstone rocks dated to 390 million years ago, which makes them 4 million years older than the previous record found in New York State, and means they were living almost 390 million years before creationism's 'Creation Week' when their god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it, centered on the Middle East.
The fossils were discovered in coastal cliffs near Minehead, Dorset, England in what is known as the Eifelian Hangman Sandstone Formation and consist of primitive trees which were ancestral to today's trees but looked more like palm trees. The discovery is the subject of a paper in the Journal of the Geological Society and a news release from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Cantabrian Coast, Spain, where prehistoric people collected marine molluscs for food
Marine mollusc shells reveal how prehistoric humans adapted to intense climate change - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona
In an event known to geologists as the '8.2 Ka event', i.e. 8.2 Kilo anum (thousand years) event, a sudden flow of cold water melt-water from the North American lakes into the North Atlantic stopped the 'Atlantic Conveyer' from bringing warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up to the coast of Western Europe and with it warm, moist air. This even significantly and quite suddenly changed the climate to a colder, drier weather pattern which affected marine wildlife.
That event was subsequently recorded in the shells of the marine molluscs the people living along the Cantabrian Coast of Northern Spain gathered for food, disposing of the shells in midden tips, such as in the El Mazo cave in Asturias, Spain. The 8.2 Ka event also had a profound effect on the human societies as their food disappeared or migrated to more equitable areas.
If the creationists story of a global genocidal flood were true, then this record would have been swept away and destroyed, or at least buried under the predicted layer of silt and dead animal and plant remains that such a flood would have made inevitable. But there it is, looking for all the world like there never was a global flood and not so much as a centimeter of silt covering it.
The midden in the El Mazo cave was in use for about 1500 years, producing a continuous stratigraphic record with a very high chronological resolution, which is now the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports by a team of archaeologists led by Asier García Escárzaga, current researcher from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, together with Igor Gutiérrez Zugasti, from the Universidad de Cantabria (UC). The study was coordinated from the Universidad de La Rioja (UR) and the Max Planck Institute (Germany) alongside members of other academic centres (Max Planck Institute, University of Burgos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and University of Faro).
The study applies a multidisciplinary toolkit of archaeomalacological studies and stable oxygen isotope analyses to shell remains recovered from the shell midden site.
Continuing a series showing how much more impressive the Universe is than religion's prophets ever thought it was.
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just detected one of the most distant galaxies ever seen. Because the velocity of light through space is a finite quantity, this means that the radiation detected by the JWST left the galaxy when the Universe itself was only about 430 million years old, in other words about 13.4 billion years ago.
To put that into miles means calculating the distance light travels in a year and multiplying that by 13.4 billion. In one year, light will travel just over 16 billion miles, so the object the JWST has detected is about 214.4 trillion miles away, and, if it's still there, it will now be at least 13.4 billion years old - which is a really long time compared to the age the authors of the Abrahamic holy books thought.
To put that in perspective: here is how the Christian Bible describes the Universe:
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 3-18
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
Gen 1:3-10
[…]
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
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.
Gen 1:14-18
And here is how the scientists at NASA using the JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope describe just a tiny portion of the universe
Looking deeply into space and time, two teams using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have studied the exceptionally luminous galaxy GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 430 million years old.
Initially detected with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, this galaxy — one of the youngest and most distant ever observed — is so bright that it is challenging scientists to understand why. Now, GN-z11 is giving up some of its secrets.
Vigorous Black Hole Is Most Distant Ever Found
A team studying GN-z11 with Webb found the first clear evidence that the galaxy is hosting a central, supermassive black hole that is rapidly accreting matter. Their finding makes this the farthest active supermassive black hole spotted to date.
“We found extremely dense gas that is common in the vicinity of supermassive black holes accreting gas,” explained principal investigator Roberto Maiolino of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “These were the first clear signatures that GN-z11 is hosting a black hole that is gobbling matter.”
Using Webb, the team also found indications of ionized chemical elements typically observed near accreting supermassive black holes. Additionally, they discovered a very powerful wind being expelled by the galaxy. Such high-velocity winds are typically driven by processes associated with vigorously accreting supermassive black holes.
“Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) has revealed an extended component, tracing the host galaxy, and a central, compact source whose colors are consistent with those of an accretion disk surrounding a black hole,” said investigator Hannah Übler, also of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute.
Together, this evidence shows that GN-z11 hosts a 2-million-solar-mass, supermassive black hole in a very active phase of consuming matter, which is why it's so luminous.
Pristine Gas Clump in GN-z11’s Halo Intrigues Researchers
A second team, also led by Maiolino, used Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to find a gaseous clump of helium in the halo surrounding GN-z11.
“The fact that we don't see anything else beyond helium suggests that this clump must be fairly pristine,” said Maiolino. “This is something that was expected by theory and simulations in the vicinity of particularly massive galaxies from these epochs — that there should be pockets of pristine gas surviving in the halo, and these may collapse and form Population III star clusters.”
Finding the never-before-seen Population III stars — the first generation of stars formed almost entirely from hydrogen and helium — is one of the most important goals of modern astrophysics. These stars are anticipated to be very massive, very luminous, and very hot. Their expected signature is the presence of ionized helium and the absence of chemical elements heavier than helium.
The formation of the first stars and galaxies marks a fundamental shift in cosmic history, during which the universe evolved from a dark and relatively simple state into the highly structured and complex environment we see today.
In future Webb observations, Maiolino, Übler, and their team will explore GN-z11 in greater depth, and they hope to strengthen the case for the Population III stars that may be forming in its halo.
But it's not fair to blame the authors of the Bible for getting it so hopelessly wrong. They were doing their best with what little knowledge they had.
Imagine for a moment that you're dating someone who told you they were 30 years old, then you discover a photograph of them as a teenager, in a newspaper dated 1984. Would you conclude that someone had been lying to you and your date was really about 55 years old, or would you assume the photograph had been faked or the newspaper had the wrong date?
Imagine now being a creationist who believed Earth was devastated by a global flood that covered the highest mountains, about 4000 years ago, which would have scoured the Earth and destroyed everything on it, then someone shows you the remains of a building in Peru that had been there for 4750 years, and showed no signs of ever being submerged in even a few feet of water, let along several thousand feet of it!
If you're a creationist, you dismiss the evidence or assume the dates are wrong or that somehow the inevitable layer of silt had been cleaned up, even if the building had managed to escape the destruction going on around it, because, if you're a creationist, the last thing you can admit to is that your beliefs could be wrong because that would make you feel less important that you think you should be, so you're prepared to perform any mental contortions necessary to avoid that thought.
And this is why belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible has been in headlong decline ever since science began providing evidence of an old Earth and evidence that there never was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, because people with intellectual integrity who value truth and have the humility to let the evidence lead their opinions, even if it leaves them feeling less important than they think they should be, have realised that the evidence tells them that the Bible is wrong, despite their mummy and daddy believing otherwise.
And of course, just such remains of a building have been found in Peru by two University of Wyoming anthropology professors, and dated to about 4750 BP. It is the remains of a stone plaza and is the oldest stone structure so far found in the Americas, being older even than the Egyptian pyramids and about the same age as Stone Henge (both of which, incidentally, also survived the alleged genocidal flood).
How they did it is explained in a University of Wyoming news release:
In northern Europe, people have been found in marshes and wetlands. Vittrup Man was found in 1915 and his remains are now in Vendsyssel Historical Museum.
There are two things about a global flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, just about 4,000 years ago, that would have been inevitable.
The first is that the whole surface of Earth would have been scoured and all trace of prior human and animal existence would have been destroyed along with any soil or alluvial deposits which would have been suspended in the water to fall out later or be left behind as silt. For example, no bog burial would have survived because no bogs would have survived.
The second is that the bare rocks would then have been left with a layer of silt which settled out, complete with the remains of all the animals and plants destroyed in the flood. Those remains, moreover would not just be from the local area, but would have had a world-wide distribution prior to the flood, so bodies of animal and plants from the Americas would have been jumbled up with those from Africa, Asia and Australia, etc. and they would all have been mixed with the remains of sea creature that would have inevitably been killed to. In fact, on that point, the Bible is quite specific that all living matter outside the Ark was destroyed.
But that's simply not what we see, ever!
Nowhere on the surface of the planet is there such a layer and yet its existence is a certain prediction of the legendary global genocidal flood.
The news just keeps getting worse for creationism as the relentless scientific refutation of all their sacred dogmas continues unabated.
Today, it's the turn of palaeontologists from the Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland, who, together with international colleagues, have just announced the discovery of a large collection of exceptionally well preserved fossils in the Lower Ordovician formation at Montagne Noire, in the Hérault department of France. The Lower Ordovician deposits were formed between about 485.4 and 470 million years before creationists believe Earth was magicked out of nothing.
Tell me all about the Lower Ordovician period particularly in the Montagne Noire, in the Hérault department of France, including how its age was determined. The Lower Ordovician period is a significant geological epoch characterized by a diversification of marine life, particularly marine invertebrates such as trilobites, brachiopods, and mollusks. It spans from approximately 485.4 to 470 million years ago. The Lower Ordovician is part of the larger Ordovician period, which is divided into three stages: Tremadocian, Floian, and Dapingian.
Montagne Noire, located in the Hérault department of France, is a region renowned for its Lower Ordovician sedimentary rocks, which provide valuable insights into the Earth's geological history during this period. The geological formations in Montagne Noire contain a wealth of fossils and sedimentary structures that have been studied extensively by geologists and paleontologists.
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 628, is split diagonally in this image: The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear at top left, and the Hubble Space Telescope’s on bottom right. Webb and Hubble’s images show a striking contrast, an inverse of darkness and light. Why? Webb’s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light and Hubble’s showcase visible light. Dust absorbs ultraviolet and visible light, and then re-emits it in the infrared. In Webb's images, we see dust glowing in infrared light. In Hubble’s images, dark regions are where starlight is absorbed by dust.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team
Continuing with the theme of how different the universe really is compared to the laughably naive description of it in the Bible where the sun, moon and stars were stuck to a dome over Earth above which there was just water. And the stars could even be shaken loose by earthquakes when they would fall to Earth and could be trampled on by goats.
By contrast, here are the latest clutch of images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They are all of face-on spiral galaxies taken in the infra-red spectrum. Compare them to the description in Genesis where the entire Universe has a small, flat Earth at the centre of it.
Artwork shows three mammoths being watched by a family of ancient Alaskans from the dunes near the Swan Point archaeological site, a seasonal hunting camp occupied 14,000 years ago.
Image by Julius Csostonyi
Mammoths lived in interior and Arctic Alaska up until about 13,000 years ago. By analyzing the tusk of a mammoth, we can learn about where it lived throughout different times of its life.
Readers may remember a blog post from last November which described how scientists had tracked the lifetime movements of a male Alaskan mammoth that lived 17,100 years ago, by analysing the isotope record in its tusks.
This is possible because mammoth tusks, like those of elephants, grow continually throughout their lifetime and contain a record of the stable isotopes of strontium (87Sr and 86Sr) in their food, deposited in annual growth rings similar to those of trees, which is dependent on the ratios of those isotopes in the soil the plants grew in. By comparing the record in their tusks with known isotope maps, their movement can be mapped.
Creationists should note that these are naturally-occurring, stable, i.e., not radioactive, isotopes of strontium, so they do not decay to other elements over time, nor do the ratios change significantly over time, so modern maps of these isotope ratios in the soil are valid for tens of thousands of years ago.
Now the same team who used this technique to work out the travels of a male Alaskan mammoth, 17,100 years ago, have repeated used it to map the travels of a female which lived 3,000 years late, and have shown that humans had established encampments close to the routes these mammoths used. The mammoth tusk used was excavated from the Swan Point archaeological site along with the remains of two juvenile mammoths and signs of a campfire, stone tools and the butchered remains of other animals.
The account of the discovery is published, open access in Science Advances and is explained in a news release from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks:
What could the authors of Gensis know about the fauna of Alaska when they thought Earth was a small, flat planet centered on the Canaanite hill country? They didn't even know much about the history of their close neighbours in Egypt and Mesopotamia, let alone the remote areas of Asia.
So, they were oblivious of the fact that there were woolly mammoths there and had been for some 700,000 years. This is why there are no mammoths in the Bible, nor their relatives, Asian and African elephants, for that matter. To Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers these animals, and where they lived and the people who lived alongside them, simply didn't exist. So, they concocted tales which to us are ludicrously unrealistic, such as tales about a magic man magically making stuff from nothing with magic words, about 5,000 years before they were making the tales up, followed by an equally ludicrous tale of a genocidal flood about two thousand years later with two of all known species surviving for a year, sealed in a wooden box with no ventilation. They thought breath was something to do with 'life' and didn't know about oxygen or why the animals would have needed it, so didn't see anything wrong with a tale about hundreds of animals and 8 humans being sealed in a floating wooden box for a year.
But now, thanks to science, we know better and can see what they got wrong, and why they could not have privy to real scientific knowledge, or knowledge about real geography and history.
One of the things they got spectacularly wrong was the childish belief that all the animals around them and the planet they lived on, were all created in a few days and none of the animals had ancestors, because they didn't even know their domestic animals like goats, sheep, cattle, doves and pigs had all been selectively bred from wild ancestors.
And of course, they couldn't even have guessed that there were mammoths in Siberia which had been evolving there for 700,000 years until going extinct about 9,000 years earlier.
But a team of Swedish and Russian scientists, led by David Díez-del-Molino of the Centre for Palaeogenetics and Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, has now examined the genomes of 23 woolly mammoths, including that of the oldest known remains from 700,000 years ago, and compared them to 28 genomes of modern Asian and African elephants, to gain an understanding of the evolution of this species of mammoth. Their findings are published in an open access paper in Current Biology and explained in a Cell press release (taken here from the copy in Science Daily):
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.
Panels a and b show early images of the visible appearance of Uranus and Neptune reconstructed from Voyager 2 ISS images in 1986 and 1989, respectively, showing Uranus to be pale blue-green, and Neptune dark blue (PIA18182 and PIA01492, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). While these early Uranus images were close to ‘true’ colour, the Neptune images were actually stretched and enhanced. Panels c and d show more recent reconstructions of the true colours of these planets, showing them to be more similarly coloured.
Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colours of these planets.
Credit: Professor Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford.
You will search the Bible in vain for any mention of the planets of the solar system, let alone a description of them, and the only description of Earth is so laughably childish it's incredible that anyone could take it seriously.
The reason for that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the scientific ignorance of Bronze Age people, but it's a measure of how far science has taken us since those times, and especially since the European Enlightenment when religion first began to lose its suffocating grip on European culture.
The astounding thing is that there are people alive today, living in technologically advanced countries with modern medicines, skyscrapers, satellite communications and navigation system, the Internet, air transport, nuclear power and space exploration, who still believe those simple people from the fearful infancy of our species had a better understanding of the universe than the scientists on whose discoveries their technological society is based.
For example, astronomers are now in the position of being able to have informed debates about the details of planets such as Neptune and Uranus because we have put instruments into space that can send back accurate data to inform those debates. We can now see that what the simple authors or Genesis thought were little lights stuck on a dome over a flat Earth are in reality large planets orbiting a sun which, unlike the description of it in Genesis, is not hanging from the same dome the planets are stuck to, but is a massive body at the centre of a planetary system in one of hundreds of billions of similar suns and planetary systems in one of maybe a trillion other galaxies, none of which would be affected by earthquakes on Earth, let alone fall down when they could be trampled on by a giant goat! [sic] (Daniel 8:10). (Seriously! There really are grown adults who believe that!)
An example of this informed debate was published open access recently in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The research is described in an Oxford University News release:
Figure 1. Location of Coro Trasito cave (Huesca, Spain).
There is no let up for Creationists this week as science continues to reveal facts about the world that casually refute creationism, utterly and irredeemably. Their only hope is for a couple of day's respite over the holiday period when there will be few new science papers published, but we can be sure the onslaught will continue in the New Year.
One of today's clutch shows that there were people living in a cave in the Pyrenees who were practicing animal husbandry before, during and after the mythical genocidal flood. Perhaps someone forgot to tell them that they should all be drowing as the flood waters covered their mountain homes and killed all their livestock.
Curiously, the predicted layer of silt containing a jumble of fossils from disconnected landmasses, which would inevitably result from such a flood, failed to materialise and miraculously, the flood waters failed to wash away the evidence of these farmers' existence. Nor is there any evidence of an abrupt change of culture as the exterminated inhabitants of this cave were replaced by later immigrants from the Middle East.
The Pyrenees is a mountain barrier between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. It's not particularly high as mountain ranges go, the highest peak being Pic Aneto, at 3404 metres (a little under 11,200 feet). According to the genocidal flood account in the Bible, however, this peak was under water to a depth sufficient to cover Mount Everest under 15 cubits of water (about 30 feet), so the flood would have been about 29,030 feet deep, covering the tallest peak in the Pyrenees by about 27,000 feet.
Sadly for the Bible narrative, however, archaeologists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Archaeozoology Laboratory and the High Mountain Archaeology Group, have shown that from the Early Neolithic (about 7,000 years ago) humans had moved into the Huescan Pyrenees and had taken a number of domesticated animals with them, including cows, goats, sheep and pigs (Bos taurus, Capra hircus, Ovis aries and Sus domesticus). The archaeologists have published their findings, open-access, in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. Their research and its significance are explained in a UAB news release:
The 'Running Chicken Nebula ("No, No! Ours Is A Small God And We Insist It Stays That Way!)
VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site in Chile
The Running Chicken Nebula comprises several clouds, the most prominent of which are labelled in this vast image from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site. The bright star labelled Lambda Centauri is actually much closer to us than the nebula itself, and can be seen with the naked eye. The clouds shown in wispy pink plumes are full of gas and dust, illuminated by the young and hot stars within them. Overall, this image spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons, one of which is shown to scale for reference.
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory in Chile have revealed in unprecedented detail, the so-called, 'Running Chicken' nebula, named not after creationists when asked a direct question, but because some people think it resembles a running chicken. The photographs were taken using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) as a series of images capturing different wavelengths of light, then carefully stitched together to form this detailed composite image.
The Running Chicken Nebula actually comprises several regions, all of which we can see in this vast image that spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons [1]. The brightest region within the nebula is called IC 2948, where some people see the chicken’s head and others its rear end. The wispy pastel contours are ethereal plumes of gas and dust. Towards the centre of the image, marked by the bright, vertical, almost pillar-like, structure, is IC 2944. The brightest twinkle in this particular region is Lambda Centauri, a star visible to the naked eye that is much closer to us than the nebula itself.
There are, however, many young stars within IC 2948 and IC 2944 themselves — and while they might be bright, they’re most certainly not merry. As they spit out vast amounts of radiation, they carve up their environment much like, well, a chicken. Some regions of the nebula, known as Bok globules, can withstand the fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation pervading this region. If you zoom in to the image, you might see them: small, dark, and dense pockets of dust and gas dotted across the nebula.
Other regions pictured here include, to the upper right, Gum 39 and 40, and to the lower right, Gum 41. Aside from nebulae, there are countless orange, white and blue stars, like fireworks in the sky. Overall in this image, there are more wonders than can be described — zoom in and pan across, and you’ll have a feast for the eyes.
This image is a large mosaic comprising hundreds of separate frames carefully stitched together. The individual images were taken through filters that let through light of different colours, which were then combined into the final result presented here. The observations were conducted with the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VST, a telescope owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and hosted by ESO at its Paranal site in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is ideally suited for mapping the southern sky in visible light. The data that went into making this mosaic were taken as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), a project aimed at better understanding the life cycle of stars.
Contrast this small fraction of the visible universe (it occupies an area of the night sky about the size of 25 full moons) with the laughably naïve description of the Universe in Genesis 1: 6-18:
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. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 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. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-19
And, just to reinforce the ignorance of the authors of Genesis who guessed what they didn't know and got it so spectacularly wrong, here is a selection of deep-space images from the ESO:
The description of the Universe in the Bible is so naïve and radically different to the real universe, it beggars belief that there are grown adults who think the Bible is the inerrant word of a creator god.
There is nothing about the authors' description of it which can be described as allegorical or metaphorical, without the most contorted of mental gymnastics. It is not metaphorical or allegorical; it is quite simply wrong; spectacularly and conspicuously, with no shadow of a doubt, wrong!
What we now know are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with maybe half a trillion stars, many with planetary systems, the authors of the Bible thought were little lights stuck to the underside of a dome over a flat Earth, that can be shaken loose and will fall down to Earth where they can be trampled on by a goat! (Daniel 8:10).
They described this flat Earth with a dome over it as standing on pillars and the fixed and immobile center of the Universe, round which a small sun orbits. They described the sky above the dome as being made of water. Their universe ran on magic.
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead, they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10
Compare the following images taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope with the way the founding prophets of the Abrahamic religions described the Universe.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has gazed at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Since the recording of this energetic event in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers, the Crab Nebula has continued to draw attention and additional study as scientists seek to understand the conditions, behavior, and after-effects of supernovae through thorough study of the Crab, a relatively nearby example.
The Crab Nebula seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10
The Crab Nebula - a tiny fragment of the universe as seen by science:
Distribution of anthropogenic manufacturing traces, use-wear and residues on the Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (a) and Leang Panninge (b) tiger shark-tooth artefacts.
Figure 5. Use-related features of the Leang Panninge shark tooth: a) ground facet (indicated by red arrowhead) and striations on the lingual surface; b) grooves between the perforation and tooth shoulder from ligatures; c) plant fibre associated with hafting; d) cut notches along the base and grooves from ligatures (both indicated by red arrowheads) on the labial surface. White scale bars = 1mm (image c by B. Stephenson; all other images by M. Langley).
It's a fundamental requirement of the creation cult to believe that about 4000 years ago, their putative perfect creator god had a human-like fit of temper because its intelligently [sic] designed creation wasn't working as intended and inflicted a genocidal flood on the planet, killing everything apart from a few survivors who lived in a floating box for a year. They then disembarked onto a sterile planet somewhere in the Middle-east and somehow survived to create the biodiversity we see today.
From there, apparently, the surviving humans repopulated Earth, invented new cultures and languages as they did so, forgetting all about the flood and the god who inflicted it on their recent ancestors, and invented new gods and religions, with only one small tribe remembering it all in word-perfect detail.
Apart from the ludicrously narrow genetic bottleneck this would have cause, meaning almost all the surviving species would be extinct within a few generations, there is the little problem of so much archaeology being around that would not have survived such a flood, and evidence of cultures that existed before, during and after it apparently without noticing it at all.
An example is the 7,000-year-old fighting knife made from shark teeth discovered on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which should not have been there if the Bronze Age tales made up by people who thought Earth was small and flat with a dome over it and ran on magic, that creationists think were true history and real science, actually were true history and real science.
This discovery by a team of archaeologists from Australian and Indonesian universities led by Associate Professor of Archaeology, Michelle Langley of Griffith University, is the subject of an open access paper published recently in Antiquity. Five of the authors have also written about this discovery in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Bringing a shark to a knife fight: 7,000-year-old shark-tooth knives discovered in Indonesia
Excavations on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have uncovered two unique and deadly artefacts dating back some 7,000 years – tiger shark teeth that were used as blades.
These finds, reported in the journal Antiquity, are some of the earliest archaeological evidence globally for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons – weapons made with multiple parts. Until now, the oldest such shark-tooth blades found were less than 5,000 years old.
Modified tiger shark teeth found in 7,000-year-old layers of Leang Panninge (top) and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (bottom) on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Our international team used a combination of scientific analysis, experimental reproduction and observations of recent human communities to determine that the two modified shark teeth had once been attached to handles as blades. They were most likely used in ritual or warfare.
7,000-year-old teeth
The two shark teeth were recovered during excavations as part of a joint Indonesian-Australian archaeological research program. Both specimens were found in archaeological contexts attributed to the Toalean culture – an enigmatic foraging society that lived in southwestern Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until an unknown period in the recent past.
The shark teeth are of a similar size and came from tiger sharks (Galeocerda cuvier) that were approximately two metres long. Both teeth are perforated.
A complete tooth, found at the cave site of Leang Panninge, has two holes drilled through the root. The other – found at a cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 – has one hole, though is broken and likely originally also had two holes.
Microscopic examination of the teeth found they had once been tightly fixed to a handle using plant-based threads and a glue-like substance. The adhesive used was a combination of mineral, plant and animal materials.
The same method of attachment is seen on modern shark-tooth blades used by cultures throughout the Pacific.
Scratches and a ground section on the tip of the Leang Panninge shark tooth indicate its use by people 7,000 years ago.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Examination of the edges of each tooth found they had been used to pierce, cut and scrape flesh and bone. However, far more damage was present than a shark would naturally accrue during feeding.
While these residues superficially suggest Toalean people were using shark-tooth knives as everyday cutting implements, ethnographic (observations of recent communities), archaeological and experimental data suggest otherwise.
Grooves and traces of red resin along the base of the Leang Panninge tooth show how the teeth were attached using threads.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Why use shark teeth?
Not surprisingly, our experiments found tiger shark-tooth knives were equally effective in creating long, deep gashes in the skin when used to strike (as in fighting) as when butchering a leg of fresh pork.
Indeed, the only negative aspect is that the teeth blunt relatively quickly – too quickly to make their use as an everyday knife practical.
This fact, as well as the fact shark teeth can inflict deep lacerations, probably explains why shark-tooth blades were restricted to weapons for conflict and ritual activities in the present and recent past.
Numerous societies across the globe have integrated shark teeth into their material culture. In particular, peoples living on coastlines (and actively fishing for sharks) are more likely to incorporate greater numbers of teeth into a wider range of tools.
Shark teeth are widely used to edge deadly combat weapons or powerful ritual blades in the Pacific. Left: a knife from Kiribati; centre and right: weapons from Hawai'i.
Observations of present-day communities indicate that, when not used to adorn the human body, shark teeth were almost universally used to create blades for conflict or ritual – including ritualised combat.
For example, a fighting knife found throughout north Queensland has a single long blade made from approximately 15 shark teeth placed one after the other down a hardwood shaft shaped like an oval, and is used to strike the flank or buttocks of an adversary.
Weapons, including lances, knives and clubs armed with shark teeth are known from mainland New Guinea and Micronesia, while lances form part of the mourning costume in Tahiti.
Farther east, the peoples of Kiribati are renowned for their shark-tooth daggers, swords, spears and lances, which are recorded as having been used in highly ritualised and often fatal conflicts.
Shark teeth found in Maya and Mexican archaeological contexts are widely thought to have been used for ritualised bloodletting, and shark teeth are known to have been used as tattooing blades in Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kiribati.
In Hawai‘i, so-called “shark-tooth cutters” were used as concealed weapons and for “cutting up dead chiefs and cleaning their bones preparatory to the customary burials”.
A shark-tooth knife from Aua Island, Papua New Guinea. Red arrows highlight wear and damage caused by fighting.
Credit: M. Langley and The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
Other shark tooth archaeological finds
Almost all shark-tooth artefacts recovered globally have been identified as adornments, or interpreted as such.
Indeed, modified shark teeth have been recovered from older contexts. A solitary tiger shark tooth with a single perforation from Buang Merabak (New Ireland, Papua New Guinea) is dated to around 39,500–28,000 years ago. Eleven teeth with single perforations from Kilu (Buka Island, Papua New Guinea) are dated to around 9,000–5,000 years ago. And an unspecified number of teeth from Garivaldino (Brazil) is dated to around 9,400–7,200 years ago.
However, in each of these cases the teeth were likely personal ornaments, not weapons.
Our newly described Indonesian shark tooth artefacts, with their combination of modifications and microscopic traces, instead indicate they were not only attached to knives, but very likely linked to ritual or conflict.
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The authors give more technical details in their paper in Antiquity:
Abstract
Although first identified 120 years ago, knowledge of the Toalean technoculture of Middle Holocene Sulawesi, Indonesia, remains limited. Previous research has emphasised the exploitation of largely terrestrial resources by hunter-gatherers on the island. The recent recovery of two modified tiger shark teeth from the Maros-Pangkep karsts of South Sulawesi, however, offers new insights. The authors combine use-wear and residue analyses with ethnographic and experimental data to indicate the use of these artefacts as hafted blades within conflict and ritual contexts, revealing hitherto undocumented technological and social practices among Toalean hunter-gatherers. The results suggest these artefacts constitute some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons.
Figure 1. Map with (inset) the location of Leang Panninge and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1
image by K. Newman.
Figure 2. Archaeological contexts of the perforated shark teeth: a) Leang Panninge cave; b) cave entrance at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1, at the foot of the isolated limestone karst tower; c) stratigraphic profile, Leang Panninge (2019); d–e) stratigraphic profiles, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (2018); f) Maros point excavated from Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (Square T9S1) above the Toalean-associated layer that yielded the shark tooth (scale bar is 10mm)
Photographs and image compilation by Y. Perston.
Figure 8. Comparison of the Toalean shark-tooth artefacts with examples of Maros points found at Leang Panninge (bottom left) and Leang Pajae (top and bottom right)
Photographs of Maros points by Y. Perston; figure by M. Langley.
Other than lying about science or blatantly misrepresenting it, I've yet to see a coherent explanation for why so much of Earth's history pre-dates the creation cult's 'Creation Week'.
We know, for instance that the scientists are using the correct decay rates when they use radiometric dating to determine the age of objects like these shark teeth because creationists assure us that if the basic parameters of the Universe were even slightly different, life would be impossible, yet decay rates depend on two of the four fundamental forces - the weak and strong nuclear forces, so, if they were very different 10,000 years ago by an amount that would make 10,000 years look like 3.8 billion, or 14 billion, or whatever is needed to explain the discrepancy between belief and observable reality, then life would have been impossible when it was supposedly created because quite simply, atoms larger than hydrogen would not have existed because their nuclei would have been unstable.
Creationism must be about the only cult that requires its followers to believe that the vast majority of history occurred when there was no place and no time for it to occur in.
But then these are people who can be made to believe that all life on Earth is descended from a tiny number of ancestors that lived in an unventilated box and got out of it onto a sterile planet on which every living substance had been destroyed (Genesis 7:23), including, presumably, the plants the herbivores needed, the insects the insectivores needed and where most of them would have promptly been exterminated by the carnivores.
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